In the 77 years that have passed since the eve of Israel’s founding and up to the disaster of October 7th, Israeli society has undergone numerous changes. A profound and ongoing cultural transformation stands out alongside demographic, political, and security shifts. In its early days, the young state leaned on an ethos of “pioneering and settlement,” a “mobilized society,” and “the people’s army,” as well as on a mythos of the Jewish people’s return to their ancient homeland—closing a circle of historical and spiritual justice backed by international law.
Over the years, the positions held by parts of Israeli society have steadily eroded. Within public discourse, the ideal of a mobilized society was gradually replaced by a focus on individual rights, and the unifying vision of “establishing a national home for the Jewish people” gave way to political and diplomatic pragmatism. This new approach embraced elements of the Palestinian narrative and consequently called for establishing “two states for two peoples.”
These cultural shifts and the transformation of the ethos and myth on which the state was founded found expression in the terminology that took root in Israeli society—and even filtered into the IDF and other security bodies. Rather than telling our own story, we began to speak in universal terms, sometimes even adopting the Palestinian narrative. To a large extent, these changes laid the groundwork for the conceptual framework that led to the failure of October 7th.
The massacre of October 2023 caused a massive rupture within Israeli society and, in many ways, shattered the hope held by some that it was possible to reach an end to the conflict and a peace agreement with the Arab residents of Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. Even more critically, the massacre undermined the prevailing sense among most Israelis that the IDF would always be there—anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances—to protect us. This rupture requires us to revise our perception of reality and the values upon which society is built and, to a large degree, to change the terminology we use. Only then can we return to the last point where the State of Israel was still connected to the Zionist ethos—before we lost our way?
Between the Glory of the Army and the Adoption of the Palestinian Narrative
The Declaration of Independence on May 15, 1948, encapsulated the historical, national, and cultural background of the Jewish people returning to establish a state in their ancestral homeland. Although he was a secular man, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion carefully included many Jewish motifs in his declaration—such as references to the Bible, the visions of the prophets of Israel, and the Jewish people’s unique connection to the land. The word “Jewish,” in its various forms, appears no fewer than 18 times in the Declaration of Independence.
In the 1950s and 60s, Israeli public discourse emphasized collectivism, Zionist values, and shared national interests. Ben-Gurion, for example, stated: “We must build an exemplary society, a just society, where every individual feels that they belong, that they contribute, and that they receive.” Golda Meir declared, “Where Jewish blood is spilled—a homeland will grow.” The inseparable bond between the people and their land was also reflected in the words of poets and intellectuals, such as in Natan Alterman’s famous line: “I have no other country, even if my land is burning.”
Israel in the 1950s was driven by a strong sense of the justice of the Zionist endeavor and understood the security implications of that belief. These ideas were poignantly expressed in Moshe Dayan’s iconic eulogy in 1956 for Ro’i Rothberg, who was the security coordinator of Nahal Oz and was murdered by terrorists from Gaza, who mutilated his body and dragged it across the border. “We are a settlement generation, and without the helmet and the cannon’s mouth, we will not be able to plant a tree or build a home,” Dayan eulogized. “Our children will not live unless we dig shelters; without barbed wire and a machine gun, we cannot pave roads or drill for water. The millions of Jews who were annihilated for lacking a homeland look upon us from the ashes of Israeli history and command us to settle the land and establish a country for our people.”
The intertwining of ancient nationalism from biblical times, the fresh trauma of the Holocaust, and the daily existential war against the Arab enemy became etched into the consciousness of Israel’s founding generation. These experiences helped shape a powerful military force that understood its crucial role and was based on the “people’s army” model.
This model, developed by Ben-Gurion in the early years of the state, was built on the compulsory service of all citizens and a reserve force that would be a central and essential component of the IDF’s strength. The resounding victory in the Six-Day War and the expansion of Israel’s borders strengthened the Zionist ethos and increased the public’s reverence for the IDF and its commanders. At the same time, the control over hundreds of thousands of Arab residents in Judea and Samaria marked the beginning of a public discourse that eventually became the main dividing line in Israeli society—and the primary fault line between the two political camps.
The Palestinian ethos, rooted in the belief that Israel is a colonialist state that expelled the indigenous inhabitants of this land, gradually began to seep into public discourse, into the education system, and the Israeli media. Parts of Israeli society began adopting this narrative and its proposed solution: the division of the land into “two states for two peoples.” This terminology, which introduced words like Nakba and hudna into Israeli discourse, eventually found its way even into the IDF, weakening its ability to contend with specific threat scenarios.
Shaping History
In the 1980s and 1990s, a school of “new historians” emerged in Israel, who also began challenging the traditional Zionist narrative. Scholars such as Benny Morris, Ilan Pappé, and Avi Shlaim sought to reexamine the events 1948 and the accepted Zionist narrative. Morris, in his book The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949, wrote: “Zionism came to build a Jewish state in a land inhabited by Arabs. A clash was inevitable. The question is not whether there was an expulsion, but what its extent was and who gave the orders.”
The new historians questioned foundational myths in the Zionist story and claimed that the narrative accepted until then was biased and did not fully reflect the historical reality. Pappé went even further in his book The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, writing: “What happened in 1948 was a clear case of ethnic cleansing by every possible definition of the term. Ethnic cleansing is intended to transform an ethnically heterogeneous region into a homogeneous one.”
Simultaneously, the trend of trying to reflect reality from the perspective of the Palestinian narrative gradually began to be expressed in the education system. For example, a storm broke out over a third-grade geography textbook, Living Together in Israel, which was approved for teaching in 2008 Hebrew and Arabic editions. In the Arabic version, it stated: “The war ended with a Jewish victory and was concluded with armistice agreements between the State of Israel and its neighbors. Arabs refer to the war as the Nakba, meaning a war of disaster and loss, while the Jews refer to it as the War of Independence.” The words “a war of disaster and loss” were absent from the Hebrew version.
Israeli children were no longer raised on a straightforward Zionist ethos but rather on a complex view of reality, presenting all sides of the conflict with an understanding of the Palestinian narrative—and, in many cases, even an adoption of it.
A Shift in the Representation of the Conflict
Israeli media also underwent a significant shift in the way it covers the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead of patriotic coverage aligned with the official Israeli stance, coverage became more nuanced, taking into account the Palestinian point of view as well. Daniel Dor, a media researcher, wrote: “In the 1990s, there was a transformation in the Israeli media. From a mobilized media that saw its role as reinforcing the Zionist narrative, it became more critical, more open to different voices and alternative perspectives, including the Palestinian one.” (Press Under Influence, Babel Publishing, 2001, p. 124).
Prof. Tamar Liebes, a leading communications scholar, addressed this phenomenon and asserted: “Israeli media has transformed in terms of its willingness to hear ‘the other side.’ What was once considered betrayal—the voicing of the Palestinian perspective—has become part of journalistic norms. This is a positive development in terms of pluralism, but some argue that it weakens the Zionist narrative.” (Israeli Media in the Peace Era, Ramot Publishing, 2000, p. 67).
This new trend was also reflected in Israeli academia, where post-Zionist currents developed, significantly influencing discourse around identity and nationalism. Scholar Prof. Oren Yiftachel wrote: “The State of Israel was built based on a colonial settlement project, and its official history represses the price paid by the Palestinians. We must acknowledge this as a foundation for genuine discussion about the state’s future.” (Ethnocracy: Land and Identity Politics in Israel, Ben-Gurion University, 2010, p. 42).
In his seminal book The Invention of the Jewish People, Prof. Shlomo Sand presented a thesis that challenged the foundations of the Zionist narrative: “Modern Jewish nationalism is a product of the 19th century and not a continuous extension of ancient Jewish history as the Zionist narrative claims. The Jewish people, in the sense of an ethno-national group, is an invention.” (Resling Publishing, 2008, p. 18).
It seems fair to say today that most Israeli academia aligns with one political side, whose more radical elements have distanced themselves from the Zionist ethos and fully embraced the Palestinian narrative. Matters have gone so far that Dr. Anat Matar of Tel Aviv University referred to the hanging of Israeli flags on campus for Independence Day as “what a disease looks like.”
Another field that has undergone significant change is culture, across its various layers in Israeli literature, cinema, and art. Local films often addressed the conflict—almost always from the viewpoint of Palestinian suffering. Most recently, No Other Land, a joint Israeli-Palestinian project, won an Oscar. Israeli literature has frequently demonstrated a desire to show enlightenment and acknowledge the conflict’s complexity and the Palestinian perspective—often through the voices of its most respected authors. For example, David Grossman wrote in his book The Yellow Wind: “We Israelis must acknowledge that the Palestinians experience our presence here as a catastrophe. This does not mean we must accept their narrative but acknowledge and understand it to reach a solution.” (Kibbutz Hameuchad Publishing, 1987, p. 93).
After Oslo – The Emergence of the Dissonance
The 1990s laid the groundwork for the most significant process in the conflict’s history—the signing of the Oslo Accords. This initiative, which began behind the scenes and was later adopted by the Rabin government, called for a historic reconciliation between Israel and the Palestinians. The implementation of the agreements was reflected in Israel’s gradual withdrawal from territories in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza, as well as the establishment of joint security coordination procedures between the IDF and the Palestinian police that was formed at the time.
The initiative, enthusiastically embraced by parts of the Israeli public and overwhelmingly supported by the local media, clashed with the daily reality of ongoing terror attacks by terrorist organizations. The Israeli leadership refrained from halting the diplomatic process or imposing sanctions for breaches of the agreements or for Arafat’s failure to act against terror.
The inconceivable gap between the idea of a “peace initiative” and the continuation of Palestinian terrorism forced public leaders and the media to fully mobilize in support of the process to resolve the dissonance by crafting a new narrative. The emerging worldview held that any peace process would naturally have opponents on both sides, thus giving rise to the concepts of “enemies of peace” and “victims of peace.”
In my view, the consequences of this reality for the IDF and the security establishment were dramatic at the time and no less so in the long term—culminating in the formation of misguided conceptions, what we now, post–October 7, refer to as “The Conception.”
During the Oslo years, the author of these lines was commanding a reserve battalion in the Gaza Strip. During one deployment, the regional commander summoned me and instructed me to coordinate ambush operations along the Philadelphi Route with “the counterparts.” My confusion about who these “counterparts” were received an equally surprising answer—the Palestinian police. (I stated then that I had no intention of informing the Palestinian police about the location of our forces.)
Thus, the IDF—responsible for protecting Israel’s sovereignty and building its strength based on potential threats—found itself implementing policies that required it to ignore some of those threats and even cooperate with hostile entities.
One of the clearest examples of adopting misguided terminology and worldview lies in the concept of hudna. During several rounds of fighting between Israel and Hamas, we reached temporary ceasefires using a term that, according to Islamic tradition, denotes a tactical pause, allowing the jihad fighter to regroup and overpower his enemy.
But an army cannot operate in a state of conceptual confusion. Continued Palestinian terrorism—driven by radical agendas expressed in the Hamas Charter and the Palestinian National Charter—should have compelled the IDF and Shin Bet to regard the Palestinians as adversaries, or at the very least as threats, and to build their capabilities and operational plans accordingly. Instead, these same potential or actual enemies also became parties with whom the military was expected to coordinate cooperation and share information.
This dialectical idea starkly contrasts the essence of an army that aims to neutralize threats. It is difficult to do so when one of its hands is tied behind its back, and the discourse begins to lose its military character. Concepts like “containment” and “deterrence” are not military terms in their original sense, and their usage marked a departure from traditional military concepts such as “offense,” “decisiveness,” and “victory.”
From Terminological Shifts to October 7
The gradual transformation—from a society built on a Zionist ethos, rooted in Jewish heritage and mobilized for its security, to a satiated society, weary of war, that sanctifies individual rights—was crystallized in the name of the protest movement “Free in Our Land.” Perhaps more than anything, the missing link in the name—the word “people”—reflects the shift in the Israeli ethos.
The national anthem, Hatikvah, which includes the line “To be a free people in our land,” emphasizes the collective historical aspiration to be a free people in our land—free from foreign rule, free to fulfill national ambitions. “Free in our land” reflects an individualistic desire focused solely on human rights. The gradual abandonment, by parts of Israeli society, of the original identity upon which the State of Israel was founded has weakened the nation’s resilience in the face of its enemies.
The IDF is the people’s army, and as such, it cannot be disconnected from the trends emerging within Israeli society. A strong reserve force is an essential part of the IDF’s resilience, but the enlistment of reservists—citizens—throughout the year requires the army to draw a clear line between permitting dialogue and the expression of opinions, even in uniform, and preventing political agendas from undermining its operational effectiveness.
As noted, there has been significant conceptual confusion within the IDF in recent years. The embrace of the peace process, efforts to “understand the other side,” and the infiltration of political discourse into the security establishment have, to a considerable extent, undermined its ability to properly assess the threat posed by the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
The peak of these developments was expressed during the protest period preceding the war. The “Free in Our Land” mindset led some of its supporters to target even the holiest of Israel’s institutions—military service in the IDF. The phenomenon of refusal to serve (serve) represented the culmination of a process in which parts of society unraveled from the original Zionist ethos.
In my opinion, Israel must recalculate its course as a nation that wants to live—especially in the hostile environment of the Middle East. Its survival depends on a return to a shared national story rooted in the foundations laid out in the Declaration of Independence. Its security relies on strong security institutions that block political discourse from infiltrating them and can identify the state’s enemies.
