Opinion | Five Moments that Shaped Israel

Rega, the Hebrew word for “moment,” is closely related to words denoting relaxation, serenity, the act of calming down. In the year I was born, 1960, a young Israeli poet named Nathan Zach opened what would become one of his best-remembered poems with the words “One moment of quiet, please. / I beg you. I want to say something.”

In a certain sense, every poem ever written opens with this very same entreaty, even if it’s left unsaid.

Universal as it is, this plea for the audience’s ear is also uniquely Israeli, because in our culture it’s almost never fulfilled. Zach’s words bring to mind a speaker standing up in the midst of a tumultuous kibbutz meeting and begging for the impossible, because there will always be background noises, interjections and counterarguments—the ancient Jewish cross-textuality in its chutzpadik oral form.

As a state and a society, Israel has never enjoyed a historical moment of quiet reflection. Zach’s gentle entreaty was also ironic, deeply aware of the unabated verbal and emotional crowdedness around him. Today that constant buzz has become a crass cacophony, gigantically enhanced by the twin vectors of digitalization and populism. All the more respect to him, to all poets still sending out their lines and to Moment magazine for consistently offering us reflective moments. Speaking calmly in a world so void of calm is a great gift to those of us still capable of listening.

Here is a tale of five decisive moments in Israeli history, four of them famous and one obscure.

The famous four took place in 1948, 1967, 1995 and 2023. The diplomatic-turned-military achievement of Israel’s independence, the Six Day War, the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the October 7 Hamas attack were obvious game changers. They are patently momentous.

From the shaky and dangerous vantage point of 2025, though, we may need to adjust our telescopic view of Israel’s foundational moment to include several decades, say 1917-1948. Thus, it houses both our worst modern catastrophe and our greatest modern national breakthrough.

It was the moment in which fewer than a million Jews, led by Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, found a tiny crack in the wall of history and slipped right through it.

Consider the sheer uniqueness of that moment. There will never again be another great ebb of Western imperialism. Another empty-pocketed Chaim Weizmann seizing the moment at Lord Balfour’s office. Another trickle of Jewish dreamers, survivors, refugees (turned military conquerors too, against their best intentions), another UN General Assembly voting for the partition of Palestine between its two peoples, both recognized as natives, and another Ben-Gurion and his clear-headed political partners to make the leap.

Never again will a million Jews manage to escape with their lives and their modern national identity—Zionism—through the Nazi genocide, amidst the falling pillars of Middle Eastern empires, between the rising hopes of a new international order, and into the promised land of a nation state recognized by a UN majority. If you believe in divine intervention, here’s a good moment. If you stick with a secular view of history, as I do, you may still be deeply amazed.

The victory of Zionism was not a colonial phenomenon but a postcolonial one. A State of Palestine should have been its twin achievement. But in 1947-1948 the Palestinian and Arab leaderships rejected that option and lost their moment. Ongoing tragedy ensued.

Part of that unfolding tragedy, for both Palestinians and Jews, was Israel’s 1967 victory and conquest of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

We must still celebrate that moment, which I’m old enough to remember, as life-saving. But it is now heavily tainted by the fact that no Israeli leader or government—except Rabin, who was assassinated for his pains—was wise enough to offer the Palestinians a second chance.

The missed Palestinian moment thus swelled into the malignant historical tumor it has now become.

Post-October 7, 2023, both sides are diminished and dehumanized, albeit in different measures and ways. Hamas is the nadir of human bestiality. But Israel has made a just war deteriorate into an unjust and unwise war, risking everything it has accomplished since 1948.

You may deem me (and about 40 percent of my fellow Israelis) overly alarmist, but please consider at least one sad fact: A majority of Israeli Jews now want Gaza ethnically cleansed, and a small but loud and leading minority are openly advocating genocide. So strong is their fear (and ensuing toxic hate) of the Gazan Palestinians, not merely of Hamas.

Thus, Israel is now witnessing the failure of a central Zionist goal shared by Herzl, Ben-Gurion and Rabin: to remove, once and for all, any existential fear from the minds of the Jews. The momentous hopes of 1948 and of 1967 are being dashed.

But I still owe you a fifth, obscure moment: August 12, 1953. Don’t worry if it rings no bell. I haven’t read a single source mentioning it in the context of our current crisis.

On that day, the Knesset—prompted by Ben-Gurion’s vision of a unified nation—legislated the State Education Law. In real time this was cause for celebration, establishing free and compulsory primary education for all children in Israel. In retrospect, it was a disaster. By mandating separate secular and religious educational systems or “tracks,” it perpetuated the near-complete autonomy of ultra-Orthodox schools with no core curriculum, no secular subjects, no history and geography and languages, no sciences, hardly any math, and a heavily policed gender separation. It seemed like a small compromise with a tiny sliver of Israeli society; by now, though, the poorly educated pupils and graduates of the ultra-Orthodox sector are nearing a fifth of the population.

State Education Law, August 1953.

Worse still, the 1953 law fortified the religious-nationalist sector while abolishing the social-democratic school sector with its humanistic, scientific and secular-Jewish values. The spirit of that educational legacy still exists in Tel Aviv, Haifa and the kibbutzim, but a huge part of Israeli society was never given the option. The current diminished demography of Israeli secular liberals is the sad result.

The religious-nationalist school sector survived, flourished and gradually radicalized. Almost all the children of the 1950s immigrants from Mizrahi communities were sent off, automatically, to the religious-nationalist schools. Unlike the ultra-Orthodox, they did teach core curriculum, but increasingly abandoned humanistic education: no world literature, little world history, very little civics, always subordinating “democratic” to “Jewish.”

To be sure, many wonderful men and women went through that system. But so did Yigal Amir, the 1995 murderer of Rabin. And so did today’s ultra-nationalists Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.

Seven decades later, with this education system well nourished by the post-1967 settler messianism, many Israeli high schools churn out semi-ignorant young nationalists with an atavistic view of Jewish superiority. Not all of the young soldiers fighting in Gaza are graduates of such schools. But about a half of them are. Their military (and civilian) values are far removed from those of the IDF of 1967.

The next epoch-making moment in Israeli history may well be the 2026 national elections, if the current government allows them to take place freely—though even that is no longer self-evident. Some coalition members are preparing legislation to block several Arab-Israeli politicians, and even parties, from running. An unknown number of Israelis are packing and leaving. As I write these lines, mid-vortex, I am incapable of making any forecast. Like Zach, I crave “one moment of quiet, please.”

But perhaps the great post-October 7 awakening of liberal civil society is kindling hope for a major reset. The demonstrations are no longer only about democracy; they are also about human rights and Israel’s moral future. On the streets and city squares, a newly Jewish-Arab solidarity is raising its beautiful head. Not all young people believe in eternal war. Some are learning history and civics the hard way, and new political leaders are on the rise.

They need to hurry. But the moment may yet arrive.

Fania Oz-Salzberger is an Israeli essayist and history professor emerita at the University of Haifa.

Opening picture: Ben-Gurion signing the Declaration of Independence, May 1948; Israeli
paratroopers during the Six Day War, June 1967; burned vehicles from Nir Yitzhak kibbutz, October, 2023; Yitzhak Rabin, November 1995. (Photo credit: Lisahy (CCY 4.0) / Israel Press and Photo Agency, Dan Hadani Collection, National Library of Israel (CC BY 4.0) / David Rubinger  / GPO (CC BY-SA 3.0)