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We Have an Opportunity to Re-establish the State of Israel
(Israel Hayom) Micah Goodman - Oct. 7, 2023, the day of the murderous Hamas attack, changed us. We are no longer the same people, no longer the same country. That day changed us because we experienced Jewish history firsthand. The Zionist movement was founded by individuals who realized that the world was an unfriendly place for the Jews. The simple understanding that the alternative to Jewish sovereignty is pogroms and massacres was engraved in the consciousness of the generation that founded the State of Israel. The generation of the founding fathers had lived in the era before the Jews had a state. That is why they knew they could not take the existence of Israel for granted and devoted themselves to it. The third generation began to forget the miracle. It was born in a reality where Israel was a given and it could not even imagine a world without a Jewish state in it. For the current, fourth generation, the Jewish state is a given and seems stable, strong, and eternal. Miracles are forgotten in the fourth generation when everything becomes a given. That is when we tend to quarrel, fight, and dismantle it all from within. This is one of the deep paradoxes of human existence: When we believe that reality is stable - it falls apart; when we are aware that reality can at any moment fall apart - it remains stable. We all experienced that dark day when we were in a reality where there was no Jewish state. Now we are different people. We have acquired the perspective of the first generation. When you look around and see the thousands of volunteers and the hundreds of initiatives that are popping up, you are witnessing a phenomenon that is rare and extraordinarily powerful. You are witnessing that the Israeli people feel a sense of responsibility and ownership of the state. This signals that after the war we will receive the opportunity to re-establish the State of Israel. The writer is a research fellow at Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.