Article by Noémie Issan-Benchimol

Can Jewish religiosity blend with Zionism without ending up in messianism? Through this personal reading of Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s latest essay, Mishnaic Consciousness, Biblical Consciousness: Safed and Zionist Culture, Noémie Issan-Benchimol introduces us to another way of thinking about Jewish existence in the land of Israel: the Safed model, for which there is no outside of exile.

While the immediate focus is on the ground incursion into Lebanon, military operations and targeted assassinations, and the regional and even global balance, Noémie Issan-Benchimol, in this letter from Jerusalem, wants to bring us back to the more modest scale of the political emotions and wounds of Israeli society, starting with the still-open wound of the hostages, which is not without drawing a deep fault line between the advocates of the citizen’s social contract and the supporters of deterrence. Taking the opportunity of a political micro-event, she offers us here a meditation on power and an insight into that part of the Israeli people that opposes the Netanyahu government and its way of waging war without preparing for peace.

How should we view the divide between those in Israel who put the destruction of Hamas before any consideration of the hostages’ fate, and those who, on the contrary, are ready to negotiate their rescue at any price? In this text, Noémie Issan-Benchimol analyzes the coordinates of the debate in terms of cultural and religious ethos. While Jewish tradition sees hostage redeeming as a communal obligation, a significant part of religious Zionism is reviving a Roman ethos of civic honor, which scorns weakness and territorializes fraternity. Can fraternity, specific to the diaspora, continue to inform the politics of a state?

The series Unorthodox and Shtisel have been worldwide successes, familiarizing audiences with Haredi life. Noémie Issan-Benchimol discusses another Israeli series for K., Autonomies, which imagines the nation riven in two: on one side, the autonomous territory of Jerusalem, a theocracy led by the ultra-Orthodox; on the other side, the secular and Zionist state of Israel, its capital Tel Aviv.