Israel at 78: A Nation Becoming
As we approach Yom Ha’atzma-ut, we are honored to share reflections from some of our friends and partners in Israel. Moshe Samuels served as the shaliah (emissary) to BJ from 2015-2019, and now leads the organization Shazur, which strives to fundamentally transform Israelis’ relationship with American Jews in all their diversity, to develop a sense of mutual responsibility, accountability, and dedication to a shared destiny with their brothers and sisters abroad.
The Strauss-Howe generational theory of history suggests that societies cycle repeatedly through four seasons, each one lasting roughly the span of a long human life: confidence, questioning, fragmentation, and finally, crisis—a period when the old world no longer quite holds, and something new struggles to be born. The authors call this final phase a “Fourth Turning,” a time not only of upheaval, but of transformation.
Israel, not yet 80 years old, has sped through the first three seasons; while only in its adolescence as a nation state, Israel is already living through its first Fourth Turning. Adolescence is a stage where identity is still being shaped, where inherited values are questioned and tested, and where the desire for clarity can outpace the ability to hold complexity. It is rarely steady, bringing intensity, sharp turns, moments of conviction alongside moments of confusion. It is a time when trying on different identities can feel necessary, even when some of those experiments, in hindsight, do not hold.
For much of its history, Israel has described itself through two core commitments: Jewish and democratic. For decades, these values were understood as complementing one another. But in this current moment, they are increasingly framed as contradictory, as if the country must choose between them.
I find myself resisting that framing, even as I understand where it comes from. In a world growing more polarized, more populist, and less patient with nuance—and in the absence of any real resolution to Israel’s enduring existential fears—it is not surprising that many Israelis have turned inward, toward a narrower, more guarded understanding of identity: an intensified form of Jewish nationalism, as if clarity might be found there. At times, I can feel the pull of that instinct myself, the desire for certainty, for simplicity, for a more defined sense of who we are. And yet, I cannot escape the sense that something essential is lost—and how fragile our reality in Israel becomes—when these two commitments are forced apart.
Over the past several years, Israel has been living through this experiment in real time. Its consequences have not been abstract, but deeply lived. I have seen it up close in the two families who moved into our building, one from Sderot and one from the northern border, both uprooted from their homes, as we tried to help them find some sense of stability here in Jerusalem. I have seen it in colleagues whose partners have been called up for hundreds of days of reserve duty, as they struggle to hold together the pressing commitments of family and work, exhausted, often on the verge of collapse. It is there in neighbors who have returned from Gaza carrying trauma that does not fade, and in the strain it places on their relationships.
I have felt it in my own home—the effort to maintain a sense of resilience for my family while carrying very real fear and constant stress. In the quiet but unmistakable toll on our mental health, as anxiety becomes part of the air we breathe. In my own work, as a small business owner, trying to find creative ways to stay afloat, alongside so many others whose businesses have already closed. And in the aftermath of October 7 and the Iranian missile attacks, which shattered my deeply held belief that Israel would always serve as a safe haven for me and my family.
Taken together, these moments have exposed both the limits and the costs of this dangerous path, one that promised to secure our safety, but has brought us to a breaking point. They have served as a wake-up call: not only to the threats that lie beyond Israel’s borders, but to the fragility within—to the cost of internal division and to the risk of losing the delicate balance that once held competing values together. And perhaps also to something else—a stirring that had been quiet for too long.
After years in which the liberal camp seemed resigned, even numb, there are signs of reawakening: people returning to the public square, voices insisting once again that Israel’s identity need not be reduced to a single axis, that Jewish and democratic are not mutually exclusive, but deeply intertwined.
This is where I find a measure of optimism. Much of Israeli society is responding to these wake-up calls, even if its political leadership is not. There is a growing recognition of the costs of the choices made in recent years, and alongside it, a genuine desire to rebuild, bridge divisions, and make shared life possible again. And, like a maturing adolescent, Israeli society is increasingly willing to address the fundamental questions that will shape its future character: How do we treat the stranger in our midst? How do we maintain the Jewish character of the state while upholding freedom of religion? How do we wield power without losing our moral compass and our humanity? Israel carries the weight and the challenge of translating Jewish values into lived political reality. The tensions, the missteps, the searching—these are not abstractions, but part of a collective national experience that is largely unfamiliar to many diaspora Jews.
Part of what gives me this hope is something uniquely Israeli. Despite years of attempts to divide society into tribes—secular, religious Zionist, ultra-Orthodox, Arab—each with its own social contract to the state, we do not live in silos. There is a proximity here that is hard to replicate elsewhere. Around my own Shabbat table, as in so many homes across the country, people with fundamentally different political views and religious commitments sit together as one family. The past year has only deepened that awareness—how bound up we are in one another, especially in moments of national crisis.
It is visible, too, in the extraordinary mobilization of civil society since October 7—the ways in which people have shown up for one another, across lines that once felt more rigid. And so, even amid the noise and the more toxic voices in public life, I sense that the deeper currents within Israeli society are moving in a different direction.
At 78, Israel stands at a juncture—one that will shape not only its future, but the kind of society it chooses to become. As it moves through its adolescence and begins to respond to the crisis of its Fourth Turning, it requires patience, not because its actions are beyond critique, but because growth is uneven, and identity is forged over time. The patience to remain engaged through uncertainty, to hold complexity, to recognize that this process is rarely linear, and rarely without pain. To care about Israel at this moment is to remain engaged in that process, not to turn away from it.
The story is still unfolding, and what will emerge from this Turning is not yet known. But within it lies the possibility of renewal, resilience, and a return to a vision of Israel as a model society. And I have hope that as Israel moves into young adulthood, its identity will find roots in both the deepest Jewish and democratic values.
Shabbat shalom,
Moshe Samuels