On the other hand, it is worth taking notice of the fact that this display of character, of which Israelis are justifiably proud, did not become possible until after our enemies had begun systematically bombing all of our major cities. In other words, what we are seeing is a truly impressive display of Israeli battlefield character in a war that has engulfed the country’s entire civilian population. But it is not clear that this capacity of Israelis to show force of character in warfare was ever really in doubt. What is in doubt is something else, which is whether one can point to the growth of a similarly impressive character in other areas—political, economic, intellectual—for which the military does not explicitly train us, and in which one does not benefit from the moral clarity of being shelled.

And in these areas, our performance is in many respects troubling. Consider, for example, the pronounced tendency of Israel’s political leaders—without regard to party affiliation—to refrain from speaking clearly concerning the necessity of enduring long-term hardship in order to attain worthwhile ends. This avoidance has been painfully in evidence in recent years, as our state has moved into a period of war, isolation, and economic contraction. It is an elementary principle of politics that states periodically find themselves in difficult circumstances, and that at these times they must purposefully undertake a policy involving protracted hardship, so as to invest all available resources in a direction that will lead to eventual improvement. Under conditions of external menace, this means setting out on a course of diplomatic confrontation and war that may require long years of sacrifice and suffering in order to lay the foundations for a better postwar order. Under conditions of economic menace, it means a course of confrontation and political struggle against those interests—whether oligarchic or “social”—that stand against a policy of open enterprise and growth; and here, too, there is often no alternative to long years of hardship if solid foundations are to be laid.

In other words, neither peace nor prosperity can be returned to the state without a willingness to chart a course that entails protracted hardship. In a democracy, moreover, a policy of hardship cannot be maintained indefinitely unless the leaders win the support of the public for it—that is, unless they explain why such a policy has been purposefully chosen, and persuade the public that it must accept this burden and even embrace it if better circumstances are to emerge a few years hence.

Yet this is precisely what Israeli governments have proven unable to do. More than a few Israeli political figures are enamored of Churchill’s character, and in private they talk emphatically of the need for a political leader who will speak the truth, saying that there is now nothing to be offered but blood, toil, tears, and sweat, and that matters will be worse before they are better. But in public, no significant Israeli leader dares to speak in this fashion on any subject. Their pronouncements are not calibrated to rally the public behind a policy of sustained austerity in order to cope with what is expected to be prolonged hardship. They are aimed to put the best face on things, as if all hardship were senseless and the only message worth delivering is that matters will soon improve. The best among them, of course, do not play this game. Instead they remain silent.

One may interpret this reluctance on the part of our political leaders in one of two ways: Either much of Israel’s political leadership is without the strength of character necessary to risk electoral defeat in order to tell the public the truth; or else this leadership does have such strength, but is prevented from making use of it because the public lacks the character to bear such news and would reject a leader who comes forth with such a message. But whichever explanation one chooses, its implications with respect to the political personality of the Jewish state are not flattering. A democratic regime in which elected leaders refrain from persuading their public of the need for painful policies is one that is limited to choosing between that which is least painful and that which can be obscured by dishonesty. To put this in terms relevant to our discussion, such a state is one that is crippled by an inability to maintain a difficult course in the face of duress. It is crippled by lack of character.

Similarly, there is much to give us pause in the way Israel’s intellectual and cultural life has developed over the last few decades. I suggested above that a man of character is not one who is given to flights of uneducated bombast when contending with ideas originating outside our people; still less should he need to be taking his cues as to what constitute suitable ideas from his colleagues in Germany or the United States. A good sign, therefore, of a strong national character would be the restoration of an independent Jewish cultural mainstream, which would avoid the extremes of assimilation into the gentile West, on the one hand, and of exclusion of all foreign influence, on the other. This would mean the end of the regime of warring cultural extremes that so marred Jewish life in nineteenth-century Europe, and would pave the way for the rise of a Jewish civilization capable of once again speaking to the nations as an equal.

Yet what we see is precisely the opposite. After the founding of the state, writers and scholars such as S.Y. Agnon, Benzion Dinur, and Natan Altermann did indeed point the way to an independent cultural center that would move with confidence among Western models in the arts and letters, while at the same time developing a uniquely Jewish perspective capable of speaking to the great majority of Jews. Today, however, this trend has all but vanished; and everywhere one is confronted with a resurgence of the same warring extremes, the same old fears and hatreds, that so bedeviled Jewish life in Germany and Russia. Perhaps no one today would don a white collar or refuse the teaching of arithmetic, but the reality is closer to this than we care to admit. Our universities are to a great extent preoccupied with the imitation of the latest academic trends from abroad, while our yeshivot are for the most part closed off from any meaningful contact with ideas and traditions not their own; and the gap between them is, if anything, substantially wider than it was thirty years ago. Thus if the capacity to maintain a posture of Jewish cultural integrity without fear of gentile civilization is indeed an indicator of character, we must say that here too Israel’s record is deeply troubling.

Although Israeli Jews rarely speak of character explicitly, it is hard to say that the problem to which I am referring is unknown in the public discourse of the Jewish state. The question of character, and especially of the Zionist leadership’s failure to establish this quality among its children, was already in clear view in literary portraits of this younger generation such as Aharon Meged’s Living on the Dead (1965) and Ya’akov Shabtai’s Past Continuous (1977).²⁸ Today, however, this failure has become an open scandal. The public’s veneration of political leaders such as Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres—men advanced in years, who are in effect the last survivors of the generation of the founders—has been widely interpreted as a repudiation of the younger cadre of politicos, and recent journalism has become ever more insistent on drawing attention to this point.²⁹ Like children who have grown up in affluence and yet know nothing of the hardship and self-discipline that brought their parents to it, Israelis of today have grown up in a Jewish state whose maintenance depends on qualities of personality they witnessed as children, but did not necessarily understand or appreciate at the time. In fact, much of Israeli public life in the past thirty years, since the Yom Kippur War of 1973, is the story of the gradual awakening of a generation of Israelis to the truth that their parents possessed something they are lacking—something our state could really use right now.

The hardships of recent years have brought many Jews to a greater appreciation of the role character plays in maintaining the independence of a people. We have paid much for this lesson, but then men are only educated at great expense. The question now is whether we can make good use of what has been learned. To do so means to take up in earnest the question the generation of Israel’s founders never found the time to address properly: What is to be done so that our children will have sufficient strength of character to carry forward the commitments undertaken with the establishment of our state?

Everything else we wish for depends on the answer we give this question.