“Israel’s secular elites had quite deliberately estranged themselves from, and weaned their children off, their own Jewish cultural resources…”

Israel’s secular elites had quite deliberately estranged themselves from, and weaned their children off, their own Jewish cultural resources, succumbing to the fate of revolutionaries who give their children an education as different as they can get from their own. Ben-Gurion and his peers had no trouble arguing to religious Zionists that the Labor Zionist ethos was not only the better defense of Jewish interests but the better interpretation of its values. The successors of Ben-Gurion’s generation could not make that argument if, for no other reason, than that they no longer share with their religious interlocutors the same language or the same basic understandings of who they are and what they are doing in their own state.

Yehudah Mirsky, “What Is A Nation State For?”, Marginalia (11 March 2015) [http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/nation-state-yehudah-mirsky/]