Out of two options – to lament with everyone else, or to look for something that is right under your nose – I have chosen to the third option:

To touch upon some of the truths that have escaped us in the past two days but affect our daily lives, some of the truths of  the “I believe” sort that I have personally experienced since I was a young Beitar member protesting the White Paper and my time as a Lehi prisoner in British jail, my wars in the Knesset against the policies of concession and withdrawal, my fights to bring the Jews from the Soviet Union, Ethiopia, and the settlement of Jews in Judea and Samaria that were liberated in the Six Day War, especially in Kiryat Arba – all this during a tragic battle against uprooting Jews. All of this and everything in between – during one time period, one woman.

The first truth is that since the establishment of the state we are living in our country as non-Jews, in parentheses of course. But to be killed for our country, we are killed here only as Jews, without parentheses, without a religious connotation, but not disconnected from the uniqueness of the redemption process of the Jewish people. To life within this existential contradiction, there is a price that we are paying in all aspects of our lives.

The second truth is the continuing erosion of the code of life of our nation, a nation whose mission has been destined for service and struggle. The struggle that has existed since Abraham Our Father for tikkun olam (healing the world), the struggle for our identity throughout our exile, the struggle of Zionist action for our existence here as a state. Struggle has a price. Once, we were prepared to pay the price of this struggle – today not any more.

“You know,” Ahmad Yassin, the founder of Hamas, asked Ehud Barak, then chief of staff who had visited him in Israeli jail, “You know why the Israel of today is weakening? It’s because you have lost the will to fight.” This erosion of the desire to fight has a price. Our enemies have identified this erosion. We all remember Nasrallah’s “spider webs” … But not all of us remember that the first person who warned us against this erosion was Ze’ev Benjamin Herzl. The second part of his saying “If you will it, it is no dream,” was “If you don’t will it, all of what I have told you, will become a dream.” 

The third truth sounds like a biblical saying, but is actually the math formula of our lives: “Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint. “ In a normal country like Switzerland, there is normal societal motivation to be a good, tax-paying citizen. In Israel, there isn’t. Our nation needs abnormal messianic motivation for this … We need some kind of vision that will give meaning, taste, purpose, and meaning to our lives. Otherwise, as our sages said, our nation will dance around a golden calf. And this is what has happened to us - not in one day, but in many days. We have become a materialistic, oligarchic society with an opportunistic policy of compromise, so much so that we have forgotten the ideals with which we started. Compromise itself has become an ideal …  

The nation is the same nation that has been here since ’48. Today it is possibly even better. It is only our visionless leadership, policies, elite, and spirituality that cause us to be insincere. The leadership that refers to a nation who is by its very nature an abnormal nation in the good sense of the word as a normal nation turns it into an abnormal nation in the negative sense of the word.

The fourth truth is that for our nation only what is historical is ultimately also realistic. It is true that our history is filled with complications, about which Dr. Israel Eldad once said: “We were saved from the binding (of Isaac), but we entered into the thicket from which the bound ram that took our place left, and until today we are still anointed. However, whoever, out of impatience, outsmarts history with short cuts, whoever wants to save time, pays in cash. For leadership that instead of looking at the hands of the large clock of history, looks at only at the hands of the small clock, whose hands will never really tell the right time, it is no wonder that every ten peace plans they tried to force upon the live body of this country were rejected like a foreign transplant, one by one, and are buried in the peace plan cemetery in the Middle East. The cause of death: an attempt to a non-reality on reality.” 

The last truth for tonight is that the true understanding of today is not between right and left, not between those who want a larger Land of Israel and those who want a smaller one, but between those, both on the right and the left, who continue to believe in the just way of the Zionist process, to fight for it and pay the price it entails – and between those who are desperate, who have left Zionism. We have a huge potential for sacrifice for the land and the country, which is evident in our religious youth in the struggle against the uprooting of settlements from the Land of Israel, as well as in our secular youth, who fights today in Lebanon. What we do not have is the leadership of statesmen and intellectuals who believe in this potential and are able to harness it into practical strength on the ground. What we lack is this leadership which will be able to reinstate the vision – the meaning of our existence. Let it be!