Am Yisroel Hai

A number of weeks ago, I passed once again a familiar grafitti, this time written on stone: “עם ישראל חי”, literally, “the people of Israel live,” under a star of David. I’m always surprised by these recurring signs, as if until I come upon them, I’m quite sure they have gone out of style if not existence. The great god of grafitti has stamped them out of date and they are languishing in forgotten warehouses. But they are neither languishing nor forgotten.

Anyone who bothers to write עם ישראל חי for posterity (and these are always meant as historic signposts) is essentially writing, “The Jewish people still lives.” What is not said is as important—or may be more important—than what is said. It is not to a vacuum that the phrase turns. The grafitti comes as a response to an imaginary non-Jewish audience as if to say, you may try as hard as you wish, but the Jews are still around. Essentially, for all its bold assertiveness, the grafitti is an expression of anxiety.

And that is why I always surprised. As if Israel isn’t 62 years old and, currently, the most powerful and certainly the most prosperous country in the Middle East. Doesn’t the graffiti writer know where he is?

Yes, there is Iran and Hamas and the Hezbollah, all of which would love to see Israel destroyed, but that stamp, עם ישראל חי, appeared before these threats and will reappear when the threats disappear. The angst is at heart, although rooted in historical traumas, ahistorical.

The person writing the grafitti has the Holocaust at his back. He is part of a general and problematic view among Israeli Jews that see themselvesprimarily as victims. I remember when I was still relatively new in Israel (yet had been here a number of years) and a friend commented that he had had a professor who had distinguished between countries that look forward such as the U.S. (excluding Republicans, of course) and those that tend to look backwards, like Israel. I was surprised because I had joined forces with the Workers Movement, where people had come to build and be built. The workers’, Socialist, movement had consciously rejected the pathos of religious Judaism for the dynamic of building a land and a nation. It is that pathos the grafitti recalls, that 2,000 year old memory of martyrdom and sacrifice.