Isabel Kershner > Quotes

“All had become established breeding grounds, or boot camps, for the country’s start-up ecosystem.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The problem was that Zionism had come to redefine the Jewish people in a way that no longer required allegiance to God and the Torah. Even the opening words of the Declaration of Independence, “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people,” posed problems, she said, noting that the Jewish people came into being when they received the Torah from God at Mount Sinai, in the desert peninsula that was now part of Egypt, and that “a Jew is a person who goes in the path of the Torah and its commandments.” Most crucially, she added, “We cannot possibly identify with a Jewish state whose laws are contrary to the Torah of Israel.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“By B’Tselem, he meant the veteran Israeli human rights organization that monitored violations of Palestinian rights in the occupied territories and was widely vilified on the right as the embodiment of Western liberalism and naivete.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“More than a century later, the Soviet Union had come and gone. Communism had all but passed from the world. In Israel, the upheaval that brought Likud to power in 1977 ushered in an anti-socialist era, in part fueled by Mizrahi resentment against the old elites. And, as Israel struggled with inflation and moved toward a free-market economy, the kibbutzniks fell so far from grace that some detractors came to curse them as “parasites” and a drain on resources, and eventually even usurpers, as in the case of Nir David. About three-quarters of the 250 or so kibbutzim dotted around the country had undergone some degree of privatization in recent decades, in a reflection of the broader materialism, the decline of leftist ideology, and the redefinition of modern Israel.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The first tech delegation was the brainchild of Erel Margalit, a leading Israeli venture capitalist considered one of the architects of the start-up nation and the founder and chairman of JVP, a major Jerusalem-based venture capital fund.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The numbers were somewhat deceptive. Up to a third of the West Bank settlers were ultra-Orthodox Jews living in two rapidly expanding urban settlements, Beitar Illit and Modiin Illit, located just across the 1967 lines. Many of them, ambivalent about Zionism to begin with, were there for economic and social reasons, and not out of political ideology. Under any proposed final status map with the Palestinians, it was long assumed that these two settlements could easily be incorporated into Israel and would not pose an obstacle to partition within the framework of the long-accepted paradigm of a two-state solution.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“There was, he said, “something wrong with the DNA” of the Israeli left who defended the Palestinians. “They are not Jewish,” he declared. Nor were income gaps between the Mizrahim and Ashkenazim the point, he said, but a matter of values. “The Sephardim won’t change their skin, even if there is no food in the house. They can’t, out of fear.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“After the Oslo peace process dissolved into violence and hopelessness, the Israeli left and center-left had increasingly moved their focus from the quest for a land-for-peace settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a more social, civic agenda, promoting issues such as gender equality, civil marriage, LGBTQ rights, public transport on the Sabbath, and accommodation toward the more liberal, progressive streams of Judaism with which the vast majority of affiliated Jews in North America were identified, and which were repudiated by Israel’s Orthodox religious authorities.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Abbas accepted the reality of Israel as a Jewish state and rejected the assertions of apartheid, saying he would not describe it that way.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“While the Arab community suffered from police neglect, the Ethiopian youths consistently complained of overpolicing and harassment.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“His staying power was largely achieved by exploiting the country’s identity politics, by divide and rule and fearmongering. Toward the end of his dozen years in office, the decibels of hate grew louder and reached fever pitch as Netanyahu, under police investigation and then indicted on graft charges, became ever more determined to cling to power.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“By the early 2020s Israel was becoming a top producer of unicorns and, despite the pandemic, foreign investment was pouring in, keeping the economy afloat and filling the national tax coffers. In the first nine months of 2021, Israeli high-tech firms raised a historic peak of nearly $18 billion in capital from funding rounds and made nearly $19 billion in merger and acquisition deals or initial public offerings of shares, both popularly known as exits in Israel, and up by 92 percent from the annual 2020 figure.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Among the Haredi public, voter turnout was significantly higher than among the general population and loyalty was key.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The Heilbronns, a twelfth-generation Jerusalem family, were proud descendants of the disciples of HaGra, a Hebrew acronym for the Vilna Gaon, or Rabbi Eliyahu of Vilna, and anti-Hasidic adherents of the “Polish” school of misnagdim, or opponents.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“developed in partnership with the United States, which provided Israel with more than $3 billion in annual military assistance, mostly to be spent in the United States. Iron Dome had about a 90 percent success rate in identifying and intercepting short-to-medium-range rockets and even mortars headed for populated areas.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“They were both what was known in the popular vernacular as Sabras, or tzabarim, native-born Israeli Jews.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The bonanza had begun nearly two decades earlier. In 1998, America Online bought Mirabilis, an Israeli pioneer in instant Internet messaging. The people who spoke the revived tongue of the Bible had invented ICQ, the first online chat program, then sold it for more than $400 million. It was an almost inconceivable fortune at the time for an invisible product with no business plan to drive it; as Israel’s first big exit, it was hailed as a high-tech milestone.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The law enshrined the right to self-determination in Israel as being “unique to the Jewish People.” It omitted any mention of equality or democracy, which critics viewed as elevating the state’s Jewish character above those principles.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The youthful savvy of the recruits, the typically Israeli yihye be’seder (it’ll be okay) attitude toward calculated risk, the knack for improvisation, and the lack of fear of failure all helped turn the IDF into a national high-tech incubator with premier offensive and defensive cyber capabilities and digital connectivity among its fighting forces, a powerful force multiplier in a world where war was increasingly fought on screens.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Over that bloody weekend, like twenty years later in Lod, it felt as if Israel itself was unraveling. A governmental commission of inquiry that investigated the police response exposed an institutional pattern of government discrimination, prejudice, and neglect of the Arab minority over decades, expressed among other things in the chronic underfunding of Arab municipalities and schools, widening the social gaps and deepening poverty.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The Arab minority in Israel had never quite managed to realize its full electoral potential. Voter turnout was routinely lower than that of the Jewish Israelis, whether because of a lack of trust in their own politicians or cynicism about the system.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“the Israelis and Palestinians were at a demographic tipping point, with more-or-less parity in the number of Jews and Arabs living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. The century-long struggle over the land was only becoming more intractable. The Israeli Zionist left had long warned that the dream was at stake and that Israel could not have it both ways: Without partition into two separate homelands for Jews and Palestinians, Israel’s self-definition as a Jewish democracy, however compromised those terms were, could not be sustained and Israel would inevitably become a binational country. If all the Palestinians were given equal rights and the vote in Israel, it would not have a Jewish majority. Without partition and without allowing Palestinians to vote for the government that controlled fundamental aspects of their lives, Israel’s claim to be a democracy would eventually implode. The temporary occupation had gone on so long that many critics were already describing the separate statuses of Israel and the occupied territories as a fiction meant to obscure what was already a binational, one-state reality. Instead of a light unto the nations, Israel was being cast by its harshest liberal-left critics and human rights groups such as B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International as a single-state entity and territory that had already veered into a system of varying degrees of “Jewish supremacy” or racial “domination” over the Palestinians in different geographical areas that, they asserted, fit international definitions of apartheid and crimes against humanity. With a weak Palestinian leadership split between the increasingly autocratic Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas-run Gaza, and after years without any semblance of a peace process, Israel, more than seventy years after its founding, was more divided over its endgame than it was on the eve of its independence. Esh Kodesh and a rash of other settlement outposts had stepped into the void to try to determine the outcome and doom Israel to victory, or at least to deepen the entanglement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“There were no direct flights yet, and the coronavirus had curtailed international travel, so Margalit had chartered a private plane with about fifty seats and was bringing along the top executives of more than a dozen of the most promising Israeli companies in JVP’s portfolio. Some journalists had been invited along to get an immersive, up-close, and behind-the-scenes glimpse into this historic and very public foray into the Arabian Gulf, which was once enemy territory and off-limits to Israelis.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“In the years before the founding of the state, the kibbutzim were an effective tool for establishing a Jewish presence and, after 1948, for establishing Israeli sovereignty over tracts of empty or abandoned and appropriated land, as well as for marking the new country’s boundaries.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“tech units became instrumental in developing the industry. Like the tales of One Thousand and One Nights, a seemingly endless fount of new ideas for high-tech companies sprang from the minds of the graduates of the IDF’s once-shadowy, now-famed technological intelligence unit known as 8200, as well as from lesser-known army frameworks such as the Talpiot program, which turned out an elite squad of technological problem solvers for the fighting units, or Unit 81, the technological arm of military intelligence, or Mamram, an acronym for the army’s center for data and computer systems.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“The Haredi media mostly avoided publishing photographs of women so as to “guard the eyes” of male readers from immodesty and temptation. When unavoidable, in group photographs, for example, some Haredi media resorted to blacking out female images, turning them into silhouettes”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Its supporters argued that they were anchored in other basic laws, although equality was not explicitly mentioned anywhere and was only extrapolated by the interpretation of Israel’s Supreme Court. This strengthened the conviction of many Arab citizens that Israel could not be both Jewish and democratic. The law also effectively downgraded Arabic from a second state language to one with a “special status.” It described promoting Jewish settlement as a “national value,” without specifying where. Its clauses affirmed the openness of the state for Jewish immigration and the ingathering of exiles and the status of the flag; the national anthem, “Hatikvah”; and the Hebrew calendar, alongside the Gregorian one, as official calendars of Israel. Netanyahu hailed the passage of the law as “a defining moment in the annals of Zionism and the history of the state of Israel.” Arab representatives ripped up copies of the bill and denounced it as the anchoring of racism, fascism, discrimination, and Jewish privilege. Ahmad Tibi and Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Joint List, an alliance of predominantly Arab parties, called it apartheid. Jewish critics, Jabotinskyites among them, said the Knesset would have done better to stick to Israel’s Declaration of Independence of 1948, which did ensure complete equality of social and political rights for “all its inhabitants.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Jewish communities, however small, had maintained a constant presence in the Holy Land since the days of antiquity, and the immigrant pioneers saw their endeavors not as colonization but as a homecoming. But a clash was inevitable, with the national aspirations of one party awakening the nationalism of the other. Deadly Arab riots broke out in 1929, sparked by a dispute over access to the Western Wall in Jerusalem.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Saleh, This Is the Land of Israel, or The Ancestral Sin”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul

“Ben-Gurion, once out of power, had stated that in return for a true peace he would give up all the territories except for the Golan Heights in the north, Jerusalem, and the West Bank city of Hebron, distinguishing between his belief in Israel’s rights to all the land and the pragmatic need to forgo some of those rights and concede some of the land.”
― Isabel Kershner, The Land of Hope and Fear: Israel's Battle for Its Inner Soul