I learned to love Israel after it disappointed me.

We cannot truly love a country because it never lets us down. We should love it because we still choose it even and especially when it does.

photo: Levi Meir Clancy/Unsplash

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

---

When you start to fall in love with someone, you do not really love them.

Not yet.

You love the version of them you can see from a distance.

You notice the smile, the intelligence, the confidence, the way they make you feel different. You collect the things that attract you and quietly assemble them into a person who is almost impossibly good. In the beginning, love is partly discovery and partly imagination. You fill in the blanks with hope.

And then, if you are lucky enough to stay, something much more interesting happens: You actually meet them. You discover that the person you thought was extraordinary is also frustrating. They have insecurities, contradictions, and tendencies that drive you insane.

They disappoint you. They say and do the wrong things. They make mistakes. They carry baggage from before you arrived. They can be selfish and stubborn and irrational. They are not always the person you imagined them to be.

Eventually, the pedestal collapses — and this is usually where we discover whether what we felt was infatuation or love. Infatuation says, “I love you because you are everything I hoped you would be.” Love says, “I know who you are now. And I still choose you.”

That is my relationship with Israel.

I fell in love with Israel before I fully understood Israel. Like many Jews, I first encountered Israel through its greatest hits: the ancient homeland, Jerusalem, the Western Wall, the Hebrew language resurrected after centuries, the desert blooming, the Holocaust survivors arriving on ships, the kibbutz, the soldiers, the technological miracles, the Entebbe rescue, the Six-Day War, the improbable story of a tiny Jewish country surviving against enemies vastly larger than itself.

It is an extraordinary story.

In fact, I would argue that the creation of the State of Israel is one of the most extraordinary stories in human history. A people scattered across continents for nearly 2,000 years maintained a memory of one land, prayed toward one city, preserved one language in prayer and scholarship, and somehow returned to build a functioning sovereign state in the same place from which their ancestors had been exiled.

There is something almost romantic about it, which is exactly the problem, because Israel is not a romance. Israel is a country, and countries are made of people, and people are messy.

The closer I got to Israel, the more the mythology gave way to reality. Israel has bureaucracy that can make you question the existence of God. It has politicians who embarrass me. It has religious extremists and secular extremists. It has corruption. It has tribalism. It has racism. It has arrogance. It has people who will cut you off in traffic and then scream at you as though you somehow inconvenienced them (and then invite you to Shabbat dinner). It has ideological camps that sometimes seem to hate each other almost as much as Israel’s enemies hate Israel.

There are Israelis whose political opinions make me furious. There are government decisions I think are infuriating. There are moments when Israeli society behaves beautifully and moments when it behaves terribly. Israel is not always wise, moral, and certainly not always right.

And that realization did not make me love Israel less. It made my love for Israel more real. Because Zionism, at least the Zionism I believe in, is not the belief that Israel is perfect. It is the belief that Jews deserve a country imperfect enough to be normal.

For much of Jewish history, Jews existed primarily as minorities inside other people’s societies. We could participate in those societies. We could contribute to them. We could become doctors, merchants, writers, scientists, musicians, politicians. Sometimes we could even thrive.

But ultimately, the societies belonged to someone else. Their armies were someone else’s armies. Their borders were someone else’s borders. Their governments were someone else’s governments. And when those governments decided that Jews were no longer welcome, Jews discovered how little control they actually possessed over their own fate.

Zionism changed that. It did not promise Jews paradise, but it did promise us responsibility. And responsibility is much harder.

Once you have sovereignty, you have to make decisions. You have to build armies and prisons and immigration systems. You have to collect taxes. You have to negotiate with neighbors, some of whom are your sworn enemies. You have to determine borders. You have to decide when to fight and when not to fight. You have to balance religion and democracy, security and liberty, collective survival and individual rights. You have to govern millions of human beings who disagree with one another about almost everything.

And inevitably, you will sometimes get those decisions wrong. That is what sovereignty looks like.

There is something strangely infantilizing about the demand that Israel prove its right to exist by behaving perfectly. No other country is loved that way. Nobody says France must justify its continued existence every time the French government does something stupid. Nobody announces that America has forfeited its legitimacy because Congress passed a bad law. Nobody argues that Australia should cease to exist because of something its prime minister did. People understand instinctively that a nation is larger than its government.

Yet when it comes to Israel, that distinction often disappears. Israel makes a mistake and suddenly Zionism itself is on trial. An Israeli politician says something stupid and suddenly Jewish sovereignty must explain itself. An Israeli government pursues a policy someone dislikes and the conclusion somehow becomes that perhaps the entire project should be dismantled.

That is not criticism. That is conditional existence. And I refuse to love Israel conditionally.

Real love contains criticism because real love cares what the other person becomes. If someone you love is behaving destructively, you do not prove your love by pretending otherwise. You tell them. You argue. You get angry. You demand better. Sometimes the people who love Israel most fiercely are the ones shouting at it the loudest. Anyone who has spent enough time around Israelis understands this immediately. Complaining about Israel may be Israel’s unofficial national sport.

Israelis complain about the government, the cost of living, the traffic, the Orthodox, the secular, the Left, the Right, the army, the bureaucracy, the schools, the restaurants, the weather, and probably the hummus. And then someone from outside Israel attacks the country and suddenly everyone becomes David Ben-Gurion.

This is why I increasingly think the most mature form of Zionism resembles mature love. At first, Zionism can be romantic — flags, songs, history, heroism, the miracle of 1948, the IDF soldiers at the Western Wall in 1967, the beaches of Tel Aviv, the stones of Jerusalem, the idea that after everything Jews endured, somehow we came home.

But eventually, if your relationship with Israel becomes deep enough, you encounter the rest: the contradictions, the disappointments, the compromises, the missteps.

And then you face a choice: You can decide that because Israel failed to match the fantasy, the entire relationship was fraudulent. Or you can understand that loving something does not require believing it is flawless. In fact, perhaps you cannot truly love something until you stop needing it to be flawless.

That is the second time I fell in love with Israel. The first time, I loved the story. The second time, I loved the country. The story is neat. The country is not. The story has heroes and villains. The country has human beings. The story moves in straight lines toward redemption. The country wakes up every morning and has to figure out what to do next.

The Israel I love today is therefore much harder to romanticize, and much harder to abandon. I no longer love Israel because I think Israelis are better than everyone else. I love Israel partly because I have learned they are not. They are like everyone else — generous and selfish, brave and frightened, brilliant and foolish, idealistic and cynical, kind and cruel, capable of extraordinary solidarity and ridiculous division.

In other words, human. And perhaps that is the most revolutionary Zionist idea of all.

For centuries, Jews were symbols in other people’s stories. To Christians, we were theological characters. To antisemites, we were villains. To revolutionaries, capitalists, nationalists, communists, Islamists, Arabs, and now “progressives,” we became whatever symbol their ideology required. The Jew was rarely permitted simply to be a person.

Zionism gave Jews something far more radical than a flag: It gave Jews the right to be ordinary, the right to succeed on our own terms, the right to fail, the right to argue, the right to make political choices and then vote again, the right to produce saints and idiots, the right to create beautiful and not-so-beautiful things, the right to live in history rather than merely be acted upon by it.

That is what I defend when I defend Israel — not perfection, but agency. Not innocence, but sovereignty. Not the idea that Israel is always right, but the idea that Israel has the same right every other nation assumes for itself.

I once thought loving Israel meant being able to explain why Israel was good. Now I think loving Israel means something harder: knowing exactly where Israel falls short of perfection and refusing to confuse disappointment with abandonment.

Eventually every relationship reaches the moment when the fantasy dies. We finally see the person as they are — not as we wish them to be — the good, the bad, and the ugly. And then comes the only question that really matters: Do I still love you now that I know you?

Perhaps more than before.

---