About Daniel Gordis
About Israel from the Inside
Imagine that someone said to you, “Tell me what the United States is about and what has long made it an extraordinary experiment in government. ” Now imagine that you responded, “Well, there was a War of Independence, a War of 1812, the Civil War, then World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam. ” Your answer, of course, would be absurd, because no one can understand America, its great accomplishments as well as its failings, through just its conflicts. Those wars are part of America’s history, but they are not “America. ”
Yet that is how too many of us think about Israel. If asked to list milestones in Israeli history, we think War of Independence, Sinai Campaign, Six Day War, Yom Kippur War, the Intifada’s, etc.