Imagining the unthinkable: Israel ceasing to exist

At the end of the Six Day War, Israeli soldiers hug and kiss the stones of the Western Wall. Photo by Dan Porges/Getty Images

Editor-at-Large
Robin Washington
January 11, 2024

Years ago, I canceled a subscription to a newspaper after it landed on my doorstep with a headline shouting “Crazed snow plower kills 1, rams 50 cars.” I wasn’t protesting its decorum or even its journalistic accuracy — though I doubted the news staff had the medical training necessary to diagnose the snow plower as “crazed.”

Rather, my cancellation was to protect my own sanity. Whatever reasons the editors had for sensationalizing the front page, it left me on edge, expecting any day to see a headline blaring “War with China.”

I felt the same way last week when turning on a CNN broadcast to a news crawl and graphic blaring “Israel under attack on seven fronts.” Shocked, I immediately checked other sources to learn if Israel really was at the brink of destruction. The volley of attacks from Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, Yemen, Iraq and Iran were real, I learned, according to Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallantbut not quite the armageddon suggested by the CNN crawl.

Yet there was a difference between CNN’s hype and that long-ago newspaper headline: This time, the calamity was very much imaginable.

I’m writing this on my 67th birthday, keenly aware no political reality any of us may think of as permanent comes with any guarantee or warranty. Israel was less than a decade old when I was born, and barely a fantasy in my parents’ youth. (A distant cousin of mine attended the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, and didn’t stick around for subsequent meetings, apparently deeming Theodor Herzl to be crazy.) I’m older than any number of African countries, and some nations we may think of as long established, like Poland or Lithuania, in fact were alternately conquered and re-established, erased from the maps for centuries.

That impermanence is also true on the policy front. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision overturning abortion rights in Dobbs v. Jackson in 2022 put to rest any notion of “settled law.” Decades of precedent of race-conscious college admissions also disappeared, when the court overturned affirmative action this past June.

So while unthinkable, it is very much imaginable that Israel could cease to exist. A real seven-front war against its neighbors, including the Palestinians, would likely prove unsustainable without U.S. boots on the ground. And despite the deep U.S.-Israeli relationship, the prospect of U.S. troops involved in a war in Israel is highly unlikely.

For most of Jewish history, Israel’s existence as a homeland for the Jewish people has been a spiritual dream, not a literal fact.

For me, that thought of Israel’s newness on the world stage has long preceded the current disaster of the war with Hamas. I’m reminded of it when perusing dusty prayer books on synagogue bookshelves. It’s disconcerting to find those with copyrights from the 1930s, on the eve of the Holocaust and before Israel became a state; all artifacts oblivious of both the inhumanity of the Shoah and improbability of a Jewish nation to come.

A world without Israel? Imaginable, but then what?

If Jews are cleared from the river to the sea — and this isn’t even remotely considering how that horror would be accomplished — how will the world define those of us who remain? In returning Palestinians to a homeland, will Jews be relegated to their historical place as stateless people? Will diaspora become our norm again, as it has been for most of the past two millennia?

I readily admit that I am navel-gazing from the comfort of my home in Minnesota. No bombs are falling on me and my shul still holds its services, albeit behind new security doors, and the closest threat to us since Oct. 7 was graffiti spray-painted on the local mosque. Though it ultimately was not related to the war, the reactions of both congregations were to reach out to one another.

But I also know, despite my privileged safety, that history offers no guarantees to the concepts of humankind, including the democracy of my own country. The hard truth is that political realities can change in the blink of an eye.

And canceling a newspaper subscription or turning off the TV won’t stop that.