Marty's thoughts

Nations are built as much on imagination as on material foundations. Borders, governments, and economies matter, but what sustains a people is the shared belief that their nation ought to exist. Few modern states demonstrate this more vividly than Israel. From the biblical promise of a land flowing with milk and honey to the Zionist dream articulated in the Balfour Declaration, Israel has always been animated by imagination. Yet imagination, while powerful, is double-edged. It can unify or divide, sustain or distort. Today, Israel’s challenge lies in grounding its national imagination in realities that can endure.

Biblical Imagination: A Homeland in Exile

For nearly two millennia, Jewish identity was sustained in diaspora by religious imagination. Each Passover concluded with the words “next year in Jerusalem.” Scriptures, prayers, and rituals kept alive the vision of return to a homeland. This vision was not geographic alone; it was symbolic — a hope for restoration, divine justice, and collective redemption. Through imagination, a scattered people remained connected to an ancestral land they had not seen.

Zionist Imagination: From Dream to Project

Modern Zionism transformed this spiritual longing into political imagination. Theodor Herzl’s maxim, “If you will it, it is no dream,” captured the essence of this transformation. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 offered international recognition of a “national home for the Jewish people.” Yet even this recognition was an act of imagination: it envisioned a state not yet founded, on land already inhabited by others. The Zionist imagination created momentum, but it also planted contradictions that remain unresolved.

National Imagination Today: Myth and Reality

In contemporary Israel, imagination continues to shape identity. Myths of origin, stories of survival, and narratives of chosenness provide a unifying ethos. Yet they also create tensions. The promise of being both a Jewish state and a democratic one, for example, is often sustained more by narrative than by practical compromise. For Palestinians, whose own imaginative claim to the land is no less vivid, the Israeli narrative appears as denial and erasure. Competing imaginations collide, and the lack of reconciliation fuels cycles of conflict.

The Double-Edged Sword of Imagination

Imagination is vital — it gave birth to Israel and sustained Jewish identity through centuries of dispersion. But imagination detached from reality risks becoming ideology. When myth is hardened into unchallengeable truth, it resists compromise. When identity is defined only through stories of chosenness or victimhood, the space for pluralism and coexistence shrinks. The result is a fragile nation held together by narrative rather than by shared reality.

Beyond Imagination: Toward Enduring Foundations

To endure, Israel must move beyond imagination alone. It must transform its founding myths into practical structures of justice, equality, and coexistence. This requires reexamining the contradictions inscribed since Balfour: Jewish nationhood on one side, and the rights of others on the same land on the other. A nation that continues to live only in imagination risks collapse from within. A nation that grounds imagination in reality can endure.

Conclusion

Israel’s existence is perhaps the clearest modern example of the power of imagination. It was imagined before it was real, sustained by memory before it was territorial. Yet this imaginative foundation is also fragile. Without reconciling myth with history, and narrative with reality, Israel risks repeating the fate of nations undone by their own contradictions. The challenge now is not to abandon imagination, but to tether it to justice, unity, and the realities of a shared land.