These days, Israeli liberals look around them with profound despair. Values that stood at the heart of Israeli society only a few decades ago are now under fierce attack. Far-right religious Israelis ridicule them, the current destructive government seeks to eradicate them, and many centrist Israelis seem embarrassed when asked whether Israel is a liberal country. Some, I suspect, would say that it depends on what you mean by liberal. They want to be part of the West, but of course they live in a Jewish state. How, then, did the values of the past fade to such an extent that even people in Tel Aviv seem uncertain about what they mean? To find an answer, we may need to return to Israel’s early years.

At the heart of the Zionist movement lay a decisive break with the Jewish past. The Jews of the newly established state were to be fundamentally different from their ancestors in the Diaspora. Looking at Eastern Europe, Zionist leaders saw a people they regarded as weak and unable to defend themselves, struggling to preserve Jewish traditions in a hostile environment. Although they acknowledged a certain spiritual depth in Jewish life, they believed that the character of the Jewish people required radical transformation.

But as with any break from the past, it was not enough simply to reject what had come before. It was also necessary to offer an alternative. What would the New Jew be like? The answers produced a fairly clear image: he would be strong, capable of defending himself, independent, Hebrew-speaking, and........

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