As a non-Jewish observer living in Europe, I have listened for years to the same refrain: Israel must become a “normal country." A nation-state like any other-less ideological, less religious, less consumed by questions of identity and collective destiny. More like France, or Germany, or any conventional Western democracy.
The argument sounds reasonable. It is also shallow and deeply mistaken.
Because Israel is not-and has never been-a normal nation-state. And what outsiders often perceive as its greatest weakness is the source of its enduring strength.
Most nations begin with land. Territory comes first; identity follows. Political ideas are layered onto an already sovereign people. Israel’s story runs in the opposite direction. At Mount Sinai, long before sovereignty or territory, a people accepted a binding system of law and obligation. “We will do and we will hear" was not merely a religious statement. It was a founding act-one that placed law before land, and obligation before sovereignty.
From a European perspective, this inversion is difficult to grasp. Our political imagination is shaped by borders, institutions, and the gradual consolidation of power. Yet although the Jewish People entered the Promised Land and ruled it for more than half a millenium, they were exiled, and for nearly two thousand years, existed without any of these. No army, no territory, no centralized political authority-and still they endured.
What held them together was not geography. It was not even culture in the usual sense. It was a shared worldview upheld by a sophisticated legal system. The Talmud functioned not only as a religious text but as a portable system of obligation. Jewish communities from Spain to Babylonia, from Yemen to Poland, differed in language, custom, and political circumstance, yet remained bound by a common legal and ethical order.
This is not a historical curiosity. It is the key to understanding Israel today.
From the outside, Israeli society often appears unusually polarized. Debates over judicial reform, religion and state, military service, or the limits of sovereignty quickly become existential. The tone is sharper, the stakes higher, the disagreements more absolute than in most Western democracies.
But this is because the arguments are not merely political. They are foundational. In most countries, politics revolves around interests-budgets, borders, policies. In Israel, politics often revolves around first principles: What is justice? What is the role of Jewish law in a sovereign state? What does it mean for a modern polity to be Jewish?
A people formed through a shared system of obligation will inevitably fracture along interpretations of that system. What appears as cleavage may in fact be continuity.
From Europe, there is a persistent expectation that Israel will eventually “normalize"-that it will resolve its tensions by converging toward the institutional patterns of Western states. Yet this expectation rests on a misunderstanding. It assumes that Israel is simply another nation temporarily burdened by history. In reality, it is the sovereign expression of a people whose collective identity was shaped by ethics and ideology long before sovereignty, and independently of it, even though they yearned ceaselessly to return to the Promised Land.
This also helps explain a phenomenon that often perplexes outside observers: the intensity with which some Jews criticize Israel, even in times of conflict. In most nations, such behavior would be seen as disloyal, even treasonous. But if identity is rooted not only in shared ancestry or territory but also in a set of values and ideals, then criticism can take on a different meaning. Many critics see themselves not as betraying their people, but as holding it accountable to its own standards. One may disagree with them-often strongly-but their stance is not incomprehensible within this uniquely Jewish framework.
And yet, despite these deep disagreements, Israel does not collapse. On the contrary, it continues to function, to innovate, and to defend itself under extraordinary pressure. This resilience is perhaps the most striking feature for an outside observer. A society marked by profound ideological division remains, in practice, remarkably cohesive.
Part of the explanation lies in a deeply ingrained aversion to internal violence. But another part lies in something more subtle: a long tradition in which disagreement is not suppressed but encouraged. Only in the Jewish tradition are arguments considered the safest path to peace, harmony, and holiness.
This raises a difficult question, especially in times of war: does dissent weaken Israel, or is it part of its strength? From a European perspective, the answer seems obvious-war demands unity, and unity requires the silencing of internal division. But Israel’s history is more complex. If Jewish cohesion has long depended on a framework that allows disagreement to persist without dissolving the whole, then the suppression of dissent may come at a cost that is not immediately visible.
Israel is often described as a nation-state, and formally this is correct. But historically and structurally, it is something unique: a political community whose unity does not rest on uniformity, but on a shared-if contested-framework of meaning. A society in which disagreement is not merely tolerated, but deeply embedded in every aspect of existence.
Most nations moved from blood and soil to language and ideas. At Mount Sinai, Israel moved ideas from heaven down to earth. The restoration of sovereignty in 1948 did not erase earlier structures; it reintroduced them into a new and far more complex context.
From the outside, Israel’s divisions are often taken as evidence of fragility. They may, in fact, be evidence of something else: a political culture that takes ethics and ideas seriously, that refuses to segregate fundamental questions into ivory towers, and that has developed, over millennia, a way of sustaining disagreement without disintegrating into chaos.
Israel is not a normal country.
And that is precisely why-against all odds-it endures. And flourishes.
Rafael Castro is an independent political analyst and a graduate of Yale and Hebrew University. An Italian Noahide by choice, Rafael can be reached at rafaelcastro78@gmail.com