On October 7, 2023, Israel experienced the shattering of something once taken for granted: the basic assumption that the state could protect its citizens.
The massacre was not only a security failure but a moral and civic rupture. It exposed porous borders, dysfunctional warning systems, and a collapse of public trust in the country’s most vital institutions – the military, the government, and the very idea of the state.
For many Israelis, that day carried a double trauma: the horror of the attack itself and the realization that the state had failed in its most fundamental duty. In an instant, Israelis were thrown back into the ancient posture of the persecuted Jew – vulnerable, unprotected, and alone, even in their sovereign homeland.
Yet October 7 also revealed something else: the extraordinary ability of Israeli society to step in where the state faltered. Reservists, emergency squads, volunteer networks, and ordinary citizens mobilized overnight.
Without orders, resources, or clarity, they filled the vacuum with a renewed civic instinct – the belief that when the state collapses, responsibility shifts to the people. In that moment, a dormant muscle flexed back to life: Zionism not as theory but as action.
This awakening has created a new majority in Israel, one bound by shared responsibility rather than ideology. It is this majority – unified by sacrifice, duty, and devotion to the country’s survival – that forms what I call the Servants’ Covenant.
The new 80%
Before October 7, Israeli society was often described through the “80/20 paradigm.” The public agreed on 80% of the practical foundations of daily life – transportation, healthcare, the economy, infrastructure – while 20% of issues, such as religion and state or the Palestinian conflict, were seen as intractable ideological divides.
But the war revealed a far deeper truth: that the old 80/20 was an illusion. The real divide was not political but civic. A new 80% has emerged – not a bloc of passive moderation but a vast serving public that understands the fragility of the state and accepts personal responsibility for its future.
This 80% is prepared to carry the burden – to send their children to combat units, to serve in the reserves, to pay the price required for national survival. It understands that Israel cannot delay hard decisions any longer, that strategy must replace wishful thinking, and that unity must be built not on slogans but on shared action.
This majority has demanded two things simultaneously: the return of all the hostages and the defeat of Hamas. It knows that neither goal can be abandoned; it refuses to choose between the country’s children and the country’s existence. The tension between these imperatives is painful, but the new majority no longer looks away – it confronts reality head-on.
The haredi dilemma
The war also revealed the absence of an entire community: the ultra-Orthodox. As hundreds of thousands of Israelis mobilized for the front, a painful truth became impossible to ignore: The exemption of haredim from the duty of military service has become the deepest fracture in the Israeli social contract.
For years, Israeli society tolerated – even justified – haredi autonomy. Independent education, segregated neighborhoods, draft exemptions – these were seen as the price of preserving Jewish tradition within a diverse society.
But October 7 changed the moral equation. For the serving public – religious and secular, Right and Left – the inequality is no longer bearable. What was once a political debate has become a civic revolt.
Forty parliamentary sessions on the new conscription law became a national reckoning: Autonomy without national responsibility is anti-Zionist. Exceptionalism undermines the people’s army; inequality destroys cohesion. A country cannot survive when only some of its children are asked to die for it.
The serving public now sees clearly: The haredi community must be integrated into the national mission.
Reframing old disputes
Have Israel’s traditional ideological divides disappeared? No – they have been reframed.
Both the Right’s “management” doctrine and the Left’s “peace” doctrine collapsed on October 7. Reality dissolved the old categories. Today, there is a broad consensus: Hamas cannot rule Gaza; sovereignty or statehood is a theoretical debate detached from the present danger; and Israel can no longer remain a “villa in the jungle.”
A similar shift is occurring in the religion-state debate. Much of what once inflamed public discourse – symbolic fights over language, ritual, or cultural norms – now feels trivial.
Israeli Judaism thrives in many forms; social arrangements work better than political ones. The more significant debate is unfolding within the religious world itself: between those who see the state as part of divine commandment and those who see it as irrelevant. It is a debate that did not exist publicly before the war.
The cultural divide between “First Israel” and “Second Israel” remains, but it, too, has softened. The periphery has grown stronger; the middle class has expanded; mobility is high. The war produced a raw, human solidarity that briefly eclipsed years of bitterness – a reminder that beneath the political noise lies a shared national identity waiting to be rebuilt.
The next chapter
The question now confronting Israel is simple: Who will lead the country into its next chapter?
The answer lies with those who carried Israel through its darkest hour – the serving public. The Servants’ Covenant is not a political party but a civic alliance rooted in duty: reservists, soldiers, first responders, educators, parents who send their children to defend the state, and communities that hold the country together.
This majority – 80-85 mandates worth in electoral terms – must become the basis of Israel’s future. Without it, the state will be trapped in the old, dysfunctional alliances: right-wing governments dependent on haredi parties, or left-wing governments dependent on anti-Zionist Arab factions. Neither arrangement can secure Israel’s survival.
The Servants’ Covenant is a call to restore statesmanship as the organizing principle of public life – to rebuild education around civic identity, to strengthen the people’s army, to ensure universal service, to integrate all communities into the Zionist mission, and to confront the difficult issues that will shape Israel’s future.
Like the generation of 1948, the generation of 2023 faces a moment of founding. The state must be rebuilt – not from physical ruin but from civic crisis. October 7 exposed our vulnerabilities, but it also revealed our strength: a serving majority that understands that the state is not a given but a task.
And the task begins now.■
Inbar Harush Gity previously served as head of the Directorate for Promoting the Recruitment and Integration of Haredim in the IDF at Israel’s Defense Ministry, where she played a key role in shaping national service policy. She is also one of the founding members of the Yashar Party led by Gadi Eisenkot.