This substack essay is timeless so I won't put a date on it. From a friend of a friend.
David? No, We are The Jewish Goliath
Avrum Burg
If a public opinion poll were held in Israel and people were asked who they are in the ancient struggle between David and Goliath, the overwhelming majority would answer David. Goliath, us? Impossible. In our self-image we are beautiful, clever, agile, resourceful. We always win. And at the same time we are fragile, persecuted, and confronted by a hostile world. In short, we are the children of David.
This is not a simple question of identity but a reflection on what we lost along the way, whether it was worth the price, and where the path disappeared. How did a civilization of wisdom turn into a culture of power. How did the people of poets and prophets become conquerors and oppressors. The truth is unavoidable. The people of the book became the people of the gun. We survived a horrific war and forfeited a part of our soul.
Few Israelis are willing to recall what happened to the handsome shepherd boy of the Bible and how his disgraceful end grew out of his youthful vanity and betrayal. We attached the Book of Psalms to his name and turned him into an eternal poet of faith, but the documented facts did not change. He was lustful, treacherous, endlessly scheming, and a serial shedder of blood. Worse still, as the years passed David became Goliath. The musician and marksman who led a band of outcasts became a weary king surrounded by plots and rebellions, a man who died bitter and heartbroken, estranged from those closest to him.
This is not merely a biblical story. It is a historical pattern. The nimble become clumsy. The lucid grow blind. The lover becomes the killer. Time and again the surprising and original victor turns into a heavy colossus and is defeated by the very forces he once overcame. Rome began as a flexible city state and rose through agility and creative adaptation. When it became a vast empire it lost the qualities that built it and eventually collapsed. Napoleon started as a brilliant commander and ended as the ruler of a rigid empire waging wars that exceeded its capacity. The United States began as a young country breaking the chains of old empires and later sank into unnecessary conflicts, humiliated repeatedly by smaller adversaries in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The Soviet Union held an enormous nuclear arsenal yet fell into the lies it told itself. The same pattern marked many liberation movements in Africa and Asia.
And we. Jews who became the heirs of Goliath. Like the biblical giant we are armed with the most advanced technology, and like him we have grown heavy and unresponsive. Exactly like him we received a deadly stone right between the eyes. Israel, the mighty Goliath, was struck badly by weaker but more daring adversaries. The David of 1948 became the Goliath of 2025.
We possess hundreds of unacknowledged nuclear weapons, the most sophisticated tools in air and on land, weapons distributed freely to almost anyone who wants them. Public discourse is violent, the killing of civilians barely registers, and a person feels reassured when passing a shop only after spotting someone with a rifle at the door. This vast armed giant called Israel could not defeat what many dismiss as a rifraf of men in sandals.
How did this happen. Not in one day and not in a single year. It was a long and deep transformation of the collective consciousness. We first preferred the strong Sabra over the learned Jew. Then we elevated power into the supreme value. When we replaced Talmudic doubt with simplistic patriotism and chose the military service man over the one of reflection, we moved from Jews to Israelis, and finally to Goliaths.
The classical Jewish figure survived through intellect. It was Jewish wisdom, not Jewish muscle, that sustained a fragile people through centuries. Cleverness, rhetoric, adaptation to changing realities. These were our tools. Zionism wanted to overturn that image and created the new Jew, the farmer and the warrior. In doing so it broke the ancient balance. The sabra emerged as an antithesis to the diasporic Jew: muscular, simplistic, unable to hold complexity. Instead of integrating Jewish depth with Israeli strength we discarded the Jewish part entirely and were left with raw force.
In contemporary Israeli society the word intellectual is almost an insult. It means leftist, detached, incapable of seeing the world as it is. Thought is perceived as weakness. Doubt as disloyalty. Complexity as fear. In their place came proud shallowness, aggressive militarism, and the worship of brute force. This did not happen by accident. It was a deliberate educational project spanning decades. A formation that begins in kindergarten, continues through emotionally manipulative school trips to Auschwitz, and matures in a military service that celebrates obedience above reflection. Everything is permitted in shaping a collective identity built on heroic imagery, national illusions, and the mythologies about our “pure weapon”, “the moral army”, and the beautiful soldier. The consequences are visible in Gaza and in the occupied territories.
We are Goliaths who remain convinced we are Davids. A deep split within the self. Eternal and invincible, yet also perpetually on the verge of annihilation. This allows us to use immense force without moral responsibility. To act as aggressors while feeling like victims. The gap between consciousness and reality has become an existential strategic problem. The state behaves as if it were a small and threatened actor even when it holds overwhelming superiority. It insists on the psychology of victimhood even while inflicting devastation. Every threat becomes a catastrophe. Every opponent a new Hitler. Every failure is an existential trauma. A state that sees itself as David yet operates as Goliath is condemned to the same strategic blindness that felled the original giant, and its end is written plainly in the biblical text.
A Goliath unaware of his size trusts only in power. He does not ask questions. He cannot imagine his own limits. Power creates the illusion of control. This is precisely what is happening to us. We are so strong that we lost the ability to understand why we are losing.
Not long ago I took part in a conversation with former soldiers, thoughtful men who nonetheless return to the familiar narrative of shooting and crying, of reflecting and then killing. At one point one of them challenged me. Are you not afraid of our enemies. Do you not have doubts. On whom can we rely if not on ourselves. My reply was detailed, but at its core stood a simple idea that angered him. I have been a diasporic Jew for two thousand years, I told him. Without power, army, or a government, no nuclear weapons, and not for one day did I worry about the fate of the Jewish people. You have been an Israeli for barely eighty years, with tanks and commandos and advanced munitions, and yet you cannot stop fearing that everything is about to end. What exactly in this muscular Israeliness makes you so afraid. What did we lose when we moved from Jew to Israeli.
This question strikes at the heart of the contradiction. All this power has not brought security, only chronic anxiety. The diasporic Jew, with all his vulnerability, knew something the Israeli forgot. Survival is not the result of absolute power but of flexibility, intelligence, and the capacity to adapt. Zionism wanted to heal the existential fear of exile. Instead it created an Israeli with a fear far stronger, because now there is something tangible to lose, and there are weapons to protect it. Weapons invite use. Use invites hatred. Hatred invites new fear.
This is the Goliath loop. The stronger we become, the more frightened we are. The more armed we are, the more threatened we feel. We lost the ancient ability to live with uncertainty. Goliath must win every time. David could lose and still endure. That is the essential difference.
Perhaps in the face of this tragedy all that remains is to listen to the Psalms. “The war horse is a false hope for salvation, and by its great might it cannot rescue”. Power alone does not save. David knew this when he wrote these words. He forgot it when he became king. And so did we.
As long as we continue to believe the stories we tell ourselves, we will repeat the same mistake again and again until the next small stone strikes, and there may be no one left to retell the tale.
substack.com |
