Superficially, the division of Jerusalem may seem justified, on practical as well as moral grounds. After all, good fences make good neighbors, etc.; but, to reconcile conflicting claims, why not perform a Solomon-like division of what is in dispute.

The proponents of division mostly argue practicality: since the two communities cannot live together, they should separate. In real life, however, cutting a city in half is easier said than done, and having two sovereigns govern different parts may prove not only an impossible task, but also a dangerous one, leading to total chaos.

In 1977, after being deposed from a half century in power, Labour politicians and intellectuals bitterly accused a public of being “riffraff” and black-hats of stealing “their” country. An old guard socialist leader suggested the voting public must be replaced with a better one. Since then it has become customary for our politicians and media to blame “the public” for everything, even when it just reacts to misguided and inept leadership.

If we have an extremely autocratic and secretive government, constantly making backroom deals at the public’s expense, it is because the public is not democratic enough. If the shekel falls, “the public” is guilty of a run on the dollar, even when few were permitted to buy it, and banks and large enterprises made massive purchases. When stock markets collapse, the public is blamed for panicking, although banks urged them to buy their stock funds at speculative highs, and markets are routinely manipulated.

Why do our intellectuals, media people and public figures express themselves in such a monolithic fashion? Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, a former Minister of Education, described them recently as “a unitary choir… [that lacks] critical polyphony, singing only one unitary note, [expressing] a collectivist taste”.

Since over fifty percent of the electorate vote center to right, it is also a puzzle why the vast majority of our elites are leftist, often extremely so. And why is there so little creative ferment and almost no dissent within the left?

Years of war, oppression and neglect by their mother churches and clerical leadership have caused a mass exodus of Christians from the Middle East. The numbers tell it all. In the Holy Land, emigration has turned majorities in once distinct Christian enclaves into minorities. In all of Israel, where Christians prospered most, they have dwindled to a mere 130,000, about 2.1% of the population. Only 14,000 Christians remain in Jerusalem. Of close to 70,000 people living in Nazareth, Christians, who until recently constituted a majority, are now only 30% of the population.

When our distinguished poet Haim Gouri agonizes over a possible threat to Israel’s very survival as a Jewish state posed by the “collapse” of our “ethos of standing up firm”, we should listen to his ruminations with alarm; for their insights, of course, but also because they reveal a continued part-blindness of the generation that created his “collapsed world”, that discourages a process of healing.