Von Humboldt’s name means little to most Americans today, though he remains well known to scientists as the man who first gave shape to environmental and climate science, and to millions across Europe and South America for the five-year journey through South America, and the books that followed, that changed how an entire era understood the natural world. He was at once a mining engineer, ornithologist, geologist, cartographer, explorer, mountain climber, poet, botanist, zoologist, philosopher, political influencer, lecturer, author. A friend to both Goethe and Darwin, he may well be the most influential scientist of the past three centuries.

What strikes me most is how thoroughly he refused to let knowledge sit in silos. At a moment when the fashion in science was to list and to catalogue, to pin the world down species by species, he saw threads instead, running under and through everything, tying one place to another across an ocean. What he had once seen in the fog and ice of the Alps, he recognized again in the peaks of the Andes, the same forces at work though vastly separated. That refusal to compartmentalize let him see what almost no one else could: not only the interconnectedness of the natural world, but the wound we were already opening in it, through deforestation, through irrigation, through monoculture, decades and more before anyone else recognized the impending disaster.

And he knew, somehow, that discovery on its own was never enough. A finding left in a journal, read by a handful of specialists, was a discovery half made. So he lectured widely, in London, in Paris, in Berlin, and he wrote books that became bestsellers around the world, translated language after language, because knowledge to him, as Wulf puts it, “had to be shared, exchanged and made available to everybody.”

Reading this, I find myself carried back through my own four decades in science, a number larger than I would like to admit. In 1986 I began a PhD asking a narrow, reductionist question: how do plants synthesize carotenoids, those ubiquitous orange, red, and pink pigments scattered throughout nature. In 1993, as a postdoc, I turned to how plants use light from the environment to shape their own development, still working with molecular tools, but now letting genes and environment speak to each other rather than holding them apart. Three years later I had my own lab, and among other threads we pulled, we traced the homologies between how plants and animals respond, at the molecular level, to light itself.

Knowledge, Humboldt believed, could never kill the creative force of imagination. It could only fling the eyes wider open, toward wonder. I understand that now in a way I could not have earlier in my career. Only once I had the professional grounding, once I had earned a place in the international scientific community, did I have the confidence to open my own eyes and imagine, for the first time, what a plant knows, while staying loyal, always, to the science underneath. I would like to think Humboldt would have approved of that book, What a Plant Knows, which has shaped how people think about plants, and perhaps about me, more than any of my reductionist papers ever did. He wanted his findings to reach not just scientists, but politicians, philosophers, artists, the person on the street. In my own small way, I wanted the same.

Humboldt wrote of his first encounters with the natural world in richly romantic terms, and never once let the wonder crowd out the measurement, the temperature, the altitude, the precise name of the species underfoot. Reading him, I recognize what has always made research irresistible to me, what must have made exploration irresistible to him: the eureka moment. Those precious, almost holy few seconds when you know something no one else in the world yet knows, when for one instant the discovery belongs to you alone, before you give it away. That is the drug of research, addictive and maddeningly rare. In four decades I have felt it fully perhaps three times. A few more, vicariously, through students who felt it themselves while I stood beside them, close enough to feel the heat of it. Everything else, valuable as it has been, has been addition, not revelation.

These past few days I have found myself carried, by Humboldt, well past my own scientific arc, toward the parallels between his world and ours: the promise and threat of artificial intelligence, the fragility of liberal values, the question of whether ideas can still move freely across a world at war. Each of those is its own essay, and maybe I will write them. But the truest thing I have realized, reading him in this place, looking out at these vistas, is what his example means for the university I lead.

The institution we have built at Ben-Gurion University over the past eight years is, I think, Humboldtian in its bones. The walls we have knocked down between disciplines, the Goldman-Sonnenfeldt School of Sustainability and Climate Change, the Young School of Human Experience, the Stein Faculty of Computer and Information Science, all of it reaches toward the same integration Humboldt spent his life insisting on. Perhaps what we owe our students now is more than knowledge organized by department. Perhaps we owe them room to get lost, if not in nature, then in knowledge, to let their senses open the way mine did on this beach, and to go looking for their own eureka moments.

Nine months ago I opened this space. Since then, 678 of you have subscribed to Letters from the Negev, and my posts have been read over 19,000 times. I’m grateful for both the readership and the feedback along the way. The three most-read posts so far have been “The Writing on the Wall,” “When the Threat Becomes Personal,” and “On America at 250.”

I’m writing now to ask for your help. I started this Substack because I was told my BGU letters deserved a wider audience, and the growing subscriber list suggests that’s happening. You can help it grow further:

• If a post resonates with you, click the Like button at the bottom of the post. It tells the algorithm to surface it to others, and the more a post circulates, the more likely it reaches people who’d otherwise never encounter BGU’s story.

• And if a particular piece stays with you, forward it through your own networks. That’s still the most reliable way these things travel.

Thank you for reading, and for whatever part you play in helping this reach further.

Danny

I still remember the radio conversation that first got me thinking about this. The ethicist Prof. Asa Kasher was being interviewed about whether politicians should be held to campaign promises the way parties to a contract are held to its terms. Israeli news anchors, more often casting themselves as entertainment than journalism, usually press candidates for a firm commitment, a line in the sand. It is a familiar ritual by now: the anchor treats the extraction of a promise as the interview’s real achievement, and the politician, cornered, obliges rather than risk looking evasive. (anyone remember the Amir Peretz’s famous shaving of a mustache?) It struck me because I had heard some version of that same demand many times myself, from colleagues at the university. Promise not to cut positions. Promise to raise the budget. Promise to back this department, this hire, this field. Promise, promise, promise.

I recognized the under current because I had heard it before, from smaller voices. Decades ago, each of my children, at around age five, asked me the same thing at bedtime: promise me you won’t die. I promised, every time, knowing it wasn’t true. I did it because they needed a fixed point to fall asleep on, and because at that age you cannot hold the actual complexity of life and death.

A candidate who tells you exactly what they will do in every circumstance is not being reassuring. They are describing a rigidity that will not survive the first month in office.

Faculty and staff are not toddlers, and the university is not a bedtime negotiation, so I try never to make those promises simply to assuage fears. What I usually offer instead is a stance. Where I intend to lead, what I value, and what I genuinely don’t yet know. And I ask them about their fears and motivations. Why is it so important that I promise? What do they expect of me? And how will they feel if in the end I have to change my mind because of some unforeseen event? My answer disappoints people more often than a promise would. It also happens to be honest, and it survives contact with reality in a way that a promise rarely does.

This is the same discipline I think we should be demanding of our candidates this election season. A promise is a fixed point offered to make someone feel settled, even when you know that it likely will be broken. A stance is a description of how someone will act when the situation is not what anyone predicted, which is the only situation Israeli politics has offered for years now. We are choosing a government that will face decisions no platform written in August can anticipate. A candidate who tells you exactly what they will do in every circumstance is not being reassuring. They are describing a rigidity that will not survive the first month in office.

I promise very little. I could not promise my children I won’t die, but I can promise to love them unconditionally. I can promise to lead my university with integrity, and to keep research and the people who do it at the center of what we build. I cannot promise who I will hire two years from now or what a shifting budget will allow, because I don’t yet know what will be true when that moment comes, and pretending otherwise would be a lie dressed up as leadership.

That is the distinction worth pressing on the people asking for our votes this fall, and it is a distinction journalists are in a unique position to press. An interviewer who corners a candidate into a promise has produced a headline, not an insight. The harder, more useful segment asks a candidate to describe how they will act when the facts on the ground are not the ones they campaigned on, and holds them there until they answer. If an anchor insists on extracting a promise anyway, there is one worth extracting: a commitment to place the country’s needs above the party’s and above their own. That promise is rare enough, and consequential enough, to be worth demanding before any other.

But you don’t need a World Cup final to see the magic of BGU’s campus.

On almost any evening, long after classes have ended, our campus is still alive. Students remain in the library until it closes. They cook dinner together in the dorms. They argue in the entrepreneurship center about a conversation that began hours earlier in class and refuses to end. Ask them why they chose Be’er Sheva instead of a university twenty minutes from their parents’ home, and the answer rarely begins with a particular department or professor. More often than not, it begins with the people they found here.

I have been thinking about that answer a great deal lately, for a reason that has nothing to do with admissions and everything to do with artificial intelligence.

For the past two years, I have argued that universities must become AI resilient. In a recent article, I suggested that artificial intelligence is forcing higher education to answer an old question in a new way: what a university is for, now that a machine can answer almost anything a student once needed a professor to explain.

The scarce resource in the age of AI is no longer information. Information has become abundant. The scarce resource is human connection.

That realization came into sharper focus last week because of an unexpected LinkedIn post.

One of our alumni, Dror Berman, wrote about meeting another freshman, Nadav Grossinger, on his very first day at Ben-Gurion University. Like countless first encounters during orientation week, neither of them could possibly have imagined where that introduction would lead. Years later they found themselves in Silicon Valley, building companies together and helping shape Israel’s, and indeed the world’s, technology ecosystem.

On the surface, it is a story about entrepreneurship.

I read it differently: It is a story about proximity.

Dror and Nadav met because they had both chosen to move to Be’er Sheva, to a university that asks students not merely to attend classes but to build a life together. They live together, argue together, struggle together, celebrate together, and, sometimes, build companies together. Their friendship was not an accidental footnote to their later success. It was one of its foundations.

The same week Dror shared that reflection, another piece of news arrived. Ben-Gurion University had been ranked first in Israel and third in the world for the proportion of alumni who go on to found highly successful venture-backed companies.

University presidents are naturally pleased by rankings. I certainly was. But I found myself wondering whether this particular ranking was measuring entrepreneurship at all. Perhaps it was measuring something deeper. Perhaps it was measuring the strength of a university community where curious, talented people find one another, challenge one another, inspire one another, and continue building together long after graduation.

That is something AI cannot replicate.

Large language models can explain quantum mechanics, critique an essay, write code, summarize a book, and serve as remarkably effective tutors. They cannot sit across the table from you at one in the morning and push back on a half-formed idea until it becomes a good one. They cannot notice that a friend has gone unusually quiet and ask whether everything is all right. They cannot build the trust that comes only from shared experiences accumulated over months and years.

In short, they cannot create community.

For centuries, universities derived much of their value from privileged access to knowledge. That era is ending. Knowledge is becoming increasingly available to anyone with an internet connection and an AI assistant.

Paradoxically, this makes the residential university more valuable, not less. Not because it controls access to knowledge, but because it creates opportunities for the kind of human encounters that knowledge alone has never been able to produce.

If information is no longer scarce, then the university’s greatest contribution lies elsewhere: in creating the conditions where exceptional people meet one another at a formative stage of life and remain connected long after they leave campus.

This is not nostalgia for a pre-digital world. AI is undoubtedly transforming universities, and it should. We should embrace it wholeheartedly, redesign how we teach, rethink how we assess learning, and prepare our students for a future in which working intelligently with AI will be an essential skill.

But in doing so, we should also recognize what has become uniquely valuable.

You cannot download proximity. You cannot prompt your way into a friendship that survives two decades and two continents. You cannot ask an algorithm to recreate the countless serendipitous encounters that occur when thousands of curious, ambitious young people choose to live and learn together.

Perhaps that is why I have become increasingly convinced that the university of the AI era will not be defined primarily by the information it possesses, but by the community it creates.

Dror probably intended his post simply as a tribute to an old friend. I read it as evidence for something much larger. Whatever the future holds for universities that compete with artificial intelligence on its own terms, ours, I suspect, will be secured by becoming even better at what AI can never do: bringing remarkable people together, in a particular place, at a particular moment in their lives, and giving them the chance to change one another forever.

I won’t pretend neutrality here. History will judge the legislative output of this government as the worst this country has ever had, and its final two weeks read like the coalition’s own confirmation of that verdict: a blitz of legislation timed precisely because whipping votes past midnight is easier than building consensus in daylight.

What struck me was not the content of any single bill; it was the machinery. Coalition discipline, procedural fluency, goal oriented no matter the cost. Whatever one thinks of where that machinery was pointed, it worked. Laws, no matter how grotesque, suddenly passed in a week.

So I found myself doing something a little indulgent: imagining what that same machinery could produce with good intentions and pointed south.

The Negev makes up sixty percent of Israel’s land, but less than a sixth of the population and only a small fraction of its national investment. It has absorbed decades of promises, especially in days preceding elections, about “developing the Negev”, that rarely survive post-election budgets. But if the government can find the discipline to pass five contested laws in a week, it can find the discipline to pass five uncontested ones. Here is my list:

A Negev Origin Admissions Law, permitting BGU to weight admission, affirmative action if you will, to its health, therapy and engineering programs (medicine, nursing, occupational therapy, social work, psychology, and engineering among them), toward applicants from the Negev. The data behind this one is stark. Physicians in the Negev serve their population at roughly 2.1 per thousand people, against 5.3 per thousand in Tel Aviv. The pattern repeats in psychology and social work, where southern clinics and school systems report waitlists that simply don’t exist in the center. Admission to BGU is so competitive that most of our applicants come from the wealthier center of the country. But unfortunately when they graduate, most gravitate back to their homes. The best way to increase the number of physicians, social workers, engineers, and the like in the Negev is to train Negev-native students at BGU who are most likely to build their lives in the Negev. But as the Negev is not considered a population deserving special consideration, we cannot legally accept students from the Negev over others. We can’t guarantee that a meaningful share of every incoming class in medicine, nursing, therapy, social work, psychology, or engineering already calls this region home, and is more likely to stay in it.

A Negev Research and Development Investment Law, setting a binding floor, not a target, for the share of national R&D and infrastructure budgets directed to Negev-based higher education, hospitals, and industry, the way peripheral incentive laws already exist for the north.

A Bedouin Town Planning and Infrastructure Law, granting formal recognition and master planning to unrecognized Bedouin villages on a fixed timeline, with water and electricity connection guaranteed rather than litigated village by village for another generation.

A Negev Rail Law, with a binding construction timeline, not an aspirational one, connecting Beer Sheva, Dimona, and Arad to the center in under an hour, on the logic that no relocation incentive matters if the commute doesn’t work.

A Negev Relocation and Anchor Institution Law, requiring a fixed share of government offices and government-funded agencies, public broadcasting among them, along with their civilian contractors, to headquarter in the Negev, with the tax and housing incentives to make that mandate stick rather than symbolic.

None of these five would generate a headline the way gender segregation in graduate school did this week. That is precisely the point. The laws that got the coalition’s full attention this session were the ones that served a narrow constituency loudly. The Negev has never been a loud constituency, and it has paid for that in every budget.

Unfortunately, I don’t expect the next Knesset to take up this list. But I’d like whoever campaigns for my vote over the next hundred days to explain why building the Negev’s workforce, research, and infrastructure is less urgent than the fights this one just finished having. Two weeks of that same coalition discipline, pointed south instead of at itself, is all it would take.

Aliquippa, Pennsylvania was built for that kind of arithmetic. Everyone I knew was some kind of hyphenate: Irish-American, Italian-American, Polish-American, Serbian-American, Black American, Greek-American; the ethnicities were numerous. We hurled ethnic slurs at each other with a casualness that would not survive five minutes today, and none of it touched the more basic fact underneath: nobody doubted anyone else’s claim to the place. My non-Jewish friends came to my bar mitzvah the way I went to their confirmations, because that was simply what neighbors did for each other. Our synagogue had no guard and no gate. When people were inside, the front door was left unlocked, because we assumed, correctly, that if trouble ever came from outside, the neighbors we grew up with would be the ones standing between it and us. My grandparents had come to America not as Romanian or Russian immigrants but as Jewish immigrants, the same way the mill families down the street were Italian, Greek, or Serbian immigrants rather than Catholic or Orthodox ones. Nationality was the organizing category, not creed, and a Jew from Aliquippa was as unambiguously American as anyone else on the block, slurs and all.

I don’t think that arithmetic holds anymore, and that is what has me unsettled as the country turns 250.

Start with the plainest evidence: the only communal institutions in America that require police presence and private security as a matter of routine, not just synagogues but Jewish community centers, schools, and day camps, belong to one group. That is not paranoia. It is a fact about how American Jewish life is now organized. The unlocked door in Aliquippa is unthinkable today, not because the neighbors changed, but because the assumption behind it, that an attack on us would be treated as an attack on all of us, no longer holds the way it once did.

Then there is New York City’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who told ABC’s Jonathan Karl recently that he could not support any state that “privileges one religion over the other,” naming Israel and, in the same breath, Saudi Arabia. It is worth sitting with the fact that Saudi Arabia was the only other example he reached for. A kingdom that bars the public practice of any faith but Islam and can impose the death penalty for apostasy got named once, as a kind of alibi, and then the argument moved on. To the best of my knowledge, I don’t believe that he has ever protested or boycotted Saudi Arabia. The roughly eighty other states in the world with an established or preferred religion, most of them Muslim-majority, a few of them Christian democracies in Europe, went unmentioned. Only the one Jewish state was made to answer for the universalism he pretends to support.

That is the part my grandparents would have recognized immediately as anti-Semitism, even if the vocabulary is new. It was never really about religion as a legal category. It was about whether Jews get to define themselves as a people, the way the Irish or the Poles or the Saudis always have been allowed to, or whether that claim has to be re-litigated every time it’s convenient. Mamdani’s formula sounds like a universal principle. Applied only once, it isn’t one.

I painted an Israeli flag on my bedroom wall the same year my friends filled the pews at my bar mitzvah and I sat in theirs at confirmation, and nobody in Aliquippa thought any of that needed defending. Somewhere between an unlocked synagogue door and an armed guard at every Jewish preschool, being visibly, unapologetically a Jew and being fully American stopped being treated as the same uncomplicated thing, and that is the loss this anniversary should actually be measured against. Fifty years after my bar mitzvah I write this from the Negev. Again I am hyphenated, but in reverse. I am an American-Israeli. I used to be proud of the adjective. Today I am not so sure.

Nadine Epstein has written a careful, historically grounded and well-intentioned essay about the death of a word. I don’t disagree with her diagnosis; I disagree with her timeline.

The word “Zionism” was already in crisis when I was a teenager debating it in the mid-1970s inside Young Judaea, the Zionist youth movement I grew up in. But the crisis wasn’t about toxicity. It was about relevance. We weren’t asking whether the word was dangerous; we were asking whether it still meant anything at all.

That distinction matters. Toxicity or a word can be cured by better usage, clearer argument, more careful speakers. Irrelevance of a word is a different kind of death. And it was irrelevance, not weaponization, that was already hollowing out the word when my generation was coming of age.

The central argument in our youth movement debates was straightforward: If the purpose of Zionism was to establish a Jewish state, and the Jewish state now existed, then what exactly was a Zionist anymore? Many of us landed on a clear answer: You could only claim the identity if you were committed to aliyah. Otherwise, you were an Israel supporter, which in itself is a fine thing to be, but not the same thing. The movement had been built on chalutziut, on pioneering, on the idea that personal transformation and physical relocation were inseparable from political conviction. If you removed that demand, what was left?

Irrelevance, not weaponization, was already hollowing out the word when my generation was coming of age.

I was among the hardliners on this question. In 1984, before leaving Columbia University for Israel, I published a short story in the HaMagshimim Journal, the literary journal of Young Judaea’s graduate movement, that imagined a dystopian future in which a young American Jewish leader, facing the social pressure of mainstreamed anti-Zionism, renounces Zionism before a major Jewish gathering, declaring it is time to “move on from false ideologies.”

I wrote that as a warning. Reading Epstein’s essay 42 years later, I feel the strange vertigo of having watched the warning come true.

The youth movement debates of the 1970s and early 1980s also contained a second, less resolved argument, one that I think Epstein’s essay misses entirely. Among those of us who were genuinely committed to aliyah, who were making the journey, there was a fierce argument about what modern Zionism should look like once you arrived. Was it still chalutziut: the kibbutz, the frontier, the physical cultivation of the land? (Kibbutz Ketura, in the Arava desert, was the touchstone for this view.) Or had pioneering evolved into something else: founding Israel’s first world-class institutions, building things that would make Israel a full participant in the cultural and intellectual life of the world?

One of my friends from that era, a fellow Young Judaean who, like me, made aliyah, first chose to study viticulture and enology, so that he could revolutionize the Israeli wine industry (which he did at the Golan Heights Winery) from an afterthought into something taken seriously on the world stage. Was that Zionism? I believe it was. The argument we were having in our early twenties, before we’d actually fulfilled our identity as Zionists, was not about whether to go, but about what building a country actually demands, not so dissimilar from the debates held early the early Zionist movement. That argument was real, and it was serious, and it had nothing to do with bumper stickers or UN resolutions.

It is this argument, about content rather than nomenclature, that I miss most in the current discourse, including in Epstein’s otherwise thoughtful piece.

David Ben-Gurion, as Epstein notes, tried to retire the word himself in 1957. He lost that battle because too many organizations, like now, had too much invested in the label. The word survived, but hollowed out: increasingly decoupled from any behavioral demand, available for anyone to claim and therefore available for anyone to weaponize.

I understand why Epstein wants to finish what Ben-Gurion started. The case she makes, that the word now generates more heat than light, is empirically true. And her prescription, to speak in specifics rather than invoke the term, is sensible advice for a certain kind of conversation, in a certain kind of context, one that happens in the diaspora.

But I want to offer a different perspective, from someone who has now lived in Israel for more than four decades.

I still identify as a Zionist. Not despite the word’s baggage, but because of its ideological imperatives. The core proposition of classical Zionism, that Jews can only be truly free and truly at home in their own sovereign homeland, resonates today more urgently than at any time since my youth. What I have watched unfold in the United States, Canada and Australia over the past several years, accelerating since October 7, is the thing I believed was theoretically inevitable when I left in 1984: the steady erosion of Jewish belonging in a society that once seemed to offer a permanent exception to Jewish history. Epstein writes from the diaspora, where the word has become a liability. I write from Beer-Sheva, where the questions the word Zionism was invented to answer are not abstract.

To be honest, I wouldn’t mourn the death of the word. But I would ask that before we bury it, we take seriously what gets buried with it: the demand that conviction be embodied, not merely declared; the argument about what it means to build something, not just to support it from a distance; and the recognition that the question Zionism was invented to answer has not, in fact, been resolved.

Epstein is right that we need language that moves us forward. I would only add: Forward toward what, exactly? That question is older than the current toxicity, and harder than any change of vocabulary will solve.

Those weeks had taken me to places I had never imagined going as a university president: sitting shiva with families who had lost children, standing at funerals, offering comfort I wasn’t sure I had. Our entire administration was doing the same, and it was doing something to us. Strengthening us, in one sense. Exacting a toll in another. I looked in the mirror and wasn’t entirely sure who looked back.

The phrase came to me because it was the only formulation that didn’t lie. Not strong despite being broken. Not broken but holding together. Both things, fully, at the same time.

Israeli researchers, originally working with Holocaust survivors, gave this state a name. They call it aintegration: the human capacity to hold incongruence, to live with contradiction and paradox, without being consumed by the need to resolve it. Not integration, not balance, not synthesis. Something more like the ability to contain incompatible truths simultaneously and remain, somehow, whole. The Holocaust survivors who demonstrated this capacity most clearly were often the ones who said things like: I live with memories I cannot understand, and yet they are mine. I carry terrible scenes alongside a love of life. The contradictions accompany me. To know how to live with them is its own kind of wholeness.

I have been thinking about this concept again in recent weeks, because life in Israel has become a breathing illustration of the need for aintegration.

Israel was founded to be a haven for Jews. Yet on October 7, more Jews were killed in a single day than at any time since 1945. That founding contradiction, promise and catastrophic vulnerability coexisting, has never fully resolved itself, and perhaps it never will.

What we are living through now is that contradiction made unbearable.

The war with Iran ended in June 2025. Except it didn’t: the ceasefire expired in February 2026, a new larger war followed, a fragile pause was brokered in April and remains teetering. As of this week the Lebanon “ceasefire” continues even as soldiers and civilians continue to die in southern Lebanon and northern Israel, as drone attacks and Israeli advances persist. The word ceasefire, applied to this situation, is doing extraordinary work, in the aptly named “ceasefire war.”

Meanwhile the Knesset, which last week passed a preliminary dissolution vote with 110 of 120 members in favor, is moving toward elections set for October, the first since October 7. Campaign politics are accelerating. Budget battles, haredi draft legislation, coalition maneuvering: the familiar machinery of Israeli democracy runs on its usual schedule, in a country that has been at war, in one form or another, for nearly three years, but conducting itself as if it hasn’t.

And beyond our borders, antisemitism is at its deadliest level in over three decades. Twenty Jews were killed in antisemitic attacks in 2025, according to Tel Aviv University’s annual report. Across virtually every Western country, incident levels remain the highest since the Second World War.

Strong and Broken, applied to a country, gets more complicated than when applied to a person.

The researchers who developed the concept of aintegration were careful to distinguish it from mere dissociation, from simply refusing to look at what is hard. Genuine aintegrative capacity, they argued, comes from having lived through enough contradiction to stop demanding that reality resolve itself neatly. It tends to be higher among people who have sat with incompatible things long enough to stop expecting them to cancel each other out. It is the opposite of the need for closure.

What worries me about the current Israeli moment is not that we are living with contradiction. That is unavoidable, and in some sense it is what we have always done. What worries me is whether we are living with it honestly, or whether the noise of election season is serving to avoid sitting with what these years have actually cost.

The capability and resilience Israel has demonstrated over these three years of war are genuinely remarkable. But we are also recognizing fractures in our society, in our politics, in our sense of shared purpose, that no ceasefire or election result will resolve. The vitriol of the current political discourse has consumed the common resilience we once took pride in. The families who lost someone on October 7, or in the months that followed, are still sitting with an absence that nothing will fill. The soldiers who served, many of them for years now, carry wounds that will take time to understand, while our government goes out of its way to exempt those who will not share the burden. The communities in the north evacuated from their homes, some still not fully returned, have had their ordinary lives rearranged in ways that compound slowly, as rockets have come back to rain terror on them.

A country, like a person, also needs a capacity to hold incongruence, to live with contradiction and paradox, without being consumed by the need to resolve it; to be strong and broken at the same time. What it cannot afford is to mistake one for the other: to let the strength become a reason not to reckon with the broken, or to let the broken become a reason to give up on what still needs to be built.

Our current government, I fear, cannot fathom this. For them the goal is not aintegration, but rather disintegration. For them there is only self-vindication and political survival, not the harder work of acknowledging complexity.

Aintegration is not a passive state. The researchers who studied Holocaust survivors noted that those who managed well were not the ones who had resolved everything. They were the ones who had learned to carry the contradictions without pretending they weren’t there. That carrying requires honesty about what was lost, what was broken, and what still needs tending.

The coming elections will tell us whether we are still capable of choosing people who can carry that honestly.

We are not alone. Across much of the democratic world, universities are increasingly discussed not simply as public institutions that require stewardship, but as actors that require supervision. The language varies, as do the political contexts, but the impulse is recognizable: a desire for tighter oversight, clearer lines of authority, and stronger alignment with national political priorities.

This shift rarely presents itself as hostility to knowledge or technology. More often, it is framed as a corrective: As universities are publicly funded, shape culture and wield influence, many argue that greater accountability to the societies that support them is not only reasonable, but necessary. Taken at face value, this line of thinking is often hard to dispute, and to many it appears harmless. It becomes more troubling when accountability to “society” is reduced to accountability to “the state”.

History offers numerous examples of what happens when political oversight becomes not an exception or a safeguard, but a mode of political intervention.

The question matters because universities are unlike most public institutions. Their most important contributions are long-cycle and difficult to predict. Breakthroughs in science and technology, the kind that eventually reshape economies or alter how we understand the world, often begin as lines of inquiry that appear marginal, unproductive, or even misguided. They demand time, tolerance for failure, and a degree of institutional confidence that does not sit easily with short political horizons. When that confidence erodes, the consequences are rarely immediate. They emerge later, often quietly, and sometimes elsewhere.

This dynamic is increasingly visible even in systems long regarded as stable. In the United States, universities have become sites of intensified political contestation. Legislative interventions in curriculum, funding, and governance are now openly debated and, in some cases, enacted. Academic appointments and research agendas are scrutinized through partisan lenses, and the language of accountability is increasingly paired with efforts to discipline institutions perceived as ideologically misaligned. While the United States remains one of the world’s strongest scientific systems, the very fact that such measures are now thinkable marks a shift in how academia is understood and defended in public discourse and legislative arenas. Increasingly, researchers are beginning to ask whether their work might be better supported elsewhere.

History offers perspective on where such shifts can lead. The most dramatic example remains the collapse of German academic life in the 1930s. Before that rupture, Germany was the undisputed center of scientific research. Its universities dominated physics and chemistry, and its scholars defined entire disciplines. Before 1933, Germany, and the German language, dominated the Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry. That dominance ended because the conditions that sustained independent inquiry were deliberately dismantled. What followed was not simply decline, but migration. Jewish scientists and others carried their questions, methods, and intellectual courage to places where they could continue their work. Over time, the United States, and the English language, came to dominate the Nobel Prizes.

Nobel Prizes are often invoked carelessly, and I am wary of doing so. Nobel Prizes are rare events, shaped by committee judgment, disciplinary fashions, and long delays between discovery and recognition. And yet, over more than a century, their distribution tells a remarkably consistent story: they cluster overwhelmingly in scientific systems characterized by sustained academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and tolerance for intellectual risk. When those conditions erode, Nobel-level work does not simply disappear, it migrates or never fully materializes. The prize, in this sense, is an indicator of where academic excellence is sustained over time.

More recent cases are less stark, but they reveal the same underlying pattern. In Hungary, changes to higher-education governance were introduced gradually, often justified in technocratic terms. Over time, institutional autonomy narrowed, international confidence weakened, and the academic system became less attractive to both scholars and students. In Turkey, measures initially framed as exceptional responses to political unrest hardened into a new normal. Academic careers grew precarious, trust eroded, and many of the country’s most promising researchers chose to leave. In both cases, while universities continue to function, what diminished was the capacity to sustain independent, high-risk intellectual work.

Against this global backdrop, I find myself wary of recent legislative proposals affecting higher-education governance in Israel. The language is familiar to anyone who has followed similar developments elsewhere: transparency, public supervision, alignment with democratic will. The explanatory notes explicitly acknowledge the importance of professionalism and independence alongside enhanced oversight. On the surface, taken clause by clause, little appears troubling to many. But it should, as the cumulative effect points toward far-reaching, unregulated, political control of higher education.

When appointment powers shift closer to the political echelon, when the tenure of governing bodies is tied more directly to electoral cycles, and when broad override mechanisms are introduced under the banner of “national importance,” a signal is sent: conform or loose funding. As we have seen globally, universities often absorb such signals quickly and respond not through open resistance, but through quiet adjustment.

Israel’s scientific and technological achievements, including Nobel Prizes outside the Peace Prize, did not emerge by accident. They were built within institutions grounded in a strong commitment to academic independence, institutions that accepted disagreement, protected dissent, and understood that some of the most valuable work looks unproductive for a very long time. That culture was not inevitable. It was cultivated, patiently, over decades.

The cost of politically managing universities is rarely paid by those who enact the change. It is paid later, by society as a whole, in discoveries that are never attempted, in questions that are never pursued, and in a gradual migration of intellectual ambition to places where curiosity is allowed more room to breathe.

This is not a partisan concern, and it is not unique to Israel. Those of us entrusted with universities carry an obligation not only to manage them in the present, but to protect the conditions under which they can continue to serve society long after today’s debates have passed.

I thought about that walk this week, after Yemanu Binyamin Zelka was killed.

Yemanu was 21 years old. He had worked his way up from delivery driver to shift supervisor at the same Pizza Hut branch in Petah Tikva over five years. On Independence Day night, he politely asked a group of teenagers, children, to stop spraying foam in the restaurant. They waited for him outside until his shift ended, and then murdered him.

What is happening to us?

The question isn’t rhetorical. The statistics are stark. Israel recorded 105 murders in the first four months of 2026 alone. Arrests of minors in the Tel Aviv area have nearly doubled since 2022. Youth gangs now roam neighborhoods in south and even central Tel Aviv, creating a climate of fear that keeps residents locked inside their homes. In Beer Sheva last week, a 19-year-old was stabbed to death by a gang of teenagers outside his home. In BGU’s city.

We keep calling each incident shocking. But something that happens this consistently is not shocking. It is a pattern, and we need to look at it the way an epidemiologist looks at an outbreak: as a disease spreading through a society that has lowered its defenses.

The pathogen, I would argue, is the erosion of empathy. And the transmission vector has been our political discourse.

When elected officials call for attacks on judges, when the language of public life normalizes contempt for the other, when those who dare to voice criticism are branded traitors, when belittling and threatening those who disagree becomes everyday practice, we should not be surprised when teenagers decide that a man who asked them to stop spraying foam deserves to die. Violence doesn’t arrive fully formed. It is modeled, normalized, and then enacted. Children are watching.

Epidemics require a response at scale, not case by case. We don’t fight a contagion by treating each patient individually while ignoring where the pathogen replicates. The conversation about youth crime and the conversation about the coarsening of our public culture are the same conversation.

I wrote earlier this year about the Negev being declared “out of control” by our Prime Minister. I argued then that the Negev’s problems are real, but that stigmatizing an entire region and its people is not governance. It is the opposite of governance. What I didn’t say explicitly, but what I have come to believe more firmly since, is that the Negev is also where the consequences of eroded empathy are most visible, and where the deliberate work of rebuilding it is most needed.

The Negev is not a metaphor. It is a place where Jewish and Bedouin communities live in proximity, with all the friction and possibility that proximity creates. For decades, that proximity has been managed primarily through neglect, punctuated by moments of collective blame. The results are exactly what an epidemiologist would predict: when a society stops investing in the conditions for empathy, and starts investing instead in the language of contempt, violence fills the space.

Ben-Gurion University strives to work against that current. Our students come from every community in Israel. They sit together, study together, build things together. That proximity doesn’t automatically produce empathy, but it creates the conditions for it. Next week, we are hosting a conference called “Academia in a Time of Polarization: Knowledge, Responsibility, and Shared Life.” Jewish and Arab scholars and students, together in one room, asking how universities can model shared society when the society around them is fracturing. It is not a feel-good exercise. It is a recognition that what gets transmitted in shared spaces, when done intentionally, can be a different kind of contagion: the slow, unglamorous spread of seeing the person in front of you as a person.

After October 7, when national systems faltered, it was exactly these relationships, built over years, that allowed Jews and Bedouins across the Negev to work side by side in emergency response without waiting for instructions from above. That is what the antigen looks like. Not slogans, but the slow, structural work of shared education. A campus where the ordinary texture of a day includes encounters across lines that elsewhere remain walls.

If we are serious about treating this epidemic, what we are building in the Negev cannot remain a regional experiment. It needs to become a national one.

The distance from Israel feels vast — until it doesn't.

Last night I spoke at a BGU gala event whose location was only announced a few hours before it began. A security precaution. Afterward, Jewish students told me they arrange escorts, often Israeli students, to walk to class to avoid running the gauntlet of anti-Israel demonstrators on campus. One student described how her world had changed completely in the space of two years. She wasn't dramatic about it. That was the most unsettling part.

My grandparents left Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, before the catastrophe. So I cannot approach the Holocaust through personal memory — no grandmother who escaped, no names on a wall. I approach it instead through a question that has haunted me since October 7:

At what point did German Jews realize there was no going back to the life they had known before?

Not imagining Auschwitz — who could have imagined that. But to the university where they taught. The neighbor who knew their name. The form where they worked.

Canada is not Nazi Germany — no comparison is intended or appropriate. What I witnessed in Vancouver was not fear of genocide. It was something quieter, and perhaps more telling: a community beginning to calculate in ways it never had to before. Watching its back. Choosing routes carefully. Keeping options open.

That recalculation — rational, cautious, deeply unsettling — may be the thread that connects Jewish communities across time and place. Not the violence, which is incomparable. But the moment just before clarity arrives. The moment you realize the world has shifted and isn't shifting back.

This Yom Hashoah calls upon us to sit with that discomfort — and to take it seriously.

This Passover, the sirens have sent people fleeing from Tel Aviv and Beersheva, often into the desert. Nahal Zin is drawing people south, to camp in the wadi below the ridge where our BGU campus at Sde Boker sits. People are sleeping under these skies, in tents or in rented flats, in this landscape, displaced from their cities and finding their way into the wilderness. For them it is a respite. I’m not sure they are all thinking about the symbolism. But I am.

Nahal Zin is not incidental to the Passover story. It is inside it. In the Bible, Numbers 20 opens with the whole congregation arriving in the Wilderness of Zin. It is there that Miriam dies and is buried. It is there that the people, suddenly without water, turn on Moses in despair. It is there that Moses strikes the rock. The wadi where Israelis are pitching their tents this week, below the campus Ben-Gurion built in the desert, is the Wilderness of Zin of the biblical account. The name has not changed.

The Seder we will sit down to in two days focuses on the night of departure: the plagues, the crossing, the liberation. The wilderness tends to get compressed into a brief transition between Egypt and Canaan. But the wilderness is not a transition, it is where the actual work happens. The generation that left Egypt did not enter Canaan. The generation that arrived there had been formed in the desert, in places like this one, through losses like Miriam’s, through crises like the one at the rock.

That distinction matters. Passover is not only a story about freedom -- it is a story about what freedom requires. The desert does not liberate anyone. But it is where the liberated become capable of something more than survival.

David Ben-Gurion, who asked to be buried in the Negev and spent his final years at Sde Boker, above this same wadi, understood something about the desert that went beyond ideology. He believed the Negev would test Israel seriously, and that what was built there would reveal what the country actually was. The work we do at Ben-Gurion University, the desert agriculture and water research, the work on resilience and community among populations the center of the country too often ignores, sits inside that same logic.

The Negev is not a backdrop. It is a pressure. And pressure, as every geologist will tell you, is where formation happens.

Two days before Passover, people are sleeping in the Wilderness of Zin again. They didn’t come for the biblical resonance. They came because the cities became unbearable. But the wilderness has always received people who arrived for the wrong reasons and sent them back different. We built a university here for exactly that reason.

The student resolution demanded that Cornell sever academic ties with the Technion. The demand was presented not as a tactical choice but as an ethical imperative, and variations of this argument are now appearing across campuses in the United States and beyond, typically grounded in the belief that universities, precisely because of their values, are obligated to translate those values into institutional positions on contested political questions.

What was striking in Kotlikoff’s response was not only that he rejected the call, but how he chose to do so. He articulated a view of the university that is at once simple and, in the current climate, increasingly difficult to sustain: that academic collaboration is not a form of political endorsement, that universities exist to enable the exchange of knowledge rather than to curtail it under pressure, and that once decisions about academic partnerships begin to follow political demands, the principle of academic freedom itself begins, quietly but unmistakably, to erode.

The most important part of his letter, though, addressed something that is usually left implicit. Kotlikoff pointed out that Cornell maintains 159 active agreements with institutions in 59 countries, many of which conduct research with military and security applications, and some of which operate under governments accused of human rights violations. Cornell itself holds military research contracts. None of this appeared in the resolution. Only the partnership with an Israeli institution was singled out for severance.

This is not a minor procedural observation. Moral arguments carry weight only to the extent that they are applied consistently. When similar cases are treated differently, without a clear and principled distinction between them, what presents itself as ethics begins to look like something else. And that something else, when it is directed persistently and exclusively at one country’s institutions, is not a position that universities can afford to leave unexamined.

From where I sit, leading a university in Israel and chairing the association of our research universities, this is not an abstract concern. These questions about academic freedom and political pressure have been with me since October 7, and I have watched, across that time, how quickly the boundaries of academic independence begin to shift once exceptions are introduced. The erosion does not begin with a dramatic decision. It begins with a case that feels justified, a distinction that seems locally reasonable, and a willingness to treat one situation as fundamentally unlike all others. The distinctions accumulate, and the ground moves.

This is why Kotlikoff’s letter matters beyond Cornell and beyond this particular resolution. It is observed closely by students, faculty, governments, and, not least, by other university presidents. In a period when many institutional leaders feel pressure to respond quickly and carefully, an example of measured clarity carries its own influence. It demonstrates that it is still possible to say: this argument, whatever its stated intentions, does not meet the standard of consistency that we apply to everything else we do. And therefore we reject it.

That is not a refusal of values. It is a defense of them.

Edited from a piece originally published in the Times of Israel.

Late last week, in the middle of that strange rhythm, laboratories at the university reopened, research that simply cannot be carried out remotely. This is happening under strict guidelines and only in buildings where protected spaces are immediately accessible. The decision nevertheless reflects something essential about universities: even under difficult circumstances, their core purpose does not pause.

War has a way of narrowing attention to the immediate. Yet crises also tend to sharpen questions about what comes afterward. What will the implications of this war be once it ends, not only for Israel, but for Israeli universities, and for Ben-Gurion University in particular?

One development almost completely overshadowed by the outbreak of war may offer a partial answer. Just two days before the fighting began, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Israel. Among the outcomes of that visit was a renewed commitment to strengthening academic ties between the two countries. Under normal circumstances it would have been significant news for universities on both sides. Within forty-eight hours it had disappeared from the headlines entirely.

For BGU this was not an abstract diplomatic signal. We already host the largest community of Indian students of any university in Israel. Next week we had planned to celebrate Holi, the Indian festival of colors, alongside our annual, somewhat mythic, student Purim party. Over the past few years one of the more joyful sights on campus has been Israeli and Indian students throwing colored powders together in celebration. Both events are now postponed. Yet the image stays with me: the overlap of two ancient festivals, two communities, in the middle of the Negev desert. It captures something real about what this relationship has become.

Beyond the color and celebration, the relationship between Indian and Israeli universities is deepening in ways that extend far beyond student life. Indian institutions have shown growing interest in areas where Israeli research has developed particular depth, including entrepreneurship, cyber security, engineering, water technologies, and desert agriculture. Recently I was asked to head the India-Israel Forum, which brings together business and academic leaders to discuss issues of national importance to both countries. We were supposed to convene in Delhi next week. The war has forced us to postpone. The work itself, however, will continue.

Wars inevitably compress attention into the immediate and force institutions to focus on continuity under strain. Yet the broader currents that shape academic collaboration move on a different timeline. When this war ends, and I suspect that moment may come sooner than many expect, one conclusion will likely already be clear. The technological capabilities Israel has demonstrated, both in defending itself and in supporting partners across the region, will only deepen global interest in Israeli innovation. Because so much of that innovation originates in universities, collaboration with Israeli academia may well become more sought after, not less.

It is no secret that over the past two and a half years academic boycotts of Israeli institutions have increased significantly. Some universities, particularly in Western Europe, have chosen to sever ties, betting that isolation is the direction of history. The evidence of this war suggests something different. The countries and institutions that are moving closer to Israeli academia, not away from it, are aligning themselves with demonstrated capability, with scientific depth, and with partnerships that endure beyond any single political moment.

For Ben-Gurion University this reality carries a particular responsibility. The partnerships taking shape quietly, even now, will help define the landscape of academic collaboration long after the present moment has passed.

It quickly became clear that this was not an alert for incoming missiles, though those would come later in the day. The sirens were activated in connection with Israeli and US strikes in Iran. Because it was Shabbat, the Home Front Command chose not to rely only on phone alerts. Sirens ensured that everyone, including those who do not use electronic devices on Shabbat, would understand that the situation had shifted and would move closer to protected spaces.

At Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, our emergency systems were activated immediately and our emergency committee convened. Shelters were opened and we checked on students and staff. Messages were sent out in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, informing our community of closing of the campuses, postponing of exams and classes, and requesting that only essential employees be present. And we started making plans to help our students who were called up to the researves.

On the institutional level, this is not new to us. Over the past almost three years, we perfected protocols and rehearsed scenarios. We learned how to communicate clearly and quickly. By 9:15 AM, all the pieces were in place to keep the university functioning.

On the personal level, though, living through the threat of war is never routine.

Over the past forty-eight hours, my family has spent long stretches of time in our safe room. More than thirty sirens have sounded. We hear the launch of interceptor missiles, and sometimes the distant boom of interceptions. Several times I tried to take my daughter’s dog out for a walk, only to turn back and run for shelter at the sound of the sirens. We are fortunate that we are given several minutes of warning. Those minutes matter. They are the difference between action and panic.

Life contracts and expands in strange rhythms on days like this. You move from normal conversation to sirens, from coffee to concrete walls, from planning next week’s meetings to counting seconds. You learn to live in intervals.

And yet even there, in a small room with family, a restless dog, and an anxious cat, there is space for something unexpected. At one point, I picked up my guitar and found myself improvising a song. It was not particularly good, but it felt necessary. Perhaps creativity is simply the mind’s way of insisting on continuity when the unthinkable and absurd become routine.

Leadership in Israel often means holding two realities at once. On the one hand, there is the responsibility to maintain institutional stability, to communicate calmly, to ensure that systems function and that students and staff feel protected. On the other hand, there is the deeply personal experience of uncertainty that everyone else shares. The sirens do not distinguish between presidents and students.

A colleague once reminded me that the goal of military action is always political. Military superiority, however decisive, is only a means. Our pilots over Tehran signal that superiority, as did the intelligence that led to the decisive initial blows. The question is not whether battles can be won. The question is whether those victories are translated into political outcomes that make the region more stable rather than more combustible. That test is slower, less visible, and ultimately more consequential. Unfortunately, we haven’t been nearly as successful in this realm.

For now, I am grateful for our emergency teams, for the discipline and resilience of our community, and for the warning systems that give us those precious minutes to reach safety. Like many Israelis and Iranians, I hope for quieter days ahead that signal moving to a better future.

It is striking to realize that the Abraham Accords are already six years old. Sitting in Abu Dhabi and listening to our hosts describe how they have approached this period, I was struck by the confidence with which they spoke about openness and connection. The UAE has positioned itself as a regional and global connector by treating openness not as a liability, but as an organizing principle. As an Israeli, this led me to reflect on our own, contrasting tendency toward political and cultural insularity, at a time when academic and scientific connectivity is increasingly consequential.

Throughout the seminar, the attitude toward Israeli academia was notably direct and constructive. Colleagues from across the region expressed concrete interest in collaboration, asked detailed questions about our research environments, and spoke openly about areas where they saw mutual benefit. Israeli universities were not discussed cautiously or abstractly, but as partners with whom meaningful work should be done.

At the same time, there was a shared awareness that previous efforts to translate the Abraham Accords into academic cooperation have fallen short and lacked resilience. In the period following the signing of the Accords, many institutions, including my own, pursued cooperation through memoranda of understanding, joint declarations, and public calls on governments to invest further. While some of these efforts produced activity, many remained largely symbolic, resulting in limited sustained collaboration. In contrast to the durability of the Accords in the defense and commercial spheres, academic cooperation proved fragile and, especially in the wake of October 7, in most cases receded altogether.

This history shaped the discussions in Abu Dhabi. When proposals arose to issue another public MoU or a collective appeal to governments, I found myself arguing for a different sequence. Rather than beginning with formal declarations, I suggested that we focus first on building collaboration through concrete programs and shared work, allowing institutional frameworks to follow once they are grounded in actual achievement. The MoU-first approach was precisely what we tried in the early years after the Accords. Experience suggests it is not sufficient. What we needed this time was tachlis—a term I explained comes from Yiddish and means being practical and down to earth.

Universities create durable impact not through statements, but through tachlis: sustained engagement, shared problem-solving, and relationships that develop over time. With that in mind, discussions turned toward practical avenues for cooperation, including expanding the Abrahamic Entrepreneurship Program that Ben-Gurion University piloted last year, this time with deeper institutional commitment and in-person engagement, as well as developing joint research initiatives around regional challenges such as water, health, climate resilience, and artificial intelligence. These are areas where collaboration is not only possible, but necessary, and where academic institutions are uniquely positioned to contribute.

This is how science diplomacy becomes meaningful: through work that is practical, patient, and oriented toward the long term, rather than symbolic gestures that fade once attention shifts elsewhere. It reflects an understanding that universities can provide continuity precisely because their time horizons extend beyond political cycles, and because trust in academic collaboration is built through repeated interaction rather than public declaration.

I return from Abu Dhabi encouraged, not because the challenges are resolved, but because the conversations were grounded in realism and shaped by experience. There was a shared understanding among many of the participants that cooperation must be constructed deliberately, with attention to execution rather than visibility. I am also encouraged by the role Ben-Gurion University can play in this landscape, not as a headline-maker, but as an institution committed to openness, rigor, and long-term partnership.

The Abraham Accords were never intended to be defined solely by what was signed. Their durability will ultimately be measured by what institutions are willing to build together, patiently and persistently, once the initial moment has passed. If we invest in science, education, and human collaboration with that perspective, the Accords can still mature into something deeper and more enduring than a political agreement.

No one who lives in the Negev denies the reality of violence, illegal weapons, or fear. Jewish and Bedouin citizens alike have paid a heavy price for years of weak enforcement and under-policing, alongside the slow erosion of trust between residents and the state. Recent incidents, including violent clashes and a fatal police raid in a Bedouin community, have only deepened anxiety and anger.

But there is a difference between confronting crime and branding an entire community.

The danger of the current political moment is not that it acknowledges a real problem. The danger is that it reduces a complex region and a diverse population into a single caricature, and then uses that caricature for political gain. This kind of rhetoric is a familiar tool of populists, one that has been used throughout history to stigmatize minorities, including Jews, around the world. When leaders speak as if “the Bedouin” are the problem, or as if the Negev itself is a lost cause, they are not restoring governance. They are undermining it.

This rhetoric has been simmering for decades. Successive governments have spoken of the “Bedouin problem,” and then behaved as if slogans—especially in an election year—were a substitute for long-term policy. The result has been predictable: continued underinvestment in infrastructure and education, unresolved planning and land status, weak municipal capacity, and a vacuum in which criminal networks thrive. When that vacuum becomes intolerable, politicians reappear with maximal rhetoric, maximal visibility, minimal patience for nuance, and minimal intention of actually putting in the work needed to solve the problem.

It is a familiar cycle: neglect, escalation, collective blame, and then neglect again.

What makes this cycle especially dangerous now is its potential to slide into something worse. When an entire community is stigmatized, when enforcement is framed as confrontation rather than protection, and when trust collapses, the outcome is not governance. It is the risk of anarchy, and the possibility of irreparable damage to Jewish–Bedouin relations in the Negev, all in the service of short-term political gain.

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If we need a reminder of what is lost when we speak this way, we should look back to October 7.

The first casualties to reach our partner, Soroka University Medical Center, that morning were two Bedouin girls, killed in their homes by rocket fire, even though they lived far from the border communities that dominated the headlines.

In the days that followed, many national agencies, especially in the Negev, became paralyzed. Systems froze and coordination faltered. In that vacuum, responsibility did not vanish. It shifted.

Jews and Bedouins across the Negev worked side by side in emergency response and volunteer efforts. In Rahat, an emergency distribution center became a place of shared responsibility rather than suspicion. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev found itself at the epicenter of citizen-based outreach and responsibility, across our campuses in Be’er Sheva, Sde Boker, and Eilat. Here again, Jew and Bedouin worked together, first to ensure that our communities endured, and then to ensure that academic life could continue.

This, too, is the Negev. It is not an idealized vision. It is lived reality.

That commitment did not begin on October 7. For years, the university has invested in programs that support Bedouin students, including initiatives designed to help them navigate language barriers, financial constraints, and cultural transition. This strategy is built on a belief that higher education is among the most powerful tools for social transformation. And indeed, our graduates are transforming Bedouin society as physicians, nurses, teachers, engineers, and entrepreneurs. Our work is far from complete, and the pace is too slow. But the impact is undeniable.

The lesson is that the bleak future imagined by some of our leaders is not inevitable. It is a political choice.

The Negev can be described as “out of control,” or it can be governed. Governance, however, does not begin with stigmatization. It begins with sustained presence, partnership, investment, and institutions that treat all citizens as stakeholders rather than suspects.

This week, Ben-Gurion University will convene all the mayors of the Negev, Jewish and Bedouin alike, in our Senate hall, as part of the launch of Prism Negev, a new strategic center designed to translate regional cooperation into data-driven action. It reflects a different logic: that security, development, and shared society rise or fall together.

I confess that I find it difficult to understand how our Prime Minister can express outrage that the Negev is “out of control,” given that he has served as Prime Minister for most of the past two decades, and it is his ministers who were charged with developing the Negev. Order is not restored by declaring an entire region broken. Order is built when citizens believe the state is present in their lives as a partner, not only as a force that arrives in moments of crisis.

Unfortunately, residents of the Negev across the political spectrum have learned to treat political promises with caution. Too often, strong declarations in election years, like rain puddles in the desert, evaporate quickly.

And yet, the Negev’s future can still be one of shared responsibility rather than shared suspicion. That future will not be secured by rhetoric. It will be secured by civil leadership: leadership rooted in institutions that remain when the cameras move on, that are willing to listen and to stay the course even when a slogan would be easier. In that landscape, the role of our university is not peripheral. It is central. A university “of the Negev” must help anchor stability, convene partners, educate future leaders, and insist that shared society is not a slogan but a practice.

That is the Negev I know. And it is the Negev worth insisting on.

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As a left-wing Zionist activist, I felt alienated from both my Jewish peers, who couldn’t grasp my sense of otherness, and my liberal classmates, who couldn’t accept my Zionism. Even then, anti-Zionist rhetoric was in fashion; Noam Chomsky and Edward Said were campus icons.

The ideology that I adhered to was based on the classic Zionist belief that only in Israel, could Jews be truly at home, protected and confident. It followed from this that America, like Germany and Spain before it, would eventually turn on the Jews who felt so at home.

Before leaving for Israel, I wrote a short story for the Hamagshimim Journal, a literary journal of graduates of my youth movement, Young Judaea. In it, I imagined a dystopian future where a Jewish student, Judah, who succumbs to anti-Zionist sentiment after the election of an Arab-American president. Judah’s old camp counselor writes to him, “We need more crazy people like you to make Aliyah,” but ends up institutionalized for his ideals. Judah, instead, renounces Zionism before a major Jewish American gathering, proclaiming that it’s time to “move on from false ideologies.”

The message I was trying to articulate in my 21-year-old way was this: When anti-Zionism becomes politically acceptable, mainstream American Jews would not resist. They would rationalize. They would adapt. They would choose comfort and belonging over uncomfortable truth.

Forty‑one years later, the accommodation I imagined is no longer theoretical, and it is no longer confined to rhetoric.

Forty-one years later, Zohran Mamdani will assume office as mayor of New York City on January 1. One third of Jewish voters supported him—a politician who has called Israel an apartheid state, endorsed BDS, and refuses to recognize Israel as a homeland for Jews. In response to a violent demonstration outside a prominent New York synagogue, Mamdani publicly framed the promotion of aliyah as a violation of international law, effectively shifting moral scrutiny from the violence itself to Jewish self-determination, treating it as illegitimate.

That one-third of New York Jews voted for such positions would have been unthinkable in mainstream Jewish discourse just a generation ago.

What I misjudged in 1984 was that I thought it would take an anti-Zionist president to mainstream hostility to Israel. I didn’t anticipate that it would start with New York City, wrapped in the language of progressivism; that “social justice” would become the respectable veneer for ideas once considered beyond the pale.

But I was right about the reaction: faced with the mainstreaming of anti-Zionism, many American Jews would not resist. They would accommodate, rationalize, and choose social acceptance.

This is not new in our history. Jews have even attempted reverse circumcision in Hellenistic and Roman times in attempts to fit in. Today, many young Jews are convinced that distancing themselves from Israel makes them morally brave.

Young Jews didn’t arrive here in a vacuum. They were educated in institutions that prioritized progressive universalism over Jewish particularity. They watched leaders accommodate anti-Zionism as it gained respectability. Many of the organizations my fictional Judah led in 1984 now see distancing from Israel as a higher Jewish value.

My polemic from 1984 has proven tragically prescient. I believed that Jewish comfort in the Diaspora was temporary, and it has proven true, though not through persecution, as many believed on October 8, but abandonment. Indeed October 7th should have been clarifying. The largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust; surging antisemitism on campuses and streets. And yet, an increasing number of Jews seemed more unsettled by Israel’s response than by the massacre itself, or even the justification of the Hamas onslaught.

But over the past year, consequences moved beyond rhetoric: from the murder of two Israeli Embassy staff members in Washington DC, to the attack on a Manchester synagogue on Yom Kippur, to the Chanukkah massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney. These incidents were not isolated. They unfolded in a climate in which antisemitism is increasingly normalized, minimized, or endlessly explained away. When moral boundaries erode in language and discourse, they eventually erode in action. When calls to “globalize the intifada” are treated as principled protest rather than incitement, violence should not surprise us.

What was once merely uncomfortable has now become unsafe.

Mamdani’s victory is not an aberration. It’s a symptom of a deeper transformation in American Jewish identity. The question is not whether Mamdani will be good or bad for Jews, whether he’ll keep his promises to fight antisemitism while maintaining his criticism of Israel.

The deeper issue is what it means that a growing number of New York’s Jews voted for someone whose politics deny Israel’s legitimacy, and yet claim to be rooted in Jewish ethics.

I left America in 1984 not because I abandoned progressive values, but because I couldn’t sustain them honestly while watching the erosion of Jewish conviction. Only in Israel could I live those values fully: opposing government policy when needed, pushing for social justice, working for Bedouin inclusion, all while standing within the Zionist project rather than outside it in judgment. Here, Jewish normalcy doesn’t require apology.

That’s the cruel irony many American Jews miss: by making their progressivism contingent on distancing themselves from Israel, they’ve trapped themselves in the very accommodation my story warned against. They think they’re being brave by criticizing Israel from Brooklyn. They don’t realize they’re just being comfortable.

Forty-one years later, a new generation of American Jews is choosing American belonging over continuity. I fear however that this will not prevent America, like Germany and Spain before it, turning on the Jews who felt so secure. The harbingers are no longer theoretical or distant; they now unfold daily on American streets and campuses.

I hope I’m wrong. I fear I’m not. Watching from Israel with my children and grandson, I can’t shake the feeling that the writing has been on the wall all along.

We just weren’t willing to read it.

As we approach the holiday, I found myself, together with Rector Chaim Hames, reflecting on eight moments from this past year at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. They are not slogans or headlines. They are quiet markers of effort, resilience, and shared purpose.

First candle
This year’s incoming class was the largest in our history, nearly one thousand more students than just four years ago. Growth, when sustained, is itself a sign of confidence.

Second candle
National data released this year showed that BGU now leads all Israeli universities in on-time degree completion. I have written recently about what may lie behind this success, so I will simply say this: student persistence is not accidental. It reflects a community that expects challenge and learns how to meet it.

Third candle
Three BGU faculty members were awarded ERC Consolidator Grants this year, the highest number we have ever received in a single cycle. These achievements reflect not only individual excellence, but an ecosystem that knows how to support ambitious research.

Fourth candle
For the first time, our share of the national research budget now exceeds our proportional size among Israel’s senior academic faculty. It is a quiet but meaningful indicator of academic impact.

Fifth candle
During two extraordinarily difficult years, our academic and administrative staff mobilized to support students. Even under strain, academic standards were upheld and degrees retained their integrity. That balance is not simple, and it does not happen by chance.

Sixth candle
In early October we opened the Stein Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences, bringing together departments that had long collaborated, and formalizing a vision that took shape over years of thoughtful work.

Seventh candle
On David Ben-Gurion Memorial Day, we awarded the Ben-Gurion Medal to individuals and institutions whose lives and actions reflect our values. Among them were scholars, civic leaders, and a former hostage whose presence reminded us, with painful clarity, of what truly matters.

Eighth candle
We continue expanding access to higher education for students from Israel’s periphery, first-generation students, graduates of Haredi education, and the Bedouin community. This work is slow, demanding, and essential.

Like the shamash, the candle that lights all the others, the faculty and staff of Ben-Gurion University are the source from which these lights emerge. In days when Israeli society is searching for steadiness and hope, their work carries meaning far beyond campus.

May this Hanukkah bring light, reflection, and the strength to continue building, one candle at a time.

And may we soon see the return of the last remaining hostage, Ran Gvili.

According to newly released national data from the Israel Council for Higher Education’s Planning and Budgeting Committee, ninety-one percent of Ben-Gurion University students complete their degrees on time. This is the highest rate among all Israeli universities. Within this achievement, BGU ranked first nationally in engineering, health professions, the social sciences, and the humanities.

It is a moment of pride, of course. But more than that, it is a moment that invites reflection. What lies behind this extraordinary success? How does a university in the Negev, serving one of the most diverse student populations in the country, become a place where students persist and thrive?

Universities are often quick to point to the systems they build, and I’ll be the first to give us credit. We have invested heavily in academic support, emotional and mental health services, accessibility programs, and learning technologies. These matter enormously. They are the scaffolding that allows students to climb. We also know that students who choose BGU are strong by every conventional metric. They come with high academic potential, motivation, and a sense of purpose.

But even when we acknowledge all of this, something remains unexplained. The numbers invite a deeper question: What is the real engine of student success?

Over the past decade, researchers in education and psychology have returned again and again to one idea that may offer part of the answer: the concept of “grit”. Popularized by Angela Duckworth, grit refers to the combination of perseverance and passion for long-term goals. It is not talent. It is not intelligence. It is the willingness to stay the course, to persist through difficulty, to continue toward a goal even when the path becomes uncertain.

Studies have shown that grit predicts long-term achievement in a surprising range of settings: military training, medical school, competitive sports, and yes, university education. Grit of course is not the only predictor, and it is not immune to criticism, but the research consistently points to something that feels profoundly relevant here. Success is often less about avoiding challenge and more about how students respond to it.

Which brings me back to the Negev.

Perhaps the desert attracts a certain kind of student. A student who is comfortable with openness and possibility. A student willing to leave the center of the country for a landscape that asks for imagination and resilience. A student who senses that studying in the Negev is an act of intention.

And perhaps the desert shapes our students as well. There is something grounding about living and learning in a place that is still becoming. The Negev is full of contrasts. It has ambition and humility. It contains vast spaces that remind us that progress is rarely instantaneous, and that growth is often quiet before it becomes visible.

For many students, this environment, and the community they build within it, offers a lesson that no course can teach: challenge is not a barrier to success. It is part of success itself. Difficult years do not weaken them. They give their degree meaning.

This does not diminish the role of the university. Institutions matter. Support structures matter. Good teaching matters. But numbers like ninety-one percent invite us to look beyond the systems we build and acknowledge the students who animate them. Their persistence is not accidental. It is part of the identity they carry and the identity they develop while they are here.

Ben-Gurion dreamed that the Negev would be a place where Israel’s future would take root, where the youth of Israel would “build and be built.” More than seventy years ago, he sensed how deeply the Negev would shape the character of those who come to study here, and how their success would become one of the clearest expressions of his vision.

In the end, student success is never one thing. It is not solely institutional design and not solely individual grit. It is the meeting of a place, a mission, and a student who chooses to walk into both.

And here in the Negev, that meeting continues to unfold in ways that astonish me.

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