the two of them, really, what an idea. - Shulamith Hareven

One of the things Zionism was meant to make from scratch was a Hebrew present. Not only in reality; in the language, too. In ancient Hebrew, there was very little grammatical present. There was a past and a future--that is, memory and longing. We almost never said "I go," "I do." It was necessary to make the present a linguistic habit, a routine part of life. Perhaps Zionism came into being primarily to create for us a present tense. To say at long last that the Jews, too, have a present. Whoever now denies this present has forgotten the whole lesson of Zionism; he would send us back to the days of remembering and longing of the Diaspora. We came to Israel so as to not wait for a messiah who is yet to come; rather, we came to be here now, today. That is Zionism in a nutshell. ("Life Is Now, Mr. Shamir")

There has been an intensification of tunnel vision, of efforts by fundamentalists to impose rigid constraints on us all, mostly the status quo has been maintained. Nevertheless, the pressure to conform to religious norms is simply unbearable and has led increasingly to acts of violence, the result of which is to divide us each against the other.

They kept leaving all the time. One from a town, two from a family, they fled the settled districts of the land of Egypt to join those who had left before them. They did not go far: no further than the nearest oasis or the first gully that had a spring. They sought only to put the sand between themselves and Egypt, to get away from its lords and officials. No more than that. (first lines)