What Israel’s Altalena crisis teaches about unity and sovereignty

Seventy-eight years have passed, but not as much has changed as we might like to think. It was June 1948. The Altalena, an arms ship that had arrived off the coast of the newly established State of Israel, had no idea it was about to become one of the country’s most enduring symbols. David Ben-Gurion insisted that the weapons aboard be handed over to the Israel Defense Forces, the newly formed national army. The Irgun, the pre-state underground organization led by Menachem Begin, wanted part of the shipment transferred to its own units. Begin would later say that only “10 moments” had been allotted for negotiations. Then the shooting began. The Altalena was sunk. Nineteen Irgun members and three IDF soldiers were killed. Begin refused to retaliate and declared: “Civil war, never.” The rest became history. For Ben-Gurion, Israeli sovereignty was sacred. One of its essential conditions was the state’s monopoly on the use of armed force. A democracy could not tolerate a “state within a state,” with independent militias answering to their own leadership. In Israel, only one institution would bear arms on behalf of the state: the IDF. Without that principle, Ben-Gurion believed, genuine national unity could not exist. In his view, defending it justified even an act that might otherwise have been unthinkable. Begin, meanwhile, regarded Jewish unity as equally sacred. Israel was less than two months old, but he was drawing on 2,000 years of Jewish history. Without unity, he understood, sovereignty itself would not survive. There might still be territory, perhaps even a place called Israel, but not a national home. And so, long before barbecues and high-tech, agriculture and road rage, Eurovision victories, basketball triumphs and the slogan “Together we will win,” the Altalena became something profoundly Israeli: a symbol of pain, but also of hope and a shared future. Yet it represented something deeper still. In its own way, the Altalena embodied the conceptual transformation undergone by the Jewish people upon returning to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland. The choice was no longer between spiritual unity in exile and competing tribes in the Land of Israel. The two dimensions had to be combined. Only sovereignty can make national unity possible, and only national unity can preserve sovereignty. They are not contradictory values. They are complementary ones. That was Begin’s greatness. It was also the reality Ben-Gurion sought to secure. In that sense, if the Western Wall symbolizes the destruction of the Second Temple and the loss of Jewish sovereignty, the Altalena can be seen as a reminder of the foundations upon which renewed Jewish sovereignty was built. But the discovery of the ship’s wreck this week also reminds us that, over the years, Israel has distorted the lesson it taught. Gradually, the Israeli consensus forgot that delicate balance and began placing unity above sovereignty. It did so through exemptions from military service, through parts of the education system and through unequal participation in the tax base. The desire to preserve unity became so dominant that the growing tensions beneath it became harder to see. Seventy-eight years have passed, but once again Israel is facing a test of its sovereignty. This time, the argument centers on universal military or national service and equal civic responsibility. It is also about preventing the emergence of communities that function as separate enclaves, whether Haredi or Arab, detached from some of the obligations shared by the rest of the state. For too long, Israel operated under the mistaken assumption that unity required compromises on sovereignty. Bend the rules. Avoid confrontation. Do not anger anyone. Accommodate. That approach made sweeping military-service exemptions possible. It allowed schools to avoid teaching subjects essential for participation in the modern economy. It allowed entire communities to enter adulthood without being adequately prepared to participate fully in civic life. But the rediscovery of the Altalena is a message from the past: We have been reading the lesson backward. Pursuing unity also requires choosing sovereignty. Not the sector. Not the community. The state. Because only within a functioning sovereign state can genuine national unity exist. That does not mean erasing distinct ways of life, abandoning the study of Torah or ignoring the concerns and identity of Israel’s Arab citizens. But those differences must remain exceptions within a shared civic framework, rather than becoming substitutes for it. Without full participation in the sovereign national project, all of us risk returning, in one form or another, to exile. With elections approaching, Israel again faces a consequential choice. But this time, the old assumption should be discarded. The choice is not sovereignty or unity. It is sovereignty and unity. And anyone who fails to understand that risks sinking beneath the surface, without another chance to rise.