Creating a New Political Party "Lights of Dawn"

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable before You, O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.

The decision to enter political life in Israel is probably the worst decision I can make strategically, personally, financially and mentally.

Who needs this? Who wants this?

And this is even before the cynicism and the venom that are destined to be poured out, and long before the propaganda machines begin to grind my name into tiny gravel.

To be honest, I am also exhausted. For many years I fought windmills so that we would be better prepared for this war, and then for another two years (against those same windmills) so that we would achieve a true victory and not end up exactly as we did. (Anyone interested in learning more is welcome to read the two books: “awakning the lion" & "like a lion he shell rise"— everything is there.)

In any case, none of that helped; I drove inside that failure on October 7. And that day lives and burns in my soul every time I close my eyes. So there is no rejoicing or exultation in me now. Nor any illusions. I am not material for politics. I do not bring flashy promises and I am not able to lie efficiently or be a sophisticated super-manipulator. All I have is a big Jewish heart — and it too is broken.

Even the association of the word “politics” gives me a stomachache; in my mind it connects to running around among people, smiling, shaking hands, answering phones, begging for favors, closing deals. And that is the essence of everything I do not want.

I want only to fly far away. To escape from here. From all the poison, the fear, the pain, all the external threats that we neglect (threats that ought to have kept us awake at night) and to curl up deep in a lie. And to flee also from the more terrible pain — the one that stems from knives repeatedly driven mercilessly into our backs. To flee the lie that here has already become a way of life — the lie of the right and the left. Only a madman will deal with all of this. Whoever values his life should stay away.

So here we are, here and now, and if you are still reading the worst announcement speech about joining the political life ever written in human history — you are probably asking, what does he want from us? he should realy go take care of himself.

I would do that, but I can’t. Do you understand? My parents were born here in this Land, their parents came from the Diaspora as Holocaust survivors, and all of them together taught me everything except how to be a Diaspora Jew — except to surrender and give up when they want to take us again as sheep to the slaughter.

And truly… God is my witness that I tried everything so we would win this war. So if you have followed me or encountered me here and there and did not understand what the reasoning behind it all was —

it is very simple: in short, I fought with all my might and tried to do everything I could at every given moment so that Israel would win and come out victorious from the war of its life in which it still finds itself. This included countless different and strange actions and deeds on various fronts, such as pushing or applying pressure on others and decision-makers, writing articles or position papers, producing alternatives, demonstrating, explaining, warning, cursing and shouting, comforting, encouraging and praising — and this happened everywhere I thought I might be able bring benefit, in Israel and abroad.

All of this, in sum, was meant to return to me the possibility of sleeping in peace and the color and taste of life, the confidence that there is someone to rely on, and the possibility of leaving Israel in a more-or-less normal condition for my children.

With the government’s decision to end the war two things are clear to me: first, that the war is not over and therefore in practice we are in a strategically more dangerous situation than the one in which we started;

and second, that personally I have nowhere to run and nothing to lose.

I have no other country. I know only one direction of charge and that is forward; I know only one direction of fighting and that is upward; I know only one people of Israel and that is you — this is what there is, and with this we, all of us, must win.

Our enemies from one end of the world to the other are smiling to themselves now, licking their lips and sharpening their swords. They tasted Israeli blood and weakness and are preparing the next moves. There is no way to defeat this and them with the current leadership. None. Deep inside, whoever you are and whatever political position you hold, you know this. Even if you won’t admit it.

The good news is that the enemy again made a grave mistake, as grave as Sinawar’s once on October 7

"We already said: ‘and like a lion he shell rise" ’

The lion is the laziest animal in nature. He does not get up, he does not move; sometimes on safari he looks like a rug. Until… he finally deigns in his goodness to rise and roar… and then… the enemy already regrets having woken him. The Israeli lion is alive and exists and is stronger than ever — the moment he changes leadership he will roar from one end of the world to the other.

So, you’ve already understood: I am not entering all this because I am sane. I am entering because I am crazy.

And you know what? That is exactly what we all need to be now to save our Israel. A little crazy. Crazy with love for this people in all its parts.

And I swear that since I came to my senses, that love has been the only thing that drove me to do, say, cry out and act — everything I did, said, shouted, or did. Only that.

The madness I speak of is the terrible, awful and endless cry of pain that has not been heard here for two years.

It is a cry that, if it would erupt at once from all of us, would already split the heavens and destroy the world and begin a new world. And that is precisely what we fought for over the past two years. A new and corrected world that we deserve but are being prevented from by all possible forces.

This cry is the cry of our brothers and sons and fathers who froze in the middle of their final charge in the bushes of Lebanon or in the alleys of Gaza, and it is the cry of their widows and mourning mothers, and of their small children who suffer in the deafening silence created by the void of their absence.

And it is the cry of Israelis like me and like you who, at the last moment of their lives, managed to notice that the worst nightmare was standing on their lawn, in their backyard.

This is the cry of the reservists who again and again and again were called (and are still being called) to go into the unknown and do so out of infinite love and hope to give their children a better future, so that in a few years they will not be the ones who will have to fight in those cursed places… yet despite all the investment and dedication, the reservists time and again were betrayed and found that their sacrifice was wasted in vain, that their blood became very, very cheap, and that the Government of Israel is careful to return every grain of land that they and their comrades fought for directly into the hands of the enemy just to obtain false agreements not worth the paper they were written on and to return the strategic situation as quickly as possible directly to October 6 — as if all the horror, the efforts and the sacrifice they experienced day and night had never occurred at all…

It is also the cry of the terrible national humiliation we underwent as a nation, still fresh within us, and of the images engraved in the souls living on the earth in this generation, even though it seems those images belong to another generation. Images of Jews led to slaughter, to rape and to captivity. Images that fundamentally contradict the greatness of the promises of the modern Jewish state to the people of Israel — “Never again.”

And now we come to the point and to the practical matter:

This cry must not only go out and be heard, it must turn into a tremendous roar that will shake the entire world — the roar of the new Israeli lion, the lion of Judah.

This is a roar that must announce to all the world, we are here and we will never move from here; this is our land, this is the sacred right granted to our forefathers and to us by the Creator of the world since the days of the Bible, and by the power of this right we will make anyone who dared to mess with us understand the magnitude of his mistake.

This roar is the declaration and the oath that Israel will never again be “a small country dodging trouble.” It will become a power.

And every meter conquered with the blood of our fighters and the sweat of their brows is sacred and will become our new natural territory. And we will defend our allies and reshape the space for our benefit and for theirs.

And the other nations of the world will learn to respect all of this and our sovereignty, one way or another.

We will crush the heads of the serpent in Tehran and in Doha and also in other places where they think they are protected — and we will not allow anywhere on earth any more tolerance, accommodation or even the slightest existence for ideas of the destruction of Israel or for the establishment of any other national entity that is not the State of Israel in this area between the Jordan and the sea.

The idea of Palestinian nationalism will die a swift death and be buried with the burial of a donkey as it deserves. Long, long ago.

We will respect the nations and everyone who respects us and our sovereignty, and we will throw to hell everyone who does not. No games, no lies and spins, no taqiyah, no mercy, no hesitation — and also no Supreme Court and no B’Tselem. Not out of arrogance, pride, or a detachment from realistic reality; we will do this with creativity, with wisdom and Israeli efficiency and out of excellent familiarity with the nature of the world and the various global interests. In cooperation with all parts of this great nation.

The people of Israel have a global moral vision. According to the Bible, in which billions around the world believe, our role is to instill it in the nations. Many of them are waiting for the moment when we will begin to do so.

This is a vision of true peace, mutual respect and the morality of justice and truth.

There is no room in it for the false Sodomite morality that grew here under every green tree; we will make very clear to the judicial system what its place is. It has a place of honor in protecting individual rights, freedom and liberalism in Israel, but it will no longer intervene in matters of national security and policy.

Israel is the state of the Jews, and without the Torah and the promise of the God of Israel to our forefathers and to us and His Providence, it has no right to exist.

Israel will remain such forever and will preserve our beloved Jewish tradition of Torah study, the students of the sages and halakha in those core matters without which there simply is no Judaism.

True Judaism is beautiful, good, welcoming, tolerant and embraces complexities; there is no place in it for coercion, political opportunism or turning the Torah into a pickaxe to dig with. In general, our existence here depends on the unity of the three different camps in Israel (the national camp, the holy camp, and the liberal camp) as Rabbi Kook noted, and on the wholeness of the three sanctities (the wholeness of the people, the wholeness of the land, and the wholeness of the Torah) as the Lubavitcher Rebbe noted.

Anyone who wants, is a partner, or is even willing to tolerate these principles is invited to join the path that begins now, and since it is clear that one cannot and must not walk this path alone and that the great and existential matters at stake must not, heaven forbid (as has happened in our history more than once), fall victim to matters of ego, honor and competition — the declared aim of the whole move is to form a technical-national-faith front bloc to which anyone who wants and wishes to take part in this necessary change is invited to join. The moment such a bloc is built and a worthy leadership leads it to appropriate national leadership, I see my role as finished.

I believe, hope and pray that the bloc will finally, God-willing, include all the correct and worthy forces to lead Israel in the next generation.