On Tuesday, January 15, 2019, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi assumed his position as the 22nd IDF Chief of Staff. From a security perspective, his tenure begins in a stormy, unstable period, when the IDF’s strategic and operational environment continues to be marked by vast uncertainty.

If in the past, we tended to speak about tensions in Israeli society in terms of Arabs and Jews, religious and secular, or Right and Left, the findings of the Israel Democracy Institute’s 2018 Israeli Democracy Index, released last week reveal a major new split: the split over Israeli democracy. In today’s Israel, the fundamental question that defines the state—what is democracy?—is becoming an increasingly significant bone of contention.

Max Nordau earned a medical degree and, like his friend Theodore Herzl, became a devout Zionist. He attended the first Zionist Congress in Basle, Switzerland in August 1897; delivering an impassioned speech about the general Jewish condition in Europe. Nordau’s engagement in the Zionist organization in its early years induced many Jewish intellectuals to follow suit.