Daily Inspiration Quote by A. B. Yehoshua

Yehoshua’s sentence is engineered as a quiet rebuke disguised as a historical clarification. He reaches back to Zionism’s origin story not to rehearse nostalgia, but to question what the project has become: a movement born to normalize Jewish political life, now at risk of shrinking Jewish moral imagination into a bunker ethic. The key phrase is “even in part” - a novelist’s scalpel. He’s not alleging total collapse, but he is saying the erosion is measurable, and therefore culpable.

The subtext is an argument about exchange: Zionism was once pitched as a repair job (security, self-determination) that would also restore a fuller participation in humanity’s shared obligations. “Contribute to other peoples” reads as deliberately outward-facing, almost unfashionably universalist in a climate where national narratives compete for victimhood and moral exemption. Yehoshua is pushing against the idea that historical trauma purchases permanent insulation from ethical reciprocity.

Context matters: he’s writing from inside Israeli society, where he was often cast as a liberal Zionist conscience, frustrated by occupation’s corrosive effects not only on Palestinians but on Israeli civic character. The line works because it reframes the debate: not “Are we right?” but “What are we becoming?” It’s less a policy brief than a warning about the cost of narrowing a national story until it can no longer recognize strangers as neighbors.