Why ‘Israel’ was the 2024 word of the year
No term shaped public discourse this past year quite like the name of the Jewish state
People hold signs that read, “I stand with Israel” during a New York City rally to mark the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 terror attacks on Israel. Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images
Aviya Kushner December 30, 2024
As 2024 ends, votes for “word of the year” are pouring in — “polarization” from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, “memecoin” from The Financial Times, and “brain rot” from The Oxford English Dictionary.
But I think the real word of the year is “Israel.”
Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza and dramatic decimation of Hezbollah in Lebanon have transformed the Middle East. They helped contribute to the recent toppling of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, fundamentally weakening Iran’s reach in the Middle East. And Israel’s escalating conflict with the Houthis has helped focus global attention on the extraordinary problems caused by the Islamist’s group attacks on commercial ships attempting to pass through the Suez Canal.
Israel is a disproportionate part of the news, and it’s nearly always part of the op-ed page. In culture, whether it’s at the Eurovision song competition, the National Book Awards or the Frankfurt Book Fair, Israel is the subject of countless speeches, protests, and petitions.
Israel has for the past year defined both public space and private space in America. It has changed the norms of civil engagement, as protestors in the U.S. have staged encampments on campuses, blocked highways, and targeted politicians’ and other leaders’ private homes.
No other news story in recent years — not the hundreds of thousands of Syrians killed in that country’s civil war; not the million-plus people killed by COVID in the U.S.; not the imminent return of Donald Trump to the presidency — has inspired the level of public outrage and, I would argue, personal and communal anguish, that the events of Oct. 7 and Israel’s broadening military response has. Yes, “Israel” is the word of the year, and we could all stand to think a bit more deeply about what that means.
A ‘genius’ name for a new country
The word “Israel” first appears in an iconic moment in the Torah, as the patriarch Jacob wrestles with an unknown figure.
As the 1985 Jewish Publication Society translation puts it, “a man wrestled with him until the break of dawn.” When the man asks Jacob’s name, Jacob answers “Jacob,” but the man replies: “Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with beings divine and human, and have prevailed.”
Yisrael, or “Israel,” comes from a combination of two Hebrew words: “sarita” — “you overcame” — and “el,” or “God.” So “Israel” is about overcoming God, and as the verse explains, also about overcoming men.
Jacob in the Torah is not a flawless figure. He takes his brother’s inheritance. He marries one sister, then the other — the one he wants. He works 14 years until he gets the bride of his choice. As the scholar and translator Robert Alter notes, “of all the patriarchs, Jacob is the one whose life is entangled in moral ambiguities.”
Alter’s translation reads: “Not Jacob shall your name hence be said, but Israel, for you have striven with God and men, and won out.”
I found Alter’s comment on the Hebrew term “vatuchal,” which he translates as “won out,” relevant to our current moment.
“In almost all his dealings, Jacob the bargainer, trader, wrestler, and heel-grabber has managed to win out,” Alter writes. “His winning out against the mysterious stranger consists in having fought to a kind of tie: the adversary has been unable to best him, and though he has hurt Jacob, he cannot break loose from Jacob’s grip.”
All of this is related to why David Ben-Gurion chose the name “Israel” for the new country — instead of other proposed options, like “Zion” or “Judah.”
“Ben-Gurion’s choice of name was hailed as a stroke of genius; in fact it arose out of the innermost historic or tribal consciousness of us all,” a civil servant at the time, Walter Eytan, recalled to the historian Martin Gilbert, who quoted him in Israel: A History.
“There could have been no more effective introduction of the new State to the world,” Eytan said, adding “it made obvious to the world not only who we were but that we were what we had always been, and that if the State of Israel as such was a newcomer on the international scene, it was in fact but the natural outward form, in modern terms, of a mystery and a people whose roots went back to the earliest ages of man.”
The dream of Israel, and the reality
This year, many Jews around the world have had to confront the difference between the dream of Israel and the actual Israel. They have had to grapple with the country’s changing reputation as an increasing number of international bodies have come to accuse of it of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide.
“Israel” is probably the most powerful word in Jewish discourse today.
Views on Israel have changed how many Jews feel about college campuses, book publishing, the news media, most politicians, and many celebrities. Opinions on how Israel is conducting its war against Hamas have destroyed friendships, challenged congregations, and split families.
Within Israel, many Israelis are furious at the government, and at individual government officials; many personally blame Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for dragging his feet and not making a hostage deal — not to mention presiding over the biggest security screw-up in Israeli history.
“Israel exists to provide security for Jews,” a friend who lives there told me a few months ago. “And now that security is not there.”
But, support it or decry it, there’s no arguing that Israel has roared back from the devastation and humiliation of Oct. 7.
It fought, it overcame. It has, at least for now, managed to “win out” against Iran, whose proxies had surrounded the country. It sounds a bit like the Jacob that Alter described: “bargainer, trader, wrestler, and heel-grabber.”
Israel still has plenty to overcome. International criticism of the war will likely only continue to mount, and the country needs a concrete plan to retrieve the more than 100 hostages who remain there — many of whom are presumed dead. Then there are the country’s inner demons — its powerful far-right; the massive wartime hit to its economy; and the existential despair of millions of citizens who believe the state was not there for them when it mattered.
On Israeli television, guests repeatedly ask how they can send their children to the military when the state of Israel has not managed to bring back hostages. In conversation, many writers have told me they don’t know how the country can survive under Netanyahu’s governance.
But none of that changes the fact that for so many in the Jewish world, in 2024, “Israel” was the only word that mattered. And Israel defined the year for many outside the Jewish world, as well.
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