By: Nomi Kaltmann as seen in ABC

21 April 2026

My grandfather, Joseph Kaltmann, was a Holocaust survivor, and it largely by chance that I was not born in Israel. After the war, when he realised his parents, older sister and younger brother had all been murdered by the Nazis, he decided to leave Europe and move to Israel. My grandfather enlisted in the newly formed Israeli army and fought in the war that led to the creation of the State of Israel. After a few years, he left Israel and moved to Australia, where his cousin had already settled, wanting a quieter life and some distance from the immediacy of conflict. This is what led my father to be born and grow up in this country, and why I did too.

Since 7 October 2023, so much of the conversation around Israel has been consumed by the present moment: the war in Gaza, the regional escalation, Iran and its proxies. However, on the eve of Israel’s seventy-eighth Independence Day, the question of what Israel meant, and what it still means, to people like my grandfather still consumes me.

Until his dying day, my Zaida remained an ardent and unwavering supporter of Israel. He spoke about Jewish history as something that followed a grim and predictable arc. Jews would settle in a country that welcomed them, but over time that welcome would erode. Suspicion against Jews would give way to hostility, hostility to violence, and eventually Jews would be expelled or killed.

For my grandfather, and for so many others who had endured the same losses, the conclusion was simple: without a country of their own, Jewish safety could never be guaranteed. For many Holocaust survivors, the idea of a Jewish country like Israel was not just political or ideological; it was existential. It was the only interruption to a historical cycle that had proven, time and again, how precarious Jewish life could be in the diaspora.

For a long time, I understood my grandfather’s position as something shaped by trauma. Of course he felt that way — how could he not? My grandfather lost everything he knew in Czechoslovakia: his family, his home, his citizenship. To me, it made sense to see his attachment to Israel as a way of insisting that history would not simply repeat itself.

But since 7 October, the fire-bombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue around the corner from my home in Melbourne, and the Bondi Beach massacre, the sense of safety that I had taken for granted in Australia has shattered. 

I was raised in a family that loved Israel, and in a community where that love was reinforced. At school, Israel was held up as both refuge and achievement, and many of my peers chose to build their lives there. I understood that pull, but I never felt it as a personal imperative. I am Australian. My life is here, my instincts are shaped by this country, and my husband and I are raising our kids here.

And yet, at my core, I feel deeply attached to Israel. This attachment shows up in different ways — from my desire to constantly improve my Hebrew, to the way I obsessively follow the news from Israel.

In its seventy-eight years, Israel has built up a remarkable country. It has absorbed millions of Jews from vastly different backgrounds, created a thriving economy, and sustained itself through repeated conflicts. Its resilience is undeniable, but so too are its internal fractures. 

I recently read The Land of Hope and Fear by New York Times journalist Isabel Kershner, which helped to crystallise some of my thoughts. Published a few months before 7 October, Kershner’s book describes a country that is both highly successful and deeply divided, a place where ideological, cultural and social fault lines run through everyday life:

Seven decades after the founding of the state, Israel was doubtless a modern miracle, a regional superpower and a prosperous and innovative country projecting might into the world. But from the inside it felt more divided than ever, its population polarised and splintered an immigrant start up nation breaking down into its component parts.

So as Yom Ha‘atzmaut, Israel’s Independence Day, arrives this year, I find myself sitting with complex feelings. I feel so much pride over what Israel has built and an enduring attachment to the people who live there, many of whom are part of my family. At the same time, I feel the weight of its divisions, the ongoing wars it is fighting, and its problematic government that I feel is taking the country in a terrible direction.

Perhaps this is what it means to love something honestly. Not to resolve the contradictions, but to hold them without flinching: the pride and the grief, the attachment and the critique, the miracle and the mess. My grandfather saw Israel as the answer to a question history kept asking. Israel at seventy-eight is neither the refuge my grandfather imagined nor the failure its harshest critics insist upon. It is something more complicated and more human than either — a country built from desperation and brilliance, carrying the weight of everything it was meant to solve, and everything it has not yet managed to.

Nomi Kaltmann is an Australian journalist and lawyer. She is a proud member of Melbourne’s Jewish community.