1/ What is happening in Israel today? We should begin with what is not happening. Very few are calling for an end to the genocidal campaign in Gaza that is spilling over into the West Bank. We don't care about the Palestinians and fail to connect their plight to ours. --->
2/ Israel declared this war as having two goals: Destroying Hamas (all sorts of qualifications were added later as Hamas failed to be destroyed) and the return of the hostages. Most of us believed these goals to be commensurate, perhaps even complementary. --->
3/ The illusion of complementarity snapped yesterday, with the discovery of 6 dead hostages in a Rafah tunnel. Assuming they had been killed by Hamas, they were shot minutes before an IDF force raiding the tunnel arrived on the scene. Our offensive was killing the hostages. --->
4/ A major aspect of our murderous solipsism was the conviction that when we act in the interests of our "security" we can do no harm. At the heart of our axiomatic sense of supremacy lies the notion that saving Jewish lives trumps (pun intended) everything else. --->
5/ Because we believe ourselves to be the only real people (certainly in the region and maybe even in the world) we consider our continued existence to be a moral imperative. If we don't exist, nothing exists. "Security" (saving Jewish lives) is therefore sacred to us. --->
6/ We held on to this lie for 75 years (and 11 months). We held on to it so intensely that we could not articulate it to save our lives. It was the cornerstone of our existence. What we discovered is that "Security" can also kill us and not as a necessary sacrifice. --->
7/ The six hostages died a perfectly preventable death. Three of them could have been released months ago, had Israel agreed to a deal it had proposed and Hamas had accepted. They died because security had become synonymous with genocide and both countermanded life. --->
8/Of course, we can't actually say or think that. We still support "the war". We don't see any other option. We will "fight" until they stop, and we will tell them when they have stopped. It has been months since we proudly declared our total lack of empathy. They started. --->
9/ But we are now aware of the fact that our hallowed existence may be threatened by our Security. It is bewildering. Today's protests have taken many forms but most of them reflect confusion. We swore by Security because we thought it apolitical. What do we swear by now? --->
10/ This, I think, is unprecedented for us. Security - the notion that our lives mean more and that protecting them inculcates us against censure and repercussions - was our transparent point of origin. Without this illusion sustaining us we can sense madness in the cards. --->
11/ Needless to say, we are already mad. But this is deeper than sectarian strife that only maintains the illusion of morality, pitting "good" versus "bad". We are beginning to understand that we are patient zero. We can glimpse, at times, the walls of the asylum.
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