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What is the old adage? Most people die of toil, worry, or boredom. People aren’t the same as nations, but this is a good description of the current mood in the three modern, national paragon-experiments in Western democracy: Israel, the EU, and the USA.
There is a fourth cause of death: fear. It really does eat the soul. The recent killing of three half-naked Israeli hostages holding a white flag is one of those events in wartime that comes to symbolise everything.
Global perceptions notwithstanding, most Israelis are not evil, rapacious ‘settler colonialists’. What they are is scared.
Scared of what? Of militancy in the territories they occupy? Of their neighbours? Of a world that has come to hate them nearly as much? Maybe a bit of all three. But none is the thing they really fear. What they fear is the worst possible thing for a people to fear: themselves.
Here is what they now know, or rather, what they now know the world knows:
That their government tolerated, assisted, and suborned Hamas for a long time;
That their government had foreknowledge of the plans for October 7th;
That their army had not adequately guarded the border with Gaza;
That some of the victims of the attacks on that day also were killed by friendly fire;
That their government’s vicious campaign against Gaza won’t make them safe.
Israelis are accustomed to feeling alone, unpopular, and vulnerable. But there is something different about their feelings this time which seems more than a matter of scale. Israel has a citizen army. Its soldiers are mostly people who did not choose a profession that may require them to kill. Yet, they are killing defenceless civilians, ferociously and indiscriminately, day in, day out.
Fear asks: At what point does a people say, enough? At what point does it collapse from the refusal to allow itself to feel any normal human sense of guilt? At what point does its capacity for inflicting pain overwhelm its will to survive? At what point does it die?