I recently had occasion to recall the dystopian novel "O Destino Turistico" ("Tourist Destination"), by the Portuguese writer Rui Zink. The "destination" is a war zone controlled by violent militias, and is also an "experiential" tourist site for visitors from the West. War tourism of this sort is no longer completely off the wall, because the horrifically insulated and entertained West has never yearned so much to experience, to feel fulfilled or to touch something authentic. Basically, war tourism is relevant for every advanced civilization. It can be the next thing for already flourishing tourist destinations in underdeveloped regions, offer such luxuries as making do with little, risking avalanches or eating with your hands. But more broadly, it's simply the next level, after escape rooms or leisure-time horror entertainment. As such, it can exist outside the colonialist cliché, too, and there's no reason why it shouldn't be an option for domestic tourism.
Here in Israel, there have been similar tourist options for some time in the West Bank. For example, the Samaria Regional Council offers on its website wine tours of various vineyards, a trip to the Mount Gerizim National Park, "with its view of the city of Shekhem" – Nablus – or nearby sites, including a tahini plant and the Samaritan Museum, that offer "good food and good wine."
Tourism to Samaria is available to visitors from anywhere, and the impression is that it's a trivial matter for many Israelis. Last August, for example, the right-wing newspaper Makor Rishon published a warm recommendation for family outings under the amusing headline, "Firing zone: The trip between the perfect springs and brooks of the Samaria Hills."
But perhaps the most explicit and most contemporary example is the spontaneous domestic tourism that has developed of late in the country's south, amid the ruins of burnt-out kibbutz homes. The abashed kibbutzniks – those who have returned in small groups to rebuild – admit that they feel like animals on display in a zoo.
This case is a perfect metaphor for the way in which Israel, which is trapped in limbo between the First and Third worlds, is experiencing the war as an entertaining tourist "destination," even as it is shredded and devoured between its cogwheels. For the First World, "war" is only cinematic images, hard to watch footage, or at most a subject for political debate; whereas Israel is the West's portal to the Middle East and exists between two dimensions – the realm of entertainment, on the one hand, and the vile desert of reality, the latter of which burst mercilessly through the fence on October 7.
Israelis had an almost mystical confidence in a buffer that separated the startup nation we are from the monstrous chaos of the Gaza Strip. As if the chaos had nothing to do with us. As if we are tourists from the future, while they, those people of the past, make us laugh with their incendiary balloons. When the matter is examined deeply, the whole Israeli project of repression in the Netanyahu era rests on the refusal to internalize that we are not the bemused tourists, but that we are ourselves the "destination" – a crowded, disintegrating banana republic, controlled by armed militias, which is rapidly sliding into the Third World and is completely dependent on the West.
Netanyahu thrived on the narcissistic Israeli disorder, of which he himself is a perfect manifestation – living on the one hand the fantasy that we are a sophisticated empire that can allow itself everything (including its own colonies), and being filled on the other hand with the inferiority complex of a dependent, self-victimizing province.
Until October 7, the illusion was cracked repeatedly, but it did not shatter into splinters. These were perfect conditions for the flourishing of the fascistic right, which draws sustenance from a mixture of a ghetto feeling and anxiety, combined with Israeli megalomania. And at the same time, the liberal Israeli majority made do with a semblance of normality, the illusion that we were not surviving from hand to mouth, something we held on to as one holds on to something precious. And as long as it didn't shatter, we were able to live here on the knife's edge and take an interest mainly in our next low-cost flight out. That is what Netanyahu promised the non-messianic public, and that was also the atmosphere in the media, which forsook almost completely its role as a reporting body or watchdog.
After the illusion was smashed into pieces on October 7, some hoped that Israel would undergo a process of waking up. But in short order, that illusion or false consciousness returned in a different form, more militant and more dangerous, of a fantasy of victory; we thereby became tourists who entertain themselves in the jamboree that is this war, of which we are an integral part.
Israel's social media advocates praise us for our high morale: "The Israelis aren't afraid in the least. They're happy, they know they'll win." And indeed, those who have watched us from the outside in recent months see a nation celebrating a war like it was a New Age festival, with catering and the "taking of challah" for the masses. In the media, on social networks, on billboards and in the hip-hop war hits, one eye weeps for the captives and those who have been killed, the other eye celebrates the war; yellow balloons are released, but we continue with the war. And even though thinking about the captives can drive one crazy, the Israeli ego is afraid to give up the war and doesn't know how to cope with the issue of the hostages. The hostages are indeed ours, but they are being held "there," in that other world, far away from the incubator of false consciousness.
This is perhaps the more intangible reason for the resentment emanating from the extreme right, which has spread even into the political center, and which assails the very raising of the hostage issue for discussion. That resentment has also assumed barbaric forms, such as alienation, indifference and violent harassment of hostage families. The reason is that the necessity of returning the hostages compels Israel to stop and look at its true predicament. It compels Israel not only to forgo the imagined victory, but also to confront the situation, not to remain bemused tourists. Without makeup, without catering and without anesthetics. To come to terms with the fact that Gaza is not "there" but here. We are the destination. And the memory of the breached fence on October 7 will never heal. Never again will the illusion be whole.