The grass in the soccer fields of the Euro 2024 championship has never looked as green as it does this year. What fun to be normal. To live on a normal continent, in a normal country. To live a normal life. To enjoy normal things.
It's fun to be young in Europe. Young people there live a life that has three time periods – past, present and future. Not like here, in Israel, where there's only one aggressive, domineering time period – a past that never passes, that castrates the present, that murders the future and succeeds it, over and over again.
In recent months, on every side, I've heard people talking openly about leaving. I noted that they didn't use the word laredet (literally, "to get down" – the traditional Hebrew word for emigrating from Israel, and the opposite of the word to immigrate to Israel, which literally means "to rise up"), but la'azov ("to leave"). Maybe that's because someone who "gets down" does so from a country he leaves intact, whereas now, the feeling is that our house is going up in flames and we have to leave it before it collapses on our heads. We have to save the children and escape before it's too late.
But when do you know that the time has come to leave? And what do people do if they don't know, or can't leave?
In his foundational speech to the Israeli people four days after the October 7 massacre, U.S. President Joe Biden described his meeting with former Prime Minister Golda Meir a few weeks before the Yom Kippur War of 1973.
Biden said he was concerned for Israel's future and related how Golda had reassured him. She whispered in his ear, "Don't worry, Senator Biden. We have a secret weapon here in Israel. We have no place else to go."
Even though Biden has told this story more than once or twice before, this time, it was imbued with new life, as if it had been reunited with the circumstances that gave birth to it – an existential threat. A threat of the kind that caused so many people to ponder alternatives for living in a world in which there was no Israel (as if without it, we would have somewhere to go).
But Biden, it's important to remember, didn't tell that story to put us into a mood of existential threat. His goal was the diametric opposite – to keep us from falling into that mood. He wanted us not to feel that we were facing existential danger, and certainly we weren't doing so alone. He wanted us not to act out of a fear of collective death and not to respond out of a desire for vengeance. Biden was trying to reassure us, to dispel our fears.
Yet Israel didn't listen to Biden. It gave itself over completely to its existential fear and embarked on a campaign of vengeance that will soon have lasted for nine months and has taken the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, most of whom were innocent of any crime.
"Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves," Confucius warned. And Israel, in its madness, agreed. It dug two graves before it embarked on its campaign – one for the enemy and one for the hostages, whom it abandoned and left to die.
Palestinians leaving the Tuffah neighborhood in the east of Gaza City on Thursday.Credit: AFP
But it's not only the hostages whom it abandoned. The campaign of vengeance Israel launched has led it straight into an existential danger, one it created with its own two hands through its own crazy behavior. From day to day, the security situation is getting worse, our international isolation is growing and the threats are multiplying. And that's without even mentioning the thousands of Palestinian orphans Israel has pushed into the cycle of vengeance. Israel is digging a grave for itself, and dragging Diaspora Jewry into it along with it.
This madness knows no bounds. Flatten the Gaza Strip, "the center of Beirut will look like the center of Gaza City" (former senior army officer Giora Eiland), attack Iran, set the West Bank on fire, take over the Philadelphi route along the Gaza-Egypt border and thereby scoff at Egypt, scorn the Jordanians, be insolent to the Americans, give the United Nations and the two international courts in the Hague the middle finger. We shall dwell alone in Dimona.
And because the victory that would calm us down is unachievable (a quick glance at any map of the Middle East is enough to realize that), Israel isn't leaving itself with any choice except losing – a painful, cruel, crushing defeat. But until then, we'll kill, blow up, shell, assassinate, pulverize, destroy and topple. Who will stop us?