We have ingested the fear with our mother's milk. We have been subjected to the fear campaigns since the dawn of our youth. Israel's history is also the history of the fear campaigns regarding anything moving (or not moving) in the Middle East. And each time, the fear campaigns disintegrate in a puff when it turns out they scared us over nothing, blowing things out of proportion, over barefoot soldiers and scarecrow armies. But the fear continues to flow through the veins of every Israeli that it has penetrated – that everyone's out to destroy us.
This fearmongering, some of which is well-founded and some of it baseless, has a variety of roles – forging Israeli society, mobilizing it, unifying it in the face of a common danger, distracting attention from other important topics and extracting support for the importance of the security establishment and for huge sums to fund it. Starting with the 1948 saga of the few against the many, which was at least in part false, and up to last week's collapse of the Syrian army like a house of cards, most of the fear campaigns turned out to be hollow and manipulative.
In May 1967, our mothers stood and pasted our school windows with tape while we filled sandbags to protect the entrances to the stairwells. Less than 25 years after the Holocaust and it was again in the air. Mass graves were prepared along the Tel Aviv seafront, and everyone was afraid they would be exterminated. We all know how that war ended.
In 1973, the danger was more real, but then too, it turned out that Israel's military strength could best the worst of surprises. In the Gulf War of 1991, we were instructed to place wet rags under our doors. We put on gas masks and placed our babies in strange, inflatable torture contraptions. Many people fled their homes to the humanitarian zone of Eilat – Israel's Muwasi at the time. A second Holocaust was in the air – closer than ever. We got through that too, successfully. Turns out Iraq's ruler, Saddam Hussein, had no chemical weapons.
Then they moved on to frighten us about Lebanon and Gaza. The owner of every small boat was dubbed a "commander of Hamas' naval branch." Every kite owner was an "air fleet commander." In the Second Intifada, the Israeli army killed a boy in Hebron and on the news, they said he was a senior member of Islamic Jihad.
The reports of Hezbollah's mighty rocket force were dizzying for every Israeli, putting everyone in a pre-traumatic state. Dread again raised its head, exacerbated by the consensus predicting huge numbers of precision rockets being fired at Israel and thousands of dead in Tel Aviv. At the same time, the fear campaign continued at full force over a nuclear Iran, about which there is no need to elaborate.
And then came last year. On October 7, we were surprised by Hamas' capabilities, but at the end of the (terrifying and horrible) day, it did everything that it did riding on bicycles and pickup trucks. On October 7, it wasn't amazing capabilities on Hamas' part that were demonstrated but rather the Israeli army's total absence.
Other than its endless tunnel network, no indications of military strength were discovered that could overpower the IDF. And when the military campaign shifted to Israel's north, the amazement was even greater. Hezbollah didn't turn out to be the Viet Cong. Far from it. The prophecies of doom about the total destruction that Hezbollah missiles would wreak turned out to be wrong.
And then the military campaign was sparked in Syria, whose army was revealed to be a paper tiger. Its network of abandoned military positions along the border turned out to be a collection of huts, which, more than threatening Israel, engendered compassion for the Syrian soldiers who had been there.
During all those years, Israel did face considerable security dangers and challenges. No one is making light of them. But the connection between what they scared us about and what turned out to be the case was always weak. Israel is a regional military power without real competition. And that has implications. One is that the time has come to finally free ourselves from the baseless existential dread that every Israeli has from the day they are born until the day they die. After we free ourselves from the fear, it will be possible to start thinking differently.