The Silence of the Cannon Fodder as Israel's Stasi State Takes Shape
Why aren't Israelis rebelling? Because the majority is willing to accept a messianic and ultra-nationalist state, or doesn't care
Israel isn't Ukraine. We can't ride out a six-year war of attrition, which, let's assume, is the time needed to topple the regime in Iran. Even though they've told us a thousand times that we're a nation of heroes with the resilience of elephants, TV panelists know the truth. They ask how Iranians will withstand another month of war but don't ask how we'll do it.
Nobody asks if the dead and wounded, or the tens of thousands of people who have lost their homes, are reasons to stop the war. After all, such a question is a sign of weakness or even treason.
Nobody asks if we'll withstand a war of attrition because nobody cares. We're cannon fodder in this war. The role of cannon fodder isn't to ask questions but to remain silent and pray that the missile falls on somebody else. Trivia like somebody's well-being and ability to function doesn't interest anyone. It's doubtful that people's steadfastness was taken into account in the run-up to the war.
Don't rely on the media. Destroyed buildings and crying victims are "human stories" for journalists, something social workers have to attend to, not military officers. This is a deluxe war for the media.
Hundreds of wounded are a trifle. Complaints of people falling while running to a shelter are negligible. Journalists won't allow the euphoria that accompanies the war to be tarnished by pogroms in the West Bank. These reporters are detached. I don't believe them or their integrity. They're only mediums for delivering messages from above.
How do they handle tough questions? They don't. Any criticism is tantamount to treason; any doubt is equivalent to incitement. Anyone posing a question is stabbing the nation in the back. The argument isn't between opinions but between traitors and loyalists.
Who determines who's loyal and who's a traitor? Someone who can bend the law or change it. Someone who calls for unity while doing everything possible to quash it. Someone who sends the police to look for traitors online.
It's Udi Ronen, the head of the police's counter-incitement unit, who follows online anybody asking what the war's goals are. Be careful, the Stasi is watching you! If you change Operation Roaring Lion to Operation Squeaking Mouse, you might be detained by Ronen as he searches a select body cavity.
Just wait, the education minister will also want to help pursue traitors. He'll probably call on his dear students to tell their teachers about any "controversial statement" by their parents or friends.
We can't allow the Stasi to become a fact and the war to become routine. The routine they want to impose on us is a war in which the pilots are victorious over Iran while we at home are the losers.
Superlatives are inflated to kindergarten level. Every success is "enormous" and every operation "powerful." It has become routine to debate whether four members of the Bani Odeh family in the West Bank were "murdered" or "killed." Were they "eliminated" – to use army-speak – or did they simply die?
The war must not be normalized. University studies during wartime aren't normal. Working during wartime isn't normal. You can't conduct a routine life with sirens sending you to a shelter four times a day.
The government wants to normalize the war because it has no idea how to end it. They're stripping us of our time. "It will take as long as it takes," says the IDF chief of staff, who has said nothing about civilians who were hurt or houses that were destroyed.
Yes, you have to go down to a shelter or lock yourself in your safe room, or lie flat on the road if necessary – not in resignation but in rage. The rage isn't because we don't know but because we do know: the bitter fact that we're the cannon fodder of shady characters, one a megalomaniac and the other a liar.
If these are the leaders, why aren't we rebelling? Because the majority doesn't want to rebel, because it's willing to accept a messianic and ultra-nationalist state, or doesn't care.
This is the majority calling on Iranians to take to the streets in the name of progress and enlightenment. There is no progress or enlightenment in countries ruled by corrupt politicians and crazed clerics, countries that threaten to destroy each other and the entire world with their nuclear bombs.