There is a fact that sits uneasily beneath the surface of Israeli public life, one that rarely finds its way into official language or collective self-description: many Israelis are exhausted.

This is not a failure of resolve. It is the consequence of it. For more than two years, Israelis have been asked to endure not a single war, but a sequence of them, each presented as decisive, each dissolving into the next. Alongside this has come a steady stream of declarations, cast in the language of history, assuring “generational victory.” Yet a generation, in Israel today, has begun to feel less like a span of decades than a season.

I find myself caught between two ways of understanding this reality. On the one hand, there is the analyst. The part of me trained to read ideologies not as rhetoric but as intention. To take seriously what regimes say about themselves. To recognize patterns that repeat across decades, across movements and across texts.

And then there is the other self. The civilian. The partner. The ordinary person who does not live in frameworks, but in moments. In the sound of a siren cutting through the day. In the quiet, involuntary calculations that follow. How far is the shelter? Who is home? What was that sound?

These two modes do not cancel each other out. They deepen the tension. Because as an analyst, the picture is, in many respects, clear. The Islamic Republic is not a state pursuing conventional interests. Its ideology is foundational. A system that elevates martyrdom, that frames conflict as a form of fulfillment rather than failure, does not approach war in the way liberal societies expect. The missiles falling on Israeli cities are not deviations from its logic. They are expressions of it.

And yet, knowledge of this kind does not translate into emotional distance. It does not quiet the body’s response when the blast lands closer than expected. It does not resolve the contradiction of understanding, at one level, that this may be unavoidable, while experiencing, at another, the simple human resistance to living this way. This is where the language of resilience begins to fray. 

Recognizing the threat

Resilience has become, in Israeli society, something close to an organizing principle. And rightly so. No country in this region, under these conditions, could survive without it. But resilience is not a slogan. If it is to be sustained, it depends on something more difficult than endurance alone. It depends on truth.

And here the gap begins to show. The current confrontation between the United States, Israel, and the Islamic Republic is often described as a choice, as if it emerged from a discrete decision. In reality, it is the product of deferral. Of years in which the regime was allowed to arm, to entrench, to extend its reach across the region. Hezbollah was transformed into a force designed not merely to deter, but to devastate. Hamas and Islamic Jihad were sustained for murder. Networks were built, financed and coordinated from Iraq to Yemen.

All of this was visible. Much of it was explicit. And yet it was persistently interpreted through the language of conventional statecraft, as though incentives and agreements could gradually reshape a totalitarian project that had defined itself, from the beginning, in revolutionary terms.

What has changed is not the nature of the threat, but the willingness to recognize it. The events of what has been called the Twelve Day War did not introduce a new reality. They clarified an existing one. They marked the point at which delay could no longer be mistaken for prudence. At which the accumulated costs of inaction, paid over years in smaller currencies, converged into something that could no longer be managed at the margins.

But wars are not only lived at the level of strategy. They are lived in fragments. In the hurried descent into a stairwell or shelter. In the brief silence after an explosion, when the mind moves faster than the facts, trying to locate the damage, to assign the explosion to a place, to a street, to a name.

At the center of this are not abstractions, but people. A mother carrying her child, attempting to project calm she does not feel. A father standing at the entrance of a shelter, performing reassurance because there is no alternative. Elderly men and women talking quietly, drawing on memories of earlier wars that were also meant to be the last.

These are not the images that enter official discourse. They do not appear in the language of deterrence or proportionality. But they are the substance of what endurance actually requires.

A society can endure a great deal. Israel has proven this repeatedly. But endurance is not infinite, and it is not self-sustaining. It depends on a relationship between the reality people live and the reality they are told they are living. When that relationship begins to erode, resilience itself becomes unstable. Not because people are unwilling to endure, but because they are asked to endure within a narrative that does not fully account for their experience.

What is required, then, is not a new slogan, nor another declaration of “generational victory”. It is something simpler, and harder. An accounting. A willingness from leaders to speak plainly about what has been achieved and what has not. About the limits of power. About the nature of the conflict and the likelihood that it will not resolve cleanly or conclusively.

Resilience, if it is to remain real, cannot be built on repetition alone. A society asked to endure must also be trusted with the truth.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)