The Enemy as Glue |
The gravest danger in this war may not be defeat. It may be relief.
Not relief at destruction. Not relief at death. Not relief at escalation. Relief that Israel, after years of inner fracture, exhaustion, and self-doubt, can become legible to itself again.
An enemy like Iran does not confuse the Israeli mind. A missile does not negotiate. A shelter does not require interpretation. Under such pressure, the world regains a brutal simplicity. There is a threat. There is a people. There is defense. There is necessity. After years in which Israel had become opaque to itself, split between rival visions of law, state, religion, force, restraint, and memory, war restores a terrible kind of coherence.
That coherence is not noble. It is narcotic.
A nation under attack does not seek only safety. It also seeks orientation. It seeks release from ambiguity. It seeks a world in which survival briefly outruns interpretation. In that sense, war can offer more than mobilization. It can offer clarity. For a people as historically burdened, self-conscious, and internally divided as the Jews in sovereign form, clarity can feel almost like mercy.
That is where the danger begins.
The danger does not begin with military necessity itself. Israel has no obligation to romanticize vulnerability. It has no duty to perform confusion before enemies who are not confused about their intentions. The danger begins one layer deeper, when necessity starts to provide emotional and civilizational relief. When war ceases to be only a painful obligation and begins to function as an answer. When external threat reorganizes a fractured people so effectively that the threat itself acquires a perverse psychic usefulness.
This is not a cynical point. It is a tragic one.
For years, Israel has lived inside a crisis of self-recognition. The........