“As Israel has grown stronger and more prosperous, the sense of national danger has faded. But the paradigm has not.”

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As Israel has grown stronger and more prosperous, the sense of national danger has faded. But the paradigm has not. Hamas, with its dilapidated economic base in Gaza and earnest but incompetent efforts to kill Israelis, cannot meaningfully threaten the existence of the Jewish nation — but it can harm individual Jews, innocent Israelis, schoolchildren or the handicapped who cannot run fast enough to a nearby shelter when the siren sounds. The rhetoric of weakness has shifted from the nation to individuals, from the digging of mass graves in Tel Aviv in the run-up to the 1967 war to the more private yet somehow no less collective trauma of the Fraenkel family’s grieving for their murdered son.

Haviv Rettig Gur, “The Tragic Self-Delusion Behind the Hamas War”, The Times of Israel (17 July 2014) [http://www.timesofisrael.com/the-tragic-self-delusion-behind-the-hamas-war/]

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