– “Χάσαμε. Η αλήθεια πρέπει να ειπωθεί. Η αδυναμία να την παραδεχτείς περιλαμβάνει όλα όσα πρέπει να ξέρεις για την ατομική και μαζική ψυχολογία του Ισραήλ. Υπάρχει μια σαφής, αιχμηρή, προβλέψιμη πραγματικότητα που πρέπει να αρχίσουμε να κατανοούμε, να επεξεργαζόμαστε, να κατανοούμε και για να βγάλουμε συμπεράσματα για το μέλλον Δεν είναι διασκεδαστικό να παραδεχτούμε ότι χάσαμε, άρα λέμε ψέματα στον εαυτό μας.

«Μετά από μισό χρόνο, θα μπορούσαμε να ήμασταν σε ένα εντελώς διαφορετικό μέρος, αλλά κρατούμαστε όμηροι από τη χειρότερη ηγεσία στην ιστορία της χώρας – και έναν αξιοπρεπή διεκδικητή για τον τίτλο της χειρότερης ηγεσίας οπουδήποτε, ποτέ. Κάθε στρατιωτική επιχείρηση υποτίθεται ότι θα έχει διπλωματική έξοδο – η στρατιωτική δράση θα πρέπει να οδηγήσει σε μια καλύτερη διπλωματική πραγματικότητα το Ισραήλ δεν έχει διπλωματική έξοδο».

️ «Έχει έναν απατεώνα για έναν ηγέτη, κάποιον χωρίς ικανότητα ηγεσίας ή λήψης αποφάσεων, ένα άτομο που χάνει την αίσθηση της καλής κρίσης για ένα δωρεάν πούρο. Ωστόσο, το εκλογικό σώμα εναπέθεσε τις ελπίδες του στον σημερινό πρωθυπουργό δίνοντάς του 32 έδρες στην Κνεσέτ».

πηγη Clinker

Ολόκληρο το άρθρο

Chaim Levinson

Apr 11, 2024 8:13 pm IDT

We’ve lost. Truth must be told. The inability to admit it encapsulates everything you need to know about Israel’s individual and mass psychology. There’s a clear, sharp, predictable reality that we should begin to fathom, to process, to understand and to draw conclusions from for the future. It’s no fun to admit that we’ve lost, so we lie to ourselves.

Some of us maliciously lie. Others innocently. It would be better to find solace in some airy carb with a total-victory crust. But it might just be a bagel. When the solace ends, the hole remains. There’s no way around it. The good guys don’t always win.

Open gallery view

Israeli soldiers work on tanks at a staging ground near the border with the Gaza Strip, in southern Israel, April, 2024.Credit: Tsafrir Abayov,AP

My favorite book is “Love in the Time of Cholera.” It feels good all over to think that even after 51 years, nine months and four days, Florentino Ariza will consummate his love with Fermina Daza. Gabriel García Márquez was a fabulous writer, but letters don’t always reach their destination. Sometimes beautiful love is cut short, painful and bleeding until death arrives. That’s life. Sometimes there’s a good ending, but quite often there isn’t. Wars are like that, too.

After half a year, we could have been in a totally different place, but we’re being held hostage by the worst leadership in the country’s history – and a decent contender for the title of worst leadership anywhere, ever. Every military undertaking is supposed to have a diplomatic exit – the military action should lead to a better diplomatic reality. Israel has no diplomatic exit.

It has a scoundrel for a leader, someone with no capacity for leadership or decision-making, a person who loses his sense of good judgment over a free cigar. Yet the electorate put its faith in the current prime minister to the tune of 32 Knesset seats.

Prime Minister Netanyahu last monthCredit: Marc Israel Sellem

Theoretically, we could have been in a better place. The shock of the outbreak of the war could have been a starting point for a swift, powerful, aggressive, eminently justified campaign to quickly root out Hamas wherever that was possible. It could have then been replaced by a coalition of countries with money and good intentions to carry out reconstruction, with global and Arab backing, along with the Palestinian Authority. We could have created a viable alternative to Hamas in Gaza. After six months, there already might have been the first signs of independent government there. Every day and every minute, better decisions could have been made. But that’s whom we elected – a suit with a person attached.

We can’t say it, but we’ve lost. People have an inclination to believe in the best and be optimistic, hoping that tomorrow will be okay, that we are in a process that in the end will be more successful. That’s the most fundamental failure of human thought: the notion that the direction we are taking is a good one, that we just need to get there already – that in just a little more time, with a little more effort, the hostages will be returned, Hamas will surrender and Yahya Sinwar will be killed. After all, we’re the good guys, and good will triumph.

It’s the same mentality that leads to the notion that “the Iranian regime will soon implode” and other notions that have more to do with Hollywood scripts than life itself. They’re not the truth and it relates to something that’s uncomfortable. After all, it’s uncomfortable telling the public the truth.

It’s unpleasant to say, but we may not be able to safely return to Israel’s northern border.

My conclusion from October 7 as a journalist is that what’s “uncomfortable” is the most dangerous thing for our security and our future here, that being addicted to feeling good is itself what’s dangerous. We need to tell the truth, even when it is uncomfortable, even when it hurts, even if some people deplore it, even if it lowers morale.

We need to stand up to the Bibi-ist propaganda machines even if attack dogs are sniffing at our crotch. If on October 1, someone had said that the chief of military intelligence was incompetent, that military intelligence could plan successful operations but was incapable of providing a warning about a coming war, that the Shin Bet was dozing and that we were about to get the whooping of our lives, such a person would have been perceived as crazy, defeatist and out of touch. Certain politicians would have called for such a person to be charged with spreading false news. There were so many signs that the military was in bad shape, but we wouldn’t see them – because we believe things are all right.

It’s unpleasant to say, but we may not be able to safety return to Israel’s northern border, to what had been before. Hezbollah has changed that equation, to its own benefit. That’s the situation.

We constantly tell ourselves about an imaginary deadline – April, May, September 1 – and if Hezbollah keeps it up until then, we’ll give it a thorough shellacking. The deadline keeps being pushed back. The border region remains empty. The deceit continues. There now seems to be a high probability that for years, anyone driving along the border will be a target. Tel Hai will fall again.

And that’s true on every front: Not all hostages will return, either alive or dead. The whereabouts of some are lost, and their fate will remain unknown. They’ll be like the downed airforce navigator Ron Arad. Their relatives will go around sick with worry, fear and apprehension. From time to time, we’ll launch balloons in their memory.

Israeli soldiers run as they carry a stretcher towards a military helicopter during an exercise near the border with Lebanon, February, 2024.Credit: AP Photo/Ariel Schalit

No cabinet minister will restore our sense of personal security. Every Iranian threat will make us tremble. Our international standing was dealt a beating. Our leadership’s weakness was revealed to the outside. For years we managed to fool them into thinking we were a strong country, a wise people and a powerful army. In truth, we’re a shtetl with an air force, and that’s on the condition that its awakened in time.

In part it’s the military’s sacred place in Israel that makes it so hard to admit defeat. You can’t say anything bad about the military. Only when it comes to October 7 are you specifically allowed to talk about a disgrace. Since then, we’ve been lions.

Granted that many combat soldiers are indeed lions. They got up and left home. They fought, demonstrated skill as soldiers and chalked up impressive tactical achievements. Our defeat doesn’t mean they’re not good soldiers, that they didn’t make an effort, that they didn’t deliver or risk their lives, that they weren’t prepared to do whatever was required. It means that the combination of military capabilities and the politicians’ conduct produced an unfavorable outcome. The spin doctors keep jumping up yelling that “you’re hurting soldiers’ morale.” In truth, that’s easy to put across because who wants to come out in opposition to the soldiers?

So we keep fooling ourselves.

Along with natural psychology, there are the machines plying lies and deceit. There’s a political camp the very survival of which pretty much depends on a “victory.” That camp has long since lost all touch with truth and reality. We’ve gotten to know its leader, that human Pinocchio. For months, he’s been talking of “total victory” and of being “a step away from victory.” And for a couple of months, he’s been saying that we’re going to enter Rafah “right away,” tomorrow, tomorrow, here I go. I would believe TV reality figure Ohad Buzaglo telling me I’m his one true love before I would believe one word from Netanyahu.

Soldiers stand around the grave of Israeli soldier Sergeant Amitai Even Shoshan, who was killed in the Gaza Strip, at his funeral in Tel Mond, Israel, April, 2024.Credit: Hannah McKay/ REUTERS

The system

Soldiers stand around the grave of Israeli soldier Sergeant Amitai Even Shoshan, who was killed in the Gaza Strip, at his funeral in Tel Mond, Israel, April, 2024.Credit: Hannah McKay/ REUTERS

The system is to procrastinate for as long as possible, and in the meantime – lie. The army of spokespeople is hollering. And in recent months, right-wing Channel 14 has been giving rise to a new mouthpiece, a “shababnik,” as the ultra-Orthodox community calls people on the community’s margins, by the name of Motty Castel. If Yinon Magal and Erel Segal are submissive slaves to the father-king, Castel is a serf to the king’s son Yair Netanyahu. I’ve seen freer people at the Dungeon club.

This week Castel broke through Channel 14 screens to promise the people that victory is at hand: “I’m being contacted by a lot of citizens [who ask]: ‘Have we given up on Rafah?’ I’m saying with all due responsibility that we will enter Rafah. The prime minister has said too many times himself that we will enter Rafah and he can’t forgo entering Rafah. Furthermore, he also said in one interview that we’re going to have to do it on our own, contrary to the position of the United States. We will do it. You can calm down. It will happen.”

Rafah is the newest bluff that the mouthpieces are plying to fool us and make us think that victory is just moments away. By the time they enter Rafah, the actual event will have lost its significance. There may be an incursion, perhaps a tiny one, sometime – say in May. After that, they’ll peddle the next lie, that all we have to do is ________ (fill in the blank), and victory will be on its way. The reality is that the war’s aims will not be achieved. Hamas will not be eradicated. The hostages will not be returned through military pressure. Security will not be reestablished.

The more the mouthpieces shout that “we’re winning,” the clearer it is that we’re losing. Lying is their craft. We need to get used to that. Life is less secure than before October 7. The beating we took will sting for years to come. The international ostracism won’t go away. And, of course, the dead won’t be coming back. Nor will many of the hostages.

For some of us, life will get back on track, with the petrifying fear of an imminent repeat. And for some of us, life won’t get back on track. Those people will walk among us like the living dead. That’s what we voted for. That’s how it is. We need to get used to the sad reality in our homeland.