From Warriors to Victims: The Collapse of Israeli Pride

One of Yahya Sinwar’s goals was to prove to the world that we are subhuman. Worms. And despite a military setback, Sinwar indeed succeeded in etching trauma into our collective memory. A trauma that will resonate for generations due to the absence of a resounding victory in Gaza. I remember how, a few months after October 7th, I began to sense that something had shifted within Israelis. The rolling normalcy of indecisiveness gave rise to a feeling that people had become almost zombified: as if, along with the national humiliation of October 7th, we had also lost our human dignity.

The Holocaust temples Israel built do nothing to restore our lost honor. While the vile murderer Sinwar has paid a heavy price, we are deluding ourselves into thinking that this is the real story. In reality, the story is one of humiliation, of instilled mortal fear and self-degradation, for this is what preoccupies the Arab world: the belief that those who are afraid and traumatized are inherently weak.

They also know that one who clings to life can be dragged into shame. Like a mouse - tortured precisely because it values its life - this is what they’re doing to the hostages. The painful reason we have lost our human dignity is that unless we do to them what they did to us, we will not restore it. And Israel, it seems, fears such restoration.

In one of Shakespeare’s plays, a woman whose daughter was raped by two men manages to ensure their execution. But not only that, she cooks their bodies and feeds them to their parents who are invited for dinner. Acts of vengeance cannot be carried out through surgical bombings or helicopter strikes. No amount of bombs will restore dignity of mass rapes and mass nurder.

And so, following the loss of our dignity, and with no chance to restore it, a kind of pornography of self-tragedy emerges. In the absence of revenge or the ability to restore honor, we begin to glorify the loss itself. A perverse transformation of defect into effect. This explains the worsening of the zombie-like state under the cancerous trauma and mental erosion that have gripped us for the last 18 months, and which has deepened with the elevation of our victimhood into a point of pride.

We have sublimated our downfall, turning the 'Akedah' - the binding for sacrifice - into an ideal. In doing so, we are running on the fuel of something both inhuman and inauthentic. This is not the first time. It began with the Holocaust, where no vengeance was taken. But then, it seemed reasonabl —because the State of Israel was supposed to be the embodiment of revenge for the six million. We told the world: “Never again,” and proceeded with pioneering, Zionist creation.

But in these times, we have seen that vengeance against the Germans was ultimately ineffective. The entity we built as their revenge is failing to deliver on the promise of “never again.” And now, with the disappearance of Zionist pioneering - once the engine of that revenge - we’ve regressed into a classical exile mentality, in which the degradation of human dignity is converted into political pornography for the world to see how we, and not the Arabs, are the true victim.

Perhaps, deep down, we always knew that “never again” was a false statement we could not uphold. Had we truly been able to uphold it, we wouldn’t have needed to repeat the trauma of the Holocaust endlessly. Still, in Israel’s early decades, “never again” felt credible, because the ethos wasn’t built on the Holocaust. It was built on pioneering.

But from the 1980s onward, the ethos shifted from pioneering to Holocaust remembrance, and it became clear that Israel was not an uncompromising act of vengeance against the Nazis. And so, in the absence of a dynamic Zionist revenge, we found ourselves compulsively repeating the mantra - “never again.”

Today, in the absence of worthy leadership, governed by a post-Zionist government and culture, with no pioneering spirit, no real “never again,” and no national will to live and die with dignity, and with public discourse reduced to shallow expressions, what are we left with? All that remains is to play nice, to embrace victimhood, and to turn the performance of being a victim into an ideal.

Is the hard truth that, the moment we refused to unleash upon Gaza the horrors they brought upon us, we condemned ourselves to live by rules stripped of dignity and proportion?

From that moment on, all our national aims have been refracted through this broken lens.