A Country Without a Soul.

After Rabin’s death anniversary, all this hit me like the silence had slapped me across the face. The whole country passed through that night in quiet, treading softly, with the same caution one uses when skirting around a grave without looking inside. In the square where he fell, Rabin’s memory was buried like a whisper. And over the ground where his blood had dried, we walked like ghosts, eyes glazed, chests puffed up with slogans about strength, security, and invisible enemies. In the end, the only enemy we’re facing may be staring back from this scarred reflection in the square.

I was there, in the same place where he was murdered, as if waiting for something to shift, a breeze of awareness, a revolt. But nothing came. And in the middle of the crowd, I felt as if I were hoping for an impossible miracle, a jolt to shake these people out of their collective stupor. Instead, I found a ferocious, shouting mass calling security peace and nesting itself in an imaginary fortress, repeating the defense mantra. At the same time, I thought: does anyone here understand what we’re defending?

There, among exalted faces and hoarse voices, the picture took shape. Somewhere along the way, we let Zionism bleed itself dry, hardening it into this block of cement and fear that we now thump on our chests as if our identity were a cold statue instead of a living idea. I see locks and walls—and what was meant to be a home now feels like a cell built to protect us from nothing.

So I look into these faces, into these inflamed eyes proclaiming “security” as if the word were a spell, salvation, a stone pillar that can hold it all. But I know, and they should know too, that we’re clinging to smoke. And that’s when I realized we are the concrete. Rabin—ah, yes, Rabin—he’d be a stranger here, a displaced man, lost amid the words that once marked our dream. He believed in something more significant than the shell of this country. He thought there was something in Israel you wouldn’t find elsewhere, an ability to open doors, to let the other come in.

And now? Instead of building a home, we’ve built paranoia, a fortress so rigid that even we don’t dare look at what we’ve locked inside. These “guardians of Israel”—they call themselves defenders, but I ask: defenders of what? Because a country without a soul is just a patch of land with flags and rifles, an empty theater that no one believes in anymore, not even those who wave the banners.

Is this what we’re left with? The security they promise is just a stopgap, a flimsy pretense. I try to imagine there’s still something tangible that we could still return to being a nation worthy of the name it carries. But maybe it’s nothing more than a fantasy of mine as I look around at the emptiness, this crazed crowd with blind eyes that doesn’t see its reflection.