Folie à Plusieurs

I’m not a psychologist, nor do I need to be. In Israel, madness doesn’t arrive with the crash you’d expect. It comes slowly, like fine dust, settling on everything without anyone noticing. “Joker 2” is already in cinemas, bringing that old idea of “Folie à Deux,” a shared madness between the two. But what if it’s not just two? What if an entire nation is trapped in a nightmare that never ends?

In the movie, Joker laughs while chaos spreads. Here, in Israel, there’s no laughter. The screams are real, loud, and furious. They come from all directions, from people who think they hold the truth in their hands. And us? We go on as best we can. Netanyahu isn’t the Joker, but sometimes it feels like we’re living our own “Folie à Plusieurs”—a collective madness that spreads without stopping.

I look at the faces around me, and I see exhaustion. It’s not just the heat that weighs them down, but the fatigue of those who have seen this cycle repeat for far too long. The days pass, the years too, but the feeling of being trapped in something inescapable remains. Netanyahu? He’s become part of the landscape, a fixture no one can remove any more. We keep going because it’s all we know how to do, even though the light in so many eyes has faded.

Sometimes, I wonder if we’re all living out a story that’s already been written. Something got lost along the way, but we carry on without knowing why, as if the reflection in the mirror is no longer our own.

In the end, Joker is just fiction. But the madness he represents—that’s very real. And here we are, living it every day, waiting for anyone to have the courage to stop the movie. But what if that ending never comes? What if the nightmare is the only story we have left? Maybe there’s no happy ending. Maybe there’s no ending at all.

And when all of this is over, what will remain is silence. Not a peaceful silence, but an echo that reverberates, hollow. The kind of silence that looks back at us and asks, “Where were you while all this was happening?”