God Is Dead

I wake with a mouth gone dry, the taste of iron clinging to my tongue as if I’d spent the night chewing on the ruins of my own country. I leave the house and get in the car, and every corner seems to throw back at me a silent, weighty gaze; each building slumps under some invisible burden. Israel — the promise of a home, of dignity — reduced to concrete and silence. God? No, this is no longer about God. He’s dead, and not at the hands of an enemy, but by those who raised a false altar to power, to fear disguised as security.

Netanyahu held yet another official ceremony surrounded by allies, shrouded in hollow symbolism. But what’s missing is what matters: the families of the dead, the abducted. They were cast aside, relegated to another ceremony, and forced to mourn at a distance, far from the state’s official narrative. It’s as if this government is telling them that their voices and grief are inconvenient, a detail that doesn’t fit into the well-rehearsed theater. The country that once promised welcome and compassion leaves no room for genuine mourning. This ceremony was meant to project strength but lacked everything essential: compassion and humanity. The families — those who have lost everything — were left behind.

I stop at a light and see an older man crossing the street; his face lined like an open scar across the hardened skin of this nation. He walks on, unhurried, without a single glance at the cars. But as he approaches, his eyes meet mine for an instant, and in that brief encounter, I see the judgment we all avoid. “You chose this,” his face seems to say. “You chose a country where pain is disposable, where compassion became weakness, where even the right to grieve is a denied concession.” This older man knows. He knows what we pretend not to see: that we buried love for our neighbor, that we killed God in some office where strength was deemed more important than dignity.

The light changes, and the older man fades behind me. I drive on, but his shadow, the weight of everything we’ve destroyed, lingers beside me. Thus spoke Zarathustra, “God is dead” — but here in Israel, He’s not just dead; He was murdered at the hands of a right-wing that invokes His name even as it erases every trace of humanity.