It’s Not Over Yet

The Haaretz article (ops!) “The October 7 Effect” is not just a read; it’s an autopsy. The body on the table is Israel, and what is revealed is a country that no longer recognizes itself, breaking apart from the inside out. Israelis within are leaving as if fleeing a fire that no one wants to extinguish anymore. Diaspora Jews arrive with bright eyes, not realizing that the fire they see from afar is destruction, not warmth. This movement of departures and arrivals is the map of a dissolving territory, a skin that no longer knows itself. Each departure deepens a crack; each arrival is a fragile promise that may never be fulfilled.

What is happening here? Those who leave do so not because they are tired but depleted. There is a difference between fatigue and depletion, and Israel has tested the limits of its people’s spirit. They leave because they can no longer bear the sound of the sirens—not just the ones warning of missiles, but the internal ones that sound in the head and the heart, telling them the dream is over. And those who arrive? They come still believing in a utopia that was never truly realized, thinking the story can still be rewritten somehow. But I ask: how long will this illusion last?

I understand this dilemma as if it were my reflection. I lived in the Brazil of the dictatorship, my mind full of theories of justice and my heart brimming with longing for a home I had never known. In those days, Israel was not a place but a utopia that took flesh in the imagination. It was the bastion where the just and the ethical could coexist. The Promised Land was more than a geography; it was a moral geography. I waited for Israel for 44 years, like a lover who keeps letters that were never answered, and when I finally made Aliyah, I found a land that no longer knew how to reply. Israel forgot its promise to itself and became a hostage to its contradictions, an actress who lost the script but continues to perform.

The article confronts me with this discrepancy between the ideal and the real. Those who arrive come with a hunger that the harshness of this land has not yet tested; those who leave do so because life here has become a struggle that seems less justified by the day. Israel is no longer the inspired woman I dreamed of from afar; it is a place that lost its poetry and now only recites speeches. Those who arrive come with the weight of hope still intact; those who leave carry the burden of disillusionment for years.

So, I ask myself and invite you to consider: What exactly are we trying to salvage here? We are not merely discussing a piece of land but an idea dissolving like smoke. Israel wants to be both a laboratory of innovation and a museum of traditions, but it is disintegrating in the process, unable to choose a direction. A country that cannot decide whether it wants to be a fortress or a stage for vanity is a country that is saying goodbye to its very essence. The number of Israelis leaving is double that of those arriving. This is not a statistic; it is a sentence. The spirit has already collapsed when the body begins to abandon its parts.

Perhaps you wonder why, then, I insist on staying. I wonder that, too. And the answer is not heroic. I insist because I refuse to abandon what, despite everything, can still be saved. I am the same person who got married four times – Alright, I know it’s not a great way to prove I’m right, but follow the reasoning.- knowing that love was far from ideal. I knew the person before me had flaws, shadows, and abysses in each marriage. And I threw myself in any way because what mattered was what could be built from that. This is not about romantic stubbornness but about defying fate and saying: “It’s not over yet.”

What the article does not say, but what pulses in each of us who stays, is the urgent need for a new narrative. Israel must look into the cracked mirror and decide whether to glue the shards together or break it completely to forge something unprecedented. A country that was supposed to be a refuge has become the epicenter of a moral earthquake. Those who leave feel the ground crumbling beneath their feet; those who arrive believe they can still plant something new. And we, who remain, continue to seek meaning in this chaos, knowing that perhaps the only way to save Israel is to dismantle it to its very foundations, to its most profound words, so that it can finally be born again.