No Hens Exist Outside the Henhouse

Existential Fascism, Israel, and the Lenses No One Can Take Off

There is a rather comfortable mistake we make when we look at a society we consider sick: imagining that we ourselves stand outside it.
I look at Israel from Belgium. I see its politicians, listen to its arguments, watch the war, the hardening of parts of its right, the transformation of its language, and the ease with which certain positions that would have seemed extreme years ago now find an ordinary place in public conversation.
From here, it is tempting to say: I am outside the henhouse and, precisely because of that, I can see what the hens and cocks inside can no longer see.
But that is not true.
I am inside a henhouse too.
Mine is simply another one.

The Lenses
No one looks at the world with naked eyes.
An Israeli looks from within Israel. He carries with him 7 October, the wars that came before, military service, terrorist attacks, the memory of the Shoah, Jewish historical experience, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, children serving in the army, sirens, shelters, Israeli politics, Israeli schools, and the conversations of a society that has lived for decades with security as an existential question.
Being Israeli does not mean he must think in any particular way. That would be absurd.
But neither can he erase that environment from his gaze.
And I cannot erase mine.
I look from Belgium. From Europe. From my own biography. From my experiences of Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Israel. From my reading of history. From my understanding of Judaism and from a particular ethical architecture.
I wear Belgian, European and personal lenses.
They wear theirs.
So the right metaphor is not a henhouse being observed from outside.
It is two henhouses looking at one another through a glass fence.
Each can see the other.
Neither can entirely leave the ground on which it stands.
And neither possesses the truth merely because it is looking at the other.

Difference Is Information
This does not mean that all observations are equally correct.
It means something far more uncomfortable: an observation always contains the observer as well.
Conduct that may seem necessary from within Israel can look brutal to me from Belgium. A decision that seems obvious to me may appear naïve, irresponsible or even dangerous from Israel.
The interesting question, at least initially, is not who is right.
The first question is:
Why does the same reality produce such different observations?
The difference itself contains information.
When one society regards as normal something that another finds extraordinary, a piece of information about both has come to light.
It needs to be investigated.
Not insulted.
And not absolutised either.

The Problem Does Not End with Netanyahu
That is why I believe Israel’s real problem does not end with Benjamin Netanyahu.
Netanyahu may win an election or lose one. He may remain for a few more years or disappear from politics tomorrow.
The same can be said, in different contexts, of Donald Trump, Javier Milei, Giorgia Meloni, Vox, or any other leader or movement associated with the contemporary right.
Focusing exclusively on them creates a dangerous illusion:
if the man disappears, the phenomenon disappears.
Not necessarily.
A leader does not merely govern.
He also sows.
He repeats words. Defines enemies. Establishes categories. Decides which forms of behaviour deserve approval and which deserve contempt. Little by little, he shifts the boundaries of what may be said, done and justified.
And then a moment comes when the leader no longer needs to speak.
Society has learnt the language.
That is the real political inheritance.
Not the successor.
The pattern.

Existential Fascism
In Trilogy of Existential Wisdom, I call this process, taken down to its fundamental architecture, existential fascism.
I do not use fascism here as a historical equivalent of Mussolini, Hitler, the Blackshirts, the one-party state or totalitarian government.
Existential fascism comes before that.
It is the rebirth of selfishness as an organising principle of existence.
Its smallest unit is not the uniform.
It is a relationship:
I / YOU.
Me first.
My security.
My property.
My nation.
My group.
My religion.
My identity.
My rights.
My dead.
My suffering.
And then, if there is still room, you.
The other does not physically disappear. He may even live beside me.
But gradually he ceases to carry the same moral weight.
That is the decisive transformation.

The False We
Here a paradox appears.
Deeply divided societies can suddenly recover a word that seemed to have been lost:
we.
It happens especially during war.
Suddenly, so many of the differences disappear.
They attacked us.
We must defend our country.
Our soldiers.
Our dead.
Our survival.
But we need to look at who utters that we, and who pays for it.
Because there is an authentic we, and there is an instrumental we.
When the person proclaiming sacrifice does not bear the same sacrifice; when the person sending others to fight remains protected; when the person demanding unity uses that unity to preserve power; when some provide the bodies while others administer the meaning of those bodies, something is happening that is considerably older than any political ideology.
Selfishness has learnt to speak in the plural.
The I has not disappeared.
It has dressed itself as we.

Sowing and Reaping
That is why I am less concerned with Netanyahu’s personal fate than with what may survive him.
Over the years, fear, identity, suspicion, enmity, exceptionalism, contempt for the adversary, and an ever-deeper separation between those who truly belong to the group and those who are merely tolerated within it can all be sown.
Then comes the harvest.
And the harvest no longer belongs to the sower.
It can remain for a generation.
A society learns.
It learns bad things too.
It learns which insults are acceptable. Which suffering counts more. Whom it should listen to and whom it may stop listening to. Which boundaries can be crossed when there is enough fear.
It even learns which questions are no longer asked.
And once that learning has settled into the social fabric, changing the prime minister is relatively simple.
Unlearning is much harder.

The Danger of Looking from Belgium
But here I have to return to the second henhouse.
It would be intellectually dishonest to use everything I have said so far to conclude that I, looking from Belgium, see Israel as it really is.
I do not.
I interpret too.
I select too.
I too possess memories, prejudices, experiences and categories.
My environment also determines what appears normal to me.
Distance provides an advantage and, at the same time, creates a limitation.
From afar, I can detect relationships that have become invisible inside the system precisely because they are part of everyday life. But from afar, I may also fail to grasp variables that are absolutely real to those who live inside it.
That is the paradox.
Distance reveals some things and conceals others.
Proximity reveals some things and conceals others.
No position removes the lenses.

Two Henhouses
So I imagine two henhouses separated by glass.
In one are the Israeli hens and cocks.
In the other, I stand.
Each side looks at the other.
An Israeli hen looks at my henhouse and thinks:
How can that European fail to understand the danger?
I look at theirs and think:
How can they fail to see what they are normalising?
Both questions may contain truth.
Both may contain error.
What becomes intellectually interesting is the moment I stop asking which henhouse has the more intelligent hens and begin comparing what each position makes visible and what it makes invisible.
Then disagreement ceases to be merely conflict.
It becomes an instrument.

The Accusation
Here, too, the problem of antisemitism appears.
Antisemitism exists. It has a terrible history, and it still exists.
Precisely for that reason, the word must retain its capacity to distinguish.
When criticism of an Israeli decision is automatically classified as antisemitism, the proposition itself is no longer being examined first.
The observer is being classified.
The question ceases to be:
Is what he says true?
and becomes:
Whose side is he on?
That is an enormous epistemological shift.
But I have to apply exactly the same discipline to myself.
I cannot reply:
If they call me an antisemite, then I must necessarily be right.
No.
An unjust accusation does not automatically make the proposition being attacked true.
I have to return to the glass.
Look again.
Compare.
Ask.
Try to falsify what I believe I have recognised.

The Only Possible Way Out
I cannot leave the henhouse completely.
But I can perhaps do something more important.
I can discover that it exists.
I can look at my own walls.
I can ask myself why a particular form of behaviour seems obvious to me.
I can listen to how someone standing on the other side describes it.
I can look for what my own position prevents me from seeing.
That may be as far as human objectivity can go.
Not the absence of lenses.
Awareness of the lenses.
And here I return to existential fascism.
Its deepest danger may not lie simply in the I becoming powerful.
It lies in the I ceasing to recognise itself as I.
Calling its perspective truth.
Calling its interest morality.
Calling its fear we.
Calling anyone who introduces another way of seeing a traitor.
And ultimately building a society in which the other is permitted to exist only so long as he does not question the walls of the henhouse.
Netanyahu will disappear.
Trump will disappear.
Milei will disappear.
Meloni will disappear.
We all disappear.
The important question is what remains when the person who sowed is gone.
Because ideas outlive people.
Habits outlive governments.
Categories outlive those who first gave them voice.
And selfishness, once it succeeds in becoming culture, no longer needs a leader to command it.
It reproduces itself.
That is the real harvest.
And that is why perhaps the most important sentence is not that I can see the henhouse from outside.
It is precisely the opposite:
No hens exist outside the henhouse.
There are henhouses capable — or incapable — of looking at one another.
And a society begins to be truly in danger when it ceases to care about what can be seen from the other side of the glass.