Seventy-Seven

Israel turns seventy-seven today.

It’s not a small number.

Seventy-seven years are enough for many things: to establish institutions, bury illusions, revise pacts.

Or, on the contrary, to repeat gestures — with more efficiency and less embarrassment.

Celebrations follow the usual script: flags, speeches, children waving paper banners, soldiers smiling at the cameras and preparing for the next shift.

From the outside, everything seems in order.

From the inside, silence has become a kind of official language.

There was no exact day when everything changed.

No coup, no rupture, not even a scandal that lasted long enough.

What happened was habit.

The exception came in through the front door, sat at the table, and became part of the house routine.

Today, disagreement is suspicious.

Doubt, inconvenient.

Dissent, documented.

The government is still elected.

Parliament still votes.

The press still circulates.

But more and more, normalcy is just the stage where something abnormal keeps happening — quietly.

Security is the name given to what’s done with force.

Law, to what is decreed without listening.

Democracy, to whatever still functions — even if it no longer contains within it the spirit of questioning.

There are ministers who speak too loudly.

Soldiers who aim first.

Citizens who accept anything, as long as the target remains someone else.

And there is, above all, a society that slowly begins to resemble the power it elects.

It’s no longer possible to pretend it’s just a phase.

When the exception lasts too long, it becomes culture.

When repression becomes routine, it becomes policy.

Israel lives today under a regime shaped with urgency, with legality, with consent.

There are no tanks in the streets — there’s no need.

Control is internal, vocabulary is disciplined, and conscience, domesticated.

Those who remember are called enemies.

Those who refuse to stay silent are called anti-Zionists.

And those who write — despite everything — are called traitors.

There is no lack of information.

There is a lack of astonishment.

There is no lack of history.

There is a lack of memory.

Seventy-seven years.

More than enough time to know what one is doing.

And to know what one chooses to repeat.

The country that was born out of pain now manages the pain of others with method.

There is order, there is functionality, there is justification.

What is no longer found is retreat.

And it is that absence — quiet, steady, legal — that one day will weigh more than any enemy.

Happy birthday, Israel.

With all that implies.