The price of fear

There’s been a campaign where I live since not long after October 7^th against allowing any Arabs to work in our town. With slogans like “We won’t go back to October 6^th,” and “Our lives are in your hands – Who are you employing?” the trauma and fear of the brutal Hamas attacks of October 7^th are summoned to convince residents that it is foolish and dangerous to let potential terrorists who are most likely terror supporters work in our midst. Over the past months, I have passed by the many posters and bumper stickers with a mixture of anger, unease, sadness and impotence. How can you fight people’s fears after October 7^th? The campaign was created by regular moms, with real fear for their safety and the safety of their children. I completely understand them and share the fear.

But it was a post on a local Facebook group that convinced me to formulate a response. Reacting to the Efrat municipality’s recent decision, made in coordination with the IDF, to begin allowing Palestinian workers back in, the post’s author asked why we spent so much money on new gates “if we are just going to be freely letting the vermin into our city?” The post had been up for two hours, multiple people had responded, but other than someone suggesting that the use of the word “vermin” might not be helpful to attract new recruits, no one had clearly and unequivocally condemned language that dehumanizes people based solely on their ethnic origin.

I replied, and thankfully, since then, a lively, relatively respectful conversation has been ongoing, with many other voices joining mine and asserting that there is a difference between real security concerns and outright racism. But in the end, the conversation inevitably returns to the very real fear, and the reasonable argument, as expressed by one neighbor: Why would we want to take on any risk ourselves unless there’s a substantial reason for doing so?

To understand that reason, we have to understand the cost of this fear. What does it mean to allow these real fears too much power in our lives? The post itself is a powerful demonstration of how quickly and easily fears slide into the demonization and dehumanization of an entire people, and how easily that becomes tolerated and normalized.

The pattern should be very familiar to us. Hateful, racist words are at first tolerated, then become normal. They then become hateful, racist and violent actions that are tolerated, and then normalized. The amount of lawless, vigilante violence that has been committed against random Palestinians in the past year and a half is unprecedented in its scope, deadliness, and in the shameful absence of those who forcefully condemn it. Actions that used to be considered on the fringe are now openly excused and even encouraged by senior government officials. This pattern of normalization long precedes the current government and October 7th, but both have amplified its intensity exponentially.

On the level of pure self-interest, this fuel-feared pattern costs us our security. The reason the IDF approves, and even encourages, allowing Palestinian workers into Efrat, is because it understands that in the delicate balance of life here, allowing people to work has a stabilizing effect. Fear is understandable and legitimate, but that doesn’t mean it’s rational. It often, paradoxically, brings you to act in ways that confirm your fears. I’m not so naive that I think that if we just love them, they’ll love us back, and I don’t blame our side for the many people on the other side who hate us and support our destruction. But when we believe that every single Arab thinks that way, we actually close the door to the possibility that anyone can think otherwise. Immediately after October 7th, those who already held the belief that all Arabs are our sworn enemies were convinced that all of the Arab Israelis, and certainly the Palestinians, would attack us at our moment of weakness. That didn’t happen, but since then, the toleration of incessant vigilante violence threatens to ensure the self-fulfillment of that prophecy.

But the violent actions that inevitably follow racist words fueled by fear not only threaten our security. I believe that they threaten our soul and our very identity. Accepting the belief, and it is a belief that is both supported and contradicted by the evidence, that all 8 million Arabs who live between the river and the sea are our sworn enemies essentially condemns us to “live by our sword.” It condemns us to an all-out war that religious fundamentalists and extremists on both sides desire because both are convinced that they will win with God’s help. But “to live by the sword” was never the blessing of Jacob, and to win this war, the fundamentalists tolerate and recommend policies that contradict the most basic rules of the moral code that make us who we are. Instead of defining ourselves, we allow ourselves to be defined by our fears. And when we are defined by our fears, terror has won.

Yes, we have real and legitimate fears, and we need to take reasonable and rational precautions. But, to paraphrase Roosevelt, we need to realize that the even greater threat to us is fear itself.