The State That Consumes Its Society
The State That Consumes Its Society
“If one question must be asked without end, not because we do not know the answer, but because the answer has been politically silenced, then repeating it is not propaganda. It is a duty.”
Israel’s growing crisis of addiction, insomnia, depression and post-traumatic stress is commonly described as a consequence of October 7 and the wars that followed. The description is not false. It is merely late, narrow and strangely surprised by what it has finally discovered.
After nearly eight decades of war, reserve duty, bereavement, mobilization and permanent emergency, Israeli institutions are beginning to acknowledge that war reorganizes the psychological architecture of society. It enters sleep, family life, work, intimacy, memory and the capacity to distinguish an immediate danger from a political order built around the permanent expectation of danger.
This should not require a new scientific discovery. A society repeatedly held in a state of alarm does not emerge psychologically untouched, and a body trained to remain available for mobilization does not simply return to ordinary life when the uniform is removed. The soldier may be discharged, but the nervous system is not.
Alcohol, cannabis, sedatives and sleeping pills are therefore not the primary crisis. They are provisional instruments of regulation appearing where people can no longer regulate the tension imposed upon them. They make sleep possible after experiences that cannot be integrated, lower a vigilance that no longer knows how to end and permit a temporary return to the appearance of ordinary life.
The crisis is not that Israelis have suddenly become weak. It is that a political order has consumed their capacity to recover and has now begun to measure the resulting damage.
This is where the language of “resilience” enters, carrying the polished innocence of a humanitarian concept. Resilience appears to name strength, adaptation and recovery. In practice, it often means the ability to return to the same conditions that produced the injury without becoming unusable.
The resilient reservist resumes work, repairs family life, manages insomnia, restores mortgage payments and remains available for another call-up. Success is not measured by whether he has recovered his own rhythm, but by whether he has regained functionality. Care quietly changes its purpose: it no longer restores a person to himself but returns him to circulation.
Under such conditions, resilience becomes more than a psychological category. It becomes a moral criterion. Those who endure are mature, responsible and loyal, while those who can no longer endure are described as fragile, frustrated, unstable or insufficiently committed. The violence of the conditions disappears, and the exhausted person is judged for having failed to survive them with sufficient elegance.
The semantic machinery is remarkably efficient. Irritation remains a tolerable disturbance, frustration relocates the conflict inside the individual psyche, and a lack of resilience becomes a defect of character. In a few administrative steps, a political problem can be converted into either a clinical case or a security concern. The system produces the overload, diagnoses the overloaded person and finally evaluates his moral quality.
Resilience also carries a historical charge. The generation of 1948 is repeatedly invoked as the measure of what Israelis once endured and what they should still be capable of enduring. Earlier generations survived war, scarcity, displacement and the construction of a state; the present generation should therefore not complain about prolonged reserve duty, interrupted careers, housing costs or psychological exhaustion.
This is less historical memory than genealogical blackmail. The past is not invoked to understand the present but to shame it, while the differences between the two periods are quietly removed. Sacrifice tied to the construction of a common world is treated as equivalent to sacrifice demanded by a system that distributes risk, protection and continuity increasingly unevenly.
The relevant question is not whether earlier generations endured more. It is what present endurance serves, who benefits from it and what kind of future it still makes possible.
That question becomes unavoidable when one examines the distribution of exposure. Some citizens are repeatedly removed from work, partners, children and civilian time, sent into combat, returned home and summoned again. Their families absorb absence, anxiety, disrupted parenthood, financial instability and the difficult presence of someone who may have returned physically without fully returning psychologically.
Others remain less exposed to these forms of interruption. The asymmetry is not exhausted by the familiar language of “sharing the burden,” because what is distributed unequally is not merely an unpleasant civic duty. It is proximity to death, the continuity of employment, the stability of family life, the possibility of sleep and the right to retain one’s own time.
National statistics conceal this difference by placing radically unequal experiences inside a single category of collective trauma. A reservist who has spent hundreds of days in combat, his partner maintaining the household alone, a child living through repeated parental absence and a citizen protected from prolonged mobilization may all experience anxiety. They have not been exposed to the same intensity, duration or probability of irreversible loss.
The asymmetry does not end on the battlefield. It enters the labor market, the bank, the mortgage office and the possibility of forming a family. This may be the most neglected dimension of Israel’s reserve crisis.
In contemporary Israel, housing has become a material threshold of family continuity. A young couple does not ask only whether it can pay this month’s rent. It asks whether it can secure enough stability for children, childcare, transport, work and debt over the next twenty or thirty years.
The reservist enters this calculation with a peculiar disadvantage. Banks do not lend against courage, sacrifice or the number of days spent in uniform. They lend against stable income, professional continuity, repayment history and predictable future earnings.
For salaried workers, repeated call-ups may delay promotion, reduce bonuses, complicate job changes and weaken professional continuity. Legal protection against dismissal cannot eliminate every calculation made by an employer who requires predictable availability. For freelancers, the self-employed and small-business owners, the consequences can be more severe: months of absence may mean lost clients, interrupted contracts, declining revenue and the collapse of professional relationships built over years.
State compensation may reduce an immediate financial loss, but it cannot restore a professional trajectory. It does not return the client who left, the promotion that never occurred or the moment when an apartment was still within reach. The state compensates days of service. It does not compensate lost continuity.
Israel does not merely requisition the reservist’s time. It requisitions his biographical time: the years in which a person builds a profession, accumulates savings, acquires creditworthiness, purchases a home, forms a family and decides whether another child is materially possible.
Biographical time is not renewable. Money can be paid later, medals can be awarded later and therapy can be provided later, but the thirty-second year of a life cannot be returned to someone at forty-two. The state may release a reservist back into civilian life, but it cannot return him to the economic and personal moment from which he was removed.
The housing market makes this contradiction visible. Foreign and diaspora capital does not dominate Israel’s entire property market, and it would be inaccurate to treat overseas buyers as the principal cause of the housing crisis. Yet in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Netanya and other expensive locations, buyers with dollar-based income or accumulated capital enter the market under very different conditions from young Israeli households dependent on local wages.
One buyer may purchase an apartment as an investment, a second home, a refuge or preparation for future aliyah. The reservist is trying to acquire the material basis of an ordinary life. For one, the apartment is a reserve asset; for the other, it is the precondition of a family.
Israel asks the reservist to defend the national home while steadily weakening his ability to obtain a home of his own. This is not a metaphor but an institutional contradiction. The state celebrates family formation and demographic continuity while repeatedly removing young adults from employment, relationships and economic development at precisely the stage when family life demands the greatest material stability.
This is also why the language of “security” deserves more scrutiny than it normally receives. Security is presented as the final justification of state action and is rarely required to explain itself. Once invoked, it reorganizes law, economics, morality, memory and time. Other values remain legitimate only insofar as they do not interfere with it.
But whose security is being produced?
The reservist loses sleep, income, health, family time, professional continuity and physical safety. He may be exposed to enemy drones so that the state can announce that it is defending national security. Individual security is taken from him and transferred to an abstract subject called the state.
The same word remains in use on both sides, although its owner has changed. The state provides itself with security by taking security away from those whom it sends to provide it.
This is an extraordinary political inversion. The citizen is no longer protected so that the community may exist; the citizen is exposed so that the security apparatus may preserve its own continuity. Some bodies become zones of exposure, others beneficiaries of protection, while the language of national necessity gives the arrangement an appearance of moral inevitability.
The question is therefore no longer whether Israel is sufficiently secure. It is what security becomes when the society it was meant to protect is gradually transformed into its material.
If society is the content of the state, the state has no legitimacy apart from the lives, families, bodies, work and future of its citizens. When society becomes a resource, however, the state begins to operate in the name of its own reproduction, its own apparatuses and its own continuity. It may then consume the very conditions of its existence.
A society is not a warehouse of bodies that can be repeatedly activated. It is a continuity of time, trust, work, birth, memory, housing and the ability to imagine a future. When the state appropriates these processes, it no longer merely governs society. It begins to extract it.
The deeper barbarism lies not only in sending people to war, but in turning their nervous systems into infrastructure, their metabolism into a security asset and their family lives into logistical variables. The reservist returns from service, yet his body remains available. Sleep becomes a repair function, therapy becomes maintenance, and family resilience becomes the ability to absorb another absence.
Care then ceases to challenge the machinery of exhaustion and becomes one of its repair departments.
This is why words matter. “Resilience,” “security,” “frustration,” “trauma,” “unity” and “sacrifice” are not neutral descriptions. They organize what can be seen and what must remain hidden. Resilience evaluates the person who fails to endure while concealing the violence of the conditions. Frustration translates political conflict into individual malfunction. Security transfers protection from the citizen to the apparatus. Unity suspends the question of unequal exposure, while sacrifice gives moral beauty to costs that may have been distributed unjustly.
Thinking begins when these words are required to explain what they do.
This is not an attack on Israel or on the state. It is a refusal to allow politically productive words to pass as innocent. A society that can no longer ask what its most sacred terms are doing has not preserved unity; it has suspended thought.
The irony is that Israel takes pride in argument, interpretation and the refusal to leave a word unquestioned. Yet some of its most consequential political terms now function precisely by discouraging interpretation.
In whose name does a state act when society is no longer its content but its resource? What future is being protected when those expected to create that future are deprived of the time, housing, stability and material and metabolic capacity required to produce it? What does national security mean when it is purchased through the progressive insecurity of the people assigned to defend it?
Israel may not yet be running out of soldiers. It may be running out of the society from which soldiers, families, homes and a common future can still be formed.
Yochanan Schimmelpfennig
