The Wrong Truth

I feel the heat on the asphalt of Israel not as a whim of the weather, but as an intimate moral punishment. Sweat drips down the collars of men in crowded cafes from one end of the country to the other, soaking their shirts, their skin and their very souls. The common citizen swallows his meal with the tragic haste of a condemned man hearing his own footsteps on death row. I observe my compatriots with the cruel intimacy of someone sharing the same bomb shelter and the same trauma ward, their faces illuminated by the ghostly glow of screens. There is a sickly love that binds me to this land, the passion of an inconsolable widow chained to the corpse of her husband. Walking these sidewalks today requires the stomach of a coroner, because our tragedy is the howling obvious. The majority of my people, numbed by panic and the innate cowardice of crowds, have turned their backs on decency and fervently embraced the wrong truth.

Every unanimity is blind, deaf and murderous. This bovine conformity to the narrative of survival at any cost is our greatest historical disgrace. The ordinary man, from the desert to the coast, is terrified of being alone. The terror of the disapproval of a neighbor is infinitely greater than the terror of an enemy rocket. To avoid being the leper of his circle of friends, the civilized individual swallows his own decency. At Friday dinners, between the baked fish, the bread and the wine, the defense of carnage is served with the astonishing naturalness of a burp. The urgency of self defense has become the perfect alibi for our most intimate villainy. No one wants to think, because thinking hurts, isolates and ages you. Tribal stupidity, on the other hand, is a warm and seductive bath.

The average man suffers from an unshakeable pathological presumption. He firmly believes that destiny has set up a celestial tribunal reserved solely to stamp our eternal innocence. It is the obscene arrogance of the eternally wronged. The fellow justifies the barbarity of today by transferring the blame to the inexhaustible ghost of tomorrow, washes his bloodstained hands in the kitchen sink and sleeps the massive sleep of the just. History, however, is a fickle tramp who sleeps with the winner of today and stabs him tomorrow morning. Believing that we are the flawless and perennial victim is the delirium of a terminal patient tearing up his medical diagnosis. The future will not absolve us. The future will expose our dreadful nakedness.

To love the tribe with such hysteria, one must assassinate empathy with cruel refinement. Our patriotism has degenerated into a daily exercise in cynicism, in which a person must look at the corpse in the next street, at the ruins across the border, and see there only an acceptable miscalculation. It is the absolute triumph of insensitivity. The individual weeps copiously over the death of his pet dog, yet watches the annihilation of an entire family with the bureaucratic coldness of an accountant. The stubborn refusal to acknowledge the pain of those who terrorize us is not an instinct of self preservation, it is the rotting of the soul. When the cry of a mother means absolutely nothing simply because she was born to another people, we have already lost the war and our humanity.

Lucidity, in this country of hardened sleepwalkers, is the worst of curses. The lucid man walks with nails in his shoes, looks at his own flag waving on the mast and feels an uncontrollable urge to vomit. This nausea is not born of hatred for the homeland, but of a desperate love for what it should be. Assessing the moral sludge into which we have sunk requires the courage of a martyr and the coldness of a suicide. There is no clean war, there is no pure good against evil, there is only the broken bone, the dust and our hysterical refusal to claim authorship of the disaster. The true patriot today is the traitor, the one who points a finger in the face of his brother and warns that we are marching straight into the abyss.

Living the rigor of this uncertainty is a daily torment. Waking up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, and asking the bedroom ceiling if our national cohesion is nothing but a pact among gangsters. The pathological fear of being the pariah at Saturday lunch has turned us into polite monsters. When preserving the unity of the nation requires the surgical amputation of the conscience, all that remains is a uniformed corpse. The country we swore to protect tooth and nail has become a machine for grinding virtues, justifying any baseness in the name of an intangible good. We embrace monstrosity under the disguise of historical necessity and, holding hands, blindfolded and with petrified hearts, we consecrate our ruin by choosing the wrong truth.