There is a macabre irony in the news coming from northern Galilee and the borders with Gaza. While radars intercept drones and children in elementary schools replace art class with drills in shelters, Israeli society seems to be a victim of that "technical malfunction" that Egyptian satire wrote about years ago, as Odeh Bisharat reminds us on the pages ofHaaretz: a brief interruption of peace quickly corrected by the return to the normality of war. But this normality is not an accident; it is the product of an existential posture that has its roots in an unresolved trauma, turning memory into a weapon of permanent offense.
For decades, the official narrative of the Jewish state has intertwined the threads of the Holocaust with those of military necessity. The imperative of "Never again" has been framed not as a universal commitment against dehumanization, but as a special license for absolute militarization. Within this psychological perimeter, the world is an intrinsically hostile place and the enemy is never a political actor to negotiate with, but the metaphysical embodiment of the oppressor.
It is the famousMasada Syndrome, or the deep conviction that the rest of the world is hostile, that destruction is imminent, and that the only alternative to submission is heroic resistance to the point of self-destruction.
The term derives from the siege of the fortress of Masada (73-74 AD) during the First Jewish-Roman War, when, according to the historian Josephus Flavius, about 960 Jews preferred mass suicide to capture and slavery by the Roman legions.
The trauma of persecution, never collectively processed except in terms of force, has produced a society that sees the "enemy everywhere" in order not to look within itself. If Iran, Hezbollah, or Hamas are always, invariably, the "new Gestapo," then every response – even the most disproportionate, even the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure in Lebanon or the genocide by starvation in Gaza – becomes an act of legitimate defense. It is the paradox of the persecuted who, to exorcise the specter of their own extermination, ends up adopting the methods, language, and logic of the brute force of their historical persecutor.
The chronicles of recent days are emblematic. While diplomatic tables struggle to outline ceasefire lines, Israeli politics – from Netanyahu's far-right coalition to parts of the "Zionist" opposition – seems to feel a thrill of relief when the bombs start falling again. The nation finds its purpose. Without the enemy, without the smell of gunpowder, the State of Israel seems to lose its cohesive identity.
IT IS A FORMof militaristic addiction. The "total victory" promised by Netanyahu is an impossible logical concept, a horizon that always shifts one meter further away. If victory were truly total, the war would end, and with it, the social and economic model on which the country stands would also end. Hence the necessity for a "relatively total victory": a low or high-intensity conflict that renews itself every day, a routine of blood that serves to maintain internal control and justify colonial expansion.
The most tragic aspect is the desensitization. In the northern schools, the return to 'normalcy' coincides with the inspection of the rubble to ensure there are no unexploded ordnance. The settlers pack their bags to occupy southern Lebanon with the same naturalness as preparing for a day trip. The dehumanization of the other – whether Palestinian, Lebanese, or Iranian – has become a prerequisite for the psychological survival of the average Israeli citizen. Yet, as evidenced by soldiers who become vegetarians because the smell of meat evokes that of corpses, reality dismantles every ideological barrier.
The cost of this perpetual militarization is not only measured in geopolitical terms; it digs deep into the psyche of an entire generation. The testimonies emerging from the Gaza front describe a phenomenon that military psychiatry struggles to label: the 'moral injury.' It is not the fear of death (the classic PTSD), but the horror of what one has become.
Haaretzinterviewed some soldiers, like 'Yuval' and other colleagues, high-tech programmers turned snipers who shoot at unarmed teenagers; or like 'Maya,' who helplessly witnesses degrading humiliation rituals on prisoners. 'I felt they didn’t understand that I wasn’t a good person; quite the opposite,' confesses someone who returned from the front being welcomed as a hero, while internally feeling like a 'monster.'
THIS IS WHERE THE CIRCLEof trauma closes: the army that calls itself "the most moral in the world" produces thousands of young people who can no longer look at themselves in the mirror, tormented by the screams of prisoners tortured with electric cables or by the memory of civilians buried by bulldozers to "prevent disease." The military institution, to protect the myth of its own purity, has begun to call these pathologies "identity wounds," fearing that the term "moral" might irritate politicians or challenge the narrative of the famous "total victory."
Israel today feeds on its own trauma and no longer sees the faces of its victims, but only the reflection of its ancestral right to strike first. But a society that needs war to feel alive and sees peace as a "technical malfunction" to be repaired as soon as possible is a society that has already lost its most important battle. That with its own humanity.