As World's Gaze Shifts to Gaza, Israel's Psyche Remains Defined by Oct. 7 Attack - The ... - 0 views
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israel psyche palestine attitudes culture politics
shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 23
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When Israel was founded in 1948, the defining goal was to provide a sanctuary for Jews, after 2,000 years of statelessness and persecution. On Oct. 7, that same state proved unable to prevent the worst day of violence against Jews since the Holocaust.
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“At that moment, our Israeli identity felt so crushed. It felt like 75 years of sovereignty, of Israeliness, had — in a snap — disappeared,” said Dorit Rabinyan, an Israeli novelist.“We used to be Israelis,” she added. “Now we are Jewish.”
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For now, the assault has also unified Israeli society to a degree that felt inconceivable on Oct. 6, when Israelis were deeply divided by Mr. Netanyahu’s efforts to reduce the power of the courts; by a dispute about the role of religion in public life; and by Mr. Netanyahu’s own political future.
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Nearly 30 percent of the ultra-Orthodox public now supports the idea of military service, twenty points higher than before the war,
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“Something fundamental has changed here, and we don’t know what it is yet,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, an author and fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a research group in Jerusalem. “What we do know is that this is kind of a last chance for this country.”
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Roughly a third of voters for Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing party, Likud, have abandoned the party since Oct. 7, according to every national poll since the attack.
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Perhaps surprisingly, 70 percent of Arab Israelis now say they feel part of the state of Israel, according to a November poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based research group. That is 22 points higher than in June and the highest proportion since the group began polling on the question two decades ago.
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But for others, the scale of the Oct. 7 atrocities has left them struggling to even empathize with Gazans, let alone retain hope in a peaceful solution to the conflict.In 2018, Mr. Klein Halevi, the author, wrote a book addressed to an imagined Palestinian, “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor,” in which he attempted to set out a vision for a shared future between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.Since Oct. 7, Mr. Halevi said, he has found it hard to even consider what such a future looks like. An observant Jew, he still prays for Palestinians, but more from duty than empathy, he said.“I spent years explaining the Israeli narrative and absorbing the Palestinian narrative — and I tried to find a space where both could live together,” Mr. Klein Halevi said.“I don’t have that language right now,” he said. “It’s emotionally unavailable to me.”