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........

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