Paranoia: It seems to be going around these days. When the sirens go off, you know it’s nothing personal. Just an ongoing, multi-billion rial attempt to kill a handful of Jews. And yet, when your little community shows up as a red pin smack in the middle of a clump of red siren-alert pins on the news chat, it’s hard not to feel they’re gunning straight for you.

The Iranians are paranoid – one of those “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you” kind of situations. Okay, it’s true people who negotiate with the Americans tend to end up dead, so one can understand their reluctance to meet with American negotiators. But they have apparently gone off the deep end as far as irrational fears go, shutting down a chain of coffee houses, just because their take-away cups show an empty chair. That chair, they fear, might signify an insult to the new supreme leader, referring to the fact he has not been seen in public. Does the supreme leader (who is presumed injured or maybe really badly injured) truly care about cardboard cups? Or is someone else in the Iranian shadow government worried about the whispered conversations of students who, as we all know, like to drink coffee?

They do also seem to be paranoid about the US plans for the next phase of the war, which, considering the noisy approach of ground troops, does not seem to be all that unreasonable.

Our government is paranoid. Netanyahu’s secret underground bunkers are not news anymore, but we are apparently spending millions of shekels on new ones. Our motto has been “trust no one,” even if we work hand-in-hand, or fighter jet nose-to-jet-nose, with the US. Which is fine until it’s not, as we don’t quite trust President Trump to end the war when WE’RE ready, instead of when HE’S ready. And that’s a problem because, let’s face it, most Americans have been ready since day one.

We don’t trust Lebanon to deal with Hezbollah, so we’ll just do it for them. Sorry about the southern part of your country. Our frenzied paranoia is reflected in the news: Hezbollah and Hamas are rearming day to day! If we don’t kill them all right away, we’ll just have to go through the whole thing over again in a year or two! If anything, the media feeds a paranoia that is worse than that of our government, as we find we cannot trust our own sources of information while simultaneously fearing they are right.

We don’t trust Syria. We do trust Saudi Arabia and Qatar, but only when convenient, and we sort of, sometimes, trust Egypt, but give them little reason to trust us. Our leaders don’t trust their own citizens, which is why they must constantly lie to us. It is why, when a handful of anti-war demonstrators turned out on a rainy Saturday night to brave the sirens, arrests ensued. Not yet Iranian-style, but still.

The thing about rampant national paranoia is that it is not a good basis for truce negotiations. I’m not talking about needing trust, which must be earned, but just a willingness to talk to one another with a modicum of good faith. Paranoia is what causes the Iranians to pile clauses on top of their conditions in which they not only get to keep their nuclear stockpile, but can continue to arm our twin nemeses Hamas and Hezbollah. Paranoia is what keeps Netanyahu on late-night phone calls to Trump begging him to keep the war going, even at the cost of bombing popularity and sky-rocketing gas prices.

Paranoia is unhealthy, whether you’re a person sitting in an airless room waiting for the all-clear while your government tells you the fighting is going to continue indefinitely, or whether you’re the head of a country certain the price on your head comes with a shiny satellite-based tracker. I’m not sure where the cool heads are, but we need some now. When the way out of our present situation is clouded by crazy fear and instability – mental and otherwise – we need negotiators who can look into the future, institutions that can ensure compliance and countries that seek sanity for their citizens. We need some who know the meaning of trust and who understand we must foster that trust, on all sides, if we are to survive.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)