In the Netherlands, where I live, public discussion about Israel often feels unusually certain. People speak with confidence about a conflict far away, in a region most have never visited and whose realities they know only through screens. That distance matters more than we like to admit.

After October 7, when Hamas carried out its attack on Israeli civilians, the initial shock was widely acknowledged. But what followed in much of the public discourse was something more complicated: the focus quickly shifted away from what had happened, and toward the response that followed. The framing changed almost immediately, and with it, the emotional direction of the conversation.

I noticed this not only in media coverage, but in everyday conversations.

The events themselves were often no longer the starting point. They became background material. At the center of this shift is a broader problem: how information is received, filtered, and emotionally processed in real........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)