The State That Consumes Its Society

“If one question must be asked without end, not because we do not know the answer, but because the answer has been politically silenced, then repeating it is not propaganda. It is a duty.”

Israel’s growing crisis of addiction, insomnia, depression and post-traumatic stress is commonly described as a consequence of October 7 and the wars that followed. The description is not false. It is merely late, narrow and strangely surprised by what it has finally discovered.

After nearly eight decades of war, reserve duty, bereavement, mobilization and permanent emergency, Israeli institutions are beginning to acknowledge that war reorganizes the psychological architecture of society. It enters sleep, family life, work, intimacy, memory and the capacity to distinguish an immediate danger from a political order built around the permanent expectation of danger.

This should not require a new scientific discovery. A society repeatedly held in a state of alarm does not emerge psychologically untouched, and a body trained to remain available for mobilization does not simply return to ordinary life when the uniform is removed. The soldier may be discharged, but the nervous system is not.

Alcohol, cannabis, sedatives and sleeping pills are therefore not the primary crisis. They are provisional instruments of regulation appearing where people can no longer regulate the tension imposed upon them. They make sleep possible after experiences that cannot be integrated, lower a vigilance that no longer knows how to end and permit a temporary return to the appearance of ordinary life.

The crisis is not that Israelis have suddenly become weak. It is that a political order has consumed their capacity to recover and has now begun to measure the resulting damage.

This is where the language of “resilience” enters, carrying the polished innocence of a humanitarian concept. Resilience appears to name strength, adaptation and recovery. In practice, it often means the ability to return to the same conditions that produced the injury without becoming unusable.

The resilient reservist resumes work, repairs family life, manages insomnia, restores mortgage payments and remains available for another call-up. Success is not measured by whether he has recovered his own rhythm, but by whether he has regained functionality. Care quietly changes its purpose: it no longer restores a person to himself but returns him to circulation.

Under such conditions, resilience becomes more than a psychological category. It becomes a moral criterion. Those who endure are mature, responsible and loyal, while those who can no longer endure are described as fragile, frustrated, unstable or insufficiently committed. The violence of the conditions disappears, and the exhausted person is judged for having failed to survive them with sufficient elegance.

The semantic machinery is remarkably efficient. Irritation remains a tolerable disturbance, frustration relocates the conflict inside the individual psyche, and a lack of resilience becomes a defect of character. In a few administrative steps, a political problem can be converted into either a clinical case or a security concern. The system produces the overload, diagnoses the overloaded person and finally evaluates his........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)