They no longer have names or faces. Their deaths are no longer a "wake up call." Not a "failure" or a reason to demand that someone accept responsibility. Their deaths are a "price." A price of "getting back to normal," a price paid in blood for the right to declare that "the country stayed open, without lockdowns." We could call them "victims of containment," if one could find a jaded enough PR person. A thousand dead – in three months. More since then. Or fewer, it depends on whom you ask and what tally you go by. And that's another sign of the zeitgeist – we've stopped counting. We've stopped tracking the numbers. The days when we collectively awaited the news updates that announced, in formal language, that "the death toll has risen …" are over.
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It would be too easy, too predictable, to point out the hypocrisy. It screams, and there's no need to point a finger at it. The victims of the fourth COVID wave haven't been given dramatic front pages in the newspapers, no one counts them on billboards, and they aren't even a ticker on current events shows. No one is striding up to the podium and shouting, "Our people are dying!" Not even the person who stood up and shouted that the last time. Especially not him.
Even the debate about the numbers has been shoved into fringe Twitter threads. It's not urgent enough for anyone to report, and no one has a burning desire to know exactly how many have died since the start of the current wave, how many died last month, or how many died this week. How many we lost by nightfall.
And when we do note their number, it's only to compare it to the larger number who died in the same period last year. In other words, if they are of any interest at all, it's only so they can be used for a little politicking. This is no longer just hypocrisy – its blood-curdling cynicism.
And that's the deep-rooted thing that we need to understand: that we are in an Oslo state of mind. The COVID dead are like the "victims of peace," except that for the latter group, the radio would play sad songs after a terrorist's explosives belt detonated and sent them to heaven. We have returned, big-time, to a mentality of "the big goal" or, more accurately, "for the sake of the big goal." Of "regretting every casualty," but not allowing it to take our eyes off the prize for a second. This time, too, we're calling it "making a brave decision."
We're back to that same macabre dissonance in which an insane reality of grief, tears, casualties, people left permanently disabled, and an inconceivable emotional burden on our daily lives as well as the defense system and first responders exists under a government that celebrates victories and a media that praises its successes. Again, there is the same infuriating gap between rhetoric and reality, between the leadership and what happens on the ground, between ceremony and ordinary life.
And, just like back then, anyone who dares point this out, anyone who so much as looks like they might stick a spoke in the wheels of the runaway train is immediately condemned as an "inciter." Along with "containing death," the mental oppression of free criticism is also back. There is no longer any such thing as legitimate opposition. Everything is "Bibi-style incitement," "toxic discourse," or "unacceptable politicization."
On the eve of Yom Kippur, former MK Ayelet Nahmias-Verbin wrote on Twitter: "It's Yom Kippur Eve and the feed is full of inciting remarks about the prime minister. There isn't even a pretense that today we will be fasting for our sins, or even a symbolic modification of tone. Fraud at 500 km/hour." And because I respect her, I ask: Have we shared the same scrap of reality for the past two or three years, in which the home newspaper of Israel's cultural and legal elite seriously entertained comparisons between Netanyahu and Hitler, or Ceaușescu? Do we remember who occupied the government ministries after they compared Netanyahu to Erdogan, called his ministers "disgusting" and "sh*ts," and attributed to his supporters the psychosis of cult victims? Do we remember how at demonstrations praised by former Prime Minister Ehud Barak – which became the subject of exhibits of glorification in Rabin Square and were even canonized in art books – national symbols were desecrated, giant inflated penises were waves, and female celebrity protesters walked around carrying signs saying, "Bibi F**ked Me and Never Called"?
And yes, this is directly related to the subject with which we began. With 1,000 dead in the first wave, it was possible to strew moral panic and rush to blame the government for the "failure," and it was also acceptable to resort to despicable election propaganda that used images of meetings of the investigative committee charged with looking into the government's handling of the COVID crisis, with references to that other investigative committee, that other failure that led to that war back then. None of this was considered politicization of death, or toxic, or incitement. But when the cries of the family of Barel Hadaria Shmueli tear the skies open – the discourse police start handing out its tickets, and to the same people who came to embrace them.
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These are the same repeated patterns of institutional, official insensitivity to death and bereavement, and oversensitivity to protests, as their eyes remain on the target. They won't let death spoil the big picture, and certainly won't let the bastards raise their heads.
But I think that today's bastards are a kind of mirror. The huge panic their style creates, the urgent need to self-righteously mark them as a threat to our spiritual wholeness as a society, make them into a good reason to relaunch a discussion about the limits of stateliness and even the establishment of an entity that would "set rules for incitement on social media," or whatever – all this is a provocation, a psychological mechanism to throw off the moral stain that has stuck to us as a society during this accursed fourth wave. Because this is the wave in which we finally bid farewell to what is so Israeli, so Jewish, the total and complete opposite of our interior minister saying "know how to accept the deaths."
Ultimately, the Israeli government has forced on us all a moral defeat whose ramifications for our consciences we will have to carry for the rest of our lives – many people were exposed to possible death and might even have died so our illusion of normalcy wouldn't be disturbed. So that our comfortable routine wouldn't be disrupted. And they bore the burden without being recruited, without volunteering, without it even occurring to us to discuss "bearing the burden." And no, this isn't roulette. This wasn't a death lottery, in which each of us had an equal chance of dying for "the good of the collective." We put the weak, the bodily impaired, the vulnerable, the founding generation, and even the less privileged on the front line.
We can't evade it – a big part of our conscience has faded away, and along with is something in our social soul has been extinguished. Whether we want to or not, our general is responsible for sacrificing the lives of others, not for survival's sake but for a false sense of "normalcy" and we will never go back to what we were. This is the true legacy of the Bennett-Lapid government. Don't be stately now – scream.
