Opinion | Israel Is More Fortress Than Home Right Now

As the morning of Oct. 7 recedes into the distance, its horrors only seem to be growing. Again and again, we Israelis tell ourselves what has become part of the formative story of our identity and our destiny. How for several hours Hamas terrorists invaded the homes of Israelis, murdered some 1,200 people, raped and kidnapped, looted and burned. During those nightmarish hours, before the Israel Defense Forces snapped out of its shock, Israelis had a harsh and concrete glimpse of what might happen if their country not only suffered a punishing blow but also actually ceased to exist. If Israel were no longer.

I have talked with Jewish people living outside of Israel who have said that their physical — and spiritual — existence felt vulnerable during those hours. But more than that: Something of their life force had been taken, forever. Some were even surprised by the magnitude to which they needed Israel to exist both as an idea and as a concrete fact.

As the army began to strike back, civil society was already enlisting en masse in rescue and logistical operations, with many thousands of citizens volunteering to do what the government should have been doing were it not in a state of feckless paralysis.

At the time of publication, according to data from the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, more than 30,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip since Oct. 7. They include many children, women and civilians, many of whom were not Hamas members and played no part in the cycle of war. “Uninvolved,” as Israel calls them in conflictese, the language with which nations at war deceive themselves so as not to face the repercussions of their acts.

The renowned kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem coined a saying: “All the blood flows to the wound.” Nearly five months after the massacre, that is how Israel feels. The fear, the shock, the fury, the grief and humiliation and vengefulness, the mental energies of an entire nation — all of those have not stopped flowing to that wound, to the abyss into which we are still falling.

We cannot put aside our thoughts of the young girls and women, and the men, too, it seems, who were raped by attackers from Gaza, murderers who filmed their own crimes and broadcast them live to the victims’ families; of the babies killed; of the families burned alive.