State of fear

[Classical_Liberal]

........My nerves are rattled rather regularly. My daughter barely escaped injury in the March 1996 terror attack at the Dizengoff Centre in Tel Aviv. The immediate consequences were her refusal to approach Dizengoff Centre or ride a bus for six months. When I finally managed to get her to do so, on condition that I accompany her, she became hysterical when she saw a passenger fiddling with a clock. My daughter was 13 at the time.......

........But that does not mean that my family, in our modest middle class comfort on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, suffer less at the sight of buses blasted apart, of shattered bodies and shattered minds, at the funerals we have to attend. We have worked hard; with luck or the grace of God, we are not living in hovels. But this economic comfort does not deny us our humanity nor guarantee insulation from the costs of this war and its outcomes.

At least partially due to the price of the occupation, Israel can no longer afford a humane welfare state. The number of our destitute is rising daily. Treating the victims of terror has drained the human and financial resources of helping institutions. Demoralisation and normative chaos is spreading: just look at how we drive.

The bottom line is that terror is a double-edged sword. It kills spiritually those who wield it just as surely as it kills physically those who are its target. And vice versa. Israelis are paying a dreadful price for this war. That marvellous exercise in national revival, the establishment of the state of Israel, is being threatened by an increasingly corrupt leadership, a shallow culture and a shaky economy, loss of trust in our fellow men and loss of hope in life itself........

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,10551,1097372,00.html