"We are here so that in the country where our children will live, there will be equal rights, this is what we are fighting for," opposition leader Yair Lapid promised at a demonstration in Rishon LeZion in March last year, one of hundreds of demonstrations held over the past year in an attempt to stop the legal reform.
Yair Lapid was misled, and not just Lapid. While thousands demonstrated weekly for their children, other children were abandoned. Children who did not receive equality and did not receive a hug from Dan to Eilat, and a feeling that their war is the war of all of us: the children of Sderot and the envelope. It is clear to most of us that the October 7 massacre would not have been possible without the government's policy of containment, which included serial disregard for the strengthening of Hamas and the funneling of resources into the Gaza Strip; But let's face it – it wasn't just the government that contained.
We, the citizens, also contained.
The fact that parents run with children and babies in their arms to the safe rooms at all hours of the day and night has become, in our eyes, the new normal, he explained, a small price to pay for living alongside a difficult neighbor. The distress of the envelope became their "problem" – and as long as the missiles did not reach the center, they were not really a news item. The apathy led to the fact that the gates of hell opened over our heads out of the blue, but let's assume for a moment that we are not the story here. The apathy has made the lives of the residents of the envelope unbearable at times, with almost no one feeling that anything here seems strange.
Over the past year, the citizens of Israel have proven that they know how to take to the streets when something seems important enough to them. Saturday after Saturday, major roads were blocked here, because eliminating the cause of reasonableness – or its existence – is perceived as a greater blow to democracy than citizens who live under constant threat to their lives, children who do not stop wetting at night, women with higher abortion rates. How did we let it go on like this?
The government will be held accountable. She must. And if she refuses, we'll take to the streets on that, too, left and right. I still remember standing in late summer 2006 in Rabin Square, shouting with everyone that Halutz and Olmert and Peretz should go home. But our only civilian red line cannot be the government. This war requires us to take stock of what brings us to the streets.
It should sharpen in us the understanding that problems cannot be isolated, and that barrels of explosives cannot be allowed to lie still for years, and then be amazed when they explode.
As in the security, intelligence, and political establishments, the civilian system must now change its perception and ask itself what is the next failure it must fight against. We need to identify the next mission, which requires a broad mobilization of consciousness, first and foremost, that is taking place on the northern border. Residents of the north receive less empathy, and in any case it will be easier for the state to decide to bring them home. When the focus is on the Gaza front and the abductees, it is too easy to let the Radwan force become a problem for the mayor of Kiryat Shmona and the residents of Shlomi. It is all too easy to forget that beautiful Metula has become a ghost town, and that children from all communities along the border are forced to migrate and move as refugees in their country, homesick.
The fact that parents run with children and babies in their arms to the safe rooms at all hours of the day and night has become, in our eyes, the new normal, he explained, a small price to pay for living alongside a difficult neighbor. The distress of the envelope became their "problem" - and as long as the missiles did not reach the center, they were not really a news item
But this does not stop at the current security challenge. The mental health crisis, the violence of asylum seekers in south Tel Aviv, and the fact that at least a third of the women murdered each year are widely recognized – are the "alarm in the envelope" of today. Big problems that are too easy to turn into something that happens "there", something "complex", not to say political, that no one wants to go to war against it because there is always so much to lose, and that the voice of those who suffer – the mentally ill, residents of south Tel Aviv, women in the cycle of violence – is not important enough.
But if there is one thing that needs to change today, even before the commissions of inquiry, it is that there is no more containment. Where the government abandons it, citizens will make their voices heard.
Wrong? We'll fix it! If you find a mistake in the article, please share with us