More than three weeks after that blackest Shabbat in our Israeli history, we remain, unsurprisingly, a nation deep in shock.
Shocked at the unrestrained murderous savagery that thousands of our neighbors unleashed upon us — the hysterical exultation with which they ripped away 1,400 lives in ways many of us still will not bring ourselves to watch.
Shocked that we allowed it to happen — that we were so devastatingly complacent, misguided, delusional; so convinced that everything they were showing and telling us about how they were going to murder us was untrue. That our political leaders so misjudged and underestimated the depth of their hatred, and their capacity to turn it into action. That our military chiefs were so unconscionably unconcerned, so distracted.
Shocked at ourselves, too, in any and every field — emphatically including journalism — where a greater capacity to look our enemies in the eye, and internalize what they had in mind for us, might, just might, have helped shift ...
