OPINION: Thirty four questions about the war and no good answers

If you are Jewish and live in the diaspora, it’s common to think of Israel as a kind of insurance plan, a refuge for when we are eventually spat out of our gentile homes, as we so often are. But what, I find myself wondering in moments of doubt and despair, if we need an insurance plan from Israel? What if the country is spinning off down a dark path, in which it finds resolution to the Palestinian conflict through crimes that will ring out through history? 

This is one of the many questions that haunts me when I search for sleep each night. I used to just doze off, but now I need the distracting burble of a podcast, preferably one that doesn’t touch on the Middle East, in order to hush the anxious patter of my mind.

Where does this all end, I wonder? When does it end? How?

What if the worst does happen in Gaza? What if it’s already happening? Making the land unliveable for its inhabitants and potentially reoccupying it for yourselves – ethnic cleansing is what you’d have to call it. What other phrase is there? What if Hamas has lured Israel into destroying not just the land of Gaza, but its own sense of decency and humanity? What if the better angels of Israel’s nature died in those tunnels, along with Hersh, Ori, Eden, Almog, Alexander and Carmel? What if the depravities of Nova provoked a revenge spiral that Israel simply can’t pull itself out of?

Some of the questions are more selfish, but I ask them anyway. What will it mean to be a Jew in Britain or France or America by the time this is over? What does life look like for us if Israel is a global pariah? Do people view me differently now? Am I allowed to stay silent and watch on in confusion and pain? Or do I have to respond publicly to every anguished news cycle, even when I’m not certain what actually happened, just to maintain my status as a “good” person?

So many questions. What happens if the International Court of Justice does eventually rule that what’s happening is genocide?

Whatever the motivations of that outcome, the word will become a noose around the country’s neck, tightened by millimetres until it chokes.

And who are these zealots that seek to enact such apocalyptic destruction? Itamar and Bezalel. They look like cuddly Bnei Akiva madrichim. When did we diverge so dramatically, us and them? Or is it that they were always there, and decades of jihad waged upon Israel have brought these radical fringes into the mainstream? Will they ever go back to the fringes?

But I have other questions too, different questions, counterpoints. What if I’ve lost my nerve? What if I’m being a coward, buckling under the criticism because I want to be liked, to be comfortable and unchallenged as a diasporic Jew? For me, this war is a matter of discomfort and distress. For Israel, it is an existential fight that has been going on for 80 years or more. Perhaps none of Israel’s western critics really know what it is like to sit there in the Levant waging war with evil. Perhaps I don’t either.

What if I’ve lost my nerve? What if I’m being a coward, buckling under the criticism because I want to be liked, to be comfortable and unchallenged as a diasporic Jew?

What if we’ve all been played? Not about the death and destruction, nor the restriction of aid; none of that is denied in essence. But about the sharpest, most inhumane of the allegations, filtered through gullible media cheerleaders who are so quick to believe the very worst about Israel’s intentions in every instance and care little for reliable facts.

What if social media has sent us all a bit mad, unmooring us from our moral and philosophical and journalistic anchors? What if this is a cruel war being amped and spun up into a world historical crime by people whose dearest wish is the destruction of the Jewish state? What if this is what war in the Middle East with an enemy such as Hamas, dug in, suicidal, and indifferent to the suffering of its own people, looks like? Why do they never, ever seem to criticise Hamas?

But then, what if there can never be victory in such a war, not without losing a vital part of yourself? What price in civilian life and desolation is too high to defeat such an enemy? Surely this barrier was breached some time ago? When is it enough?

“Od yoter tov, Od yoter tov,” goes the chorus of an Israeli pop song that has become an anthem of this war, meaning “it will get better and better.” But will it? To me that’s a strangely un-Jewish way of thinking. It usually gets worse. It seems to be getting worse. Is there a better world on the other side of this?

Right now I struggle to imagine what that looks like. All I have are more questions.

• Josh Glancy is associate editor at The Sunday Times