#Palestine / Loss resilience or adherence to losses as a social glue in Israel
What do you call a group that embraces violence and a lack of regard for human life? Israelis are already using the term “death eaters” to describe the religious right, and they have a reason. But this term might apply to a much larger portion of the Israeli population today.
A recent analysis of cultural attitudes toward casualties in the ongoing Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories (aka Israeli-Palestinian “conflict”) reveals a significant shift in societal values. The study, focusing on the period surrounding October 2024, identifies the rise of a "loss resilience" ethos, indeed particularly within right-wing and religious Zionist circles.
This new paradigm prioritizes unwavering commitment to the occupation and acceptance of casualties as a necessary cost, often at the expense of previous values emphasizing empathy and questioning the inevitability of loss.
From the paper:
[…] The new ethos of loss resilience engages in a directed debate with two earlier values that provided collective meaning to death in war. The first value, the ethos of self-sacrifice, is a conscious act of a heroic warrior, whose willingness to die glorifies the collective for whom he sacrifices his life. However, the commemoration of soldiers in recent months is almost not dedicated to the glory of the nation, and even ignores the war. Stickers commemorating the fallen in the public space describe the qualities of the fallen as human beings, not as soldiers. At the same time, activity and heroism are attributed mainly to the public's "resilience," which does not question the war policy and the routine of mourning, but rather accepts the unending death of its best sons and daughters.
[…] The second value, sensitivity towards losses in war, is the central value against which the new ethos of resilience rebels. Sensitivity to losses as a shared ethos gained momentum in the 1990s, mainly against the backdrop of the First Lebanon War, and included questioning mourning as an inevitable and unifying experience. Sensitivity to losses united a liberal political camp that promoted peace efforts, and reached its peak three years after the "helicopter disaster," when the IDF withdrew from the security zone (for more on the decline in militarism in those years, see Levy, 2023).
Hebrew https://www.kriot.co.il/%D7%93%D7%91%D7%A7%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%91%D7%90%D7%91%D6%B5%D7%93%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%9B%D7%93%D7%91%D7%A7-%D7%97%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%AA%D7%99-%D7%91%D7%99%D7%A9%D7%A8%D7%90%D7%9C/
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