Desperation as a paradigm

One thing we are not allowed to practice in Israel is desperation. We must negate it! "There is no desperation," we keep on declaring; desperation is death.On the road to education, we have been warned again and again not to allow history to repeat itself. History is over for us; we must not allow it to come back. We listened too well in history class, and we feel it returns. Some talk about hope, some about "Zionism"; we wait for an event to tell us where we are going - an event which never comes.Desperation creeps from the corner of the darkroom; it takes over, whether we like it or not. To go all the way in the political practice, we can't. Our public has become non-legitimate; to participate in the war with complete conviction, we are also unable to - we don't understand the war as others do.One leg is still inside; it becomes numb, but we can still feel the cold. The other leg is outside, and the foreign passport is pressed against the skin from inside the pocket. We are desperate, and what do we do with the remaining energy? We try to keep up appearances; the prohibition on desperation is so stringent that it overcomes the most basic instinct of living.The times are of "any man to himself"; hug your children! Because who knows what will come tomorrow? You need to think for yourself which side of the barricade you want to end up on. The voice of desperation must return. We are the left; we move from desperation. Melancholic science is our scholarly spring of action.The melancholic sees the truth: succumbing to desperation is the paradigm shift we need. Moving forward without stopping means saying yes to horrible things (and I don't mean only war crimes). We must stop and rethink our lives, even if it means running away. At its core, Zionism is about running from a broken place and rebuilding from the start. Do we have the courage to restart? Is the truth able to return to the humble space it used to occupy? Times are changing, and Something is crawling up your back; we can't see it. Do you yet feel it? Are you beginning to surrender to the truth?

Nothing ever happens

People like us, the "Citizens" of the state, were born into a world where everything has already happened in it. What is the worst thing that could happen, you ask? The answer is: it has already happened. Our parents, who saw it all with their own eyes, couldn't do anything but become "Realists". Life happened to them. There is no "Event" in our life, no occurrence we could say about, "There is a before and a beginning." The only thing we know for sure is the "in retrospect"—"We knew this would happen." We've been told all the time something is about to happen, and we wait on the edge of our seats. We can't break guard, but the eyes close on their own. We must always do something to stop the never-stop-coming fate. More and more, we keep getting smarter, but all this knowledge can do is testify to the truth—nothing ever happens. At the end of the news, the hot woman says it is going to rain tomorrow. I thought to myself that she is always right. Her truth is not the weather; her truth is the forecast, that we do know about what is happening out there.