Current section Israel News In the Rush to Move On, Who Will Make Israel Face Its Moral Failures?

An IDF helicopter bringing a hostage home, on Monday. Once the goal of returning hostages was achieved, the "other Israel," like postwar "good Germans," risks becoming a voyeuristic elite, unable to convert moral consciousness to political action. Credit: Itai Ron

"The other Germany" is a phrase that entered public discourse in Israel in the early 1950s, during debates over the reparations agreements with the postwar German government. Its origins, though, go back much farther. A small newspaper in 1920s Berlin bore that very name, seeking to frame post-World War I Germany as a moral, pacifist country that was aware of its historical responsibility.

The newspaper was shut down after Hitler's ascension to power, but the term "the other Germany" remained cultural currency: an expression of the possibility of a different Germany – national but not nationalistic, capable of grieving over its decisions and of looking squarely at its face in the mirror of history. In the midst of World War II, in a recorded speech aired on the radio from his place of exile in California, Thomas Mann prepared his compatriots for the idea that "the other Germany" could rebuild itself – not out of pride but out of shame.

In psychoanalytical terms, the need to speak of an "other Germany" was a response to the catastrophic losses it caused during the war. In "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud distinguished between mourning – the process of separating from a lost object and its idealization – and melancholia, in which the lost object loses its reality but remains imprisoned within the psyche, paralyzing its capacity to grow and develop.

German psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich later described postwar German society as suffering from "the inability to mourn," a community that recognized its military defeat but not the depth of its emotional and ideal investment in the murderous father. The state sought to forget what it had wrought too quickly. Out of that selective amnesia emerged a culture that spoke of "reconstruction" and "normalization" instead of responsibility and guilt.

A similar process is now underway in Israel. But this is not a defeated dictatorship seeking redemption. It is a theocracy in-the-making: a democracy unravelling from within, where the psychic elements that once sustained reflection, doubt and moral conscious have eroded. Into that void rushes the trauma of October 7, 2023, when Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing and abducting civilians. Alongside the Holocaust, this trauma has rapidly become a founding myth of contemporary Israel and its defenses.

Out of this climate a new language has begun to form – one that calls itself "the other Israel." It reflects the self-image of Israelis who want to bring the country back from the brink while preserving a liberal, humane identity in the face of rising nationalism, militarism and personality cult.

But, like "the other Germany" after 1945, this "other Israel" had its genesis not only in the recent catastrophe of October 7, and not even in the struggle against attempts to effect a regime coup, but from a cumulative experience of denying loss. Israeli society is prepared to process the failures of October 7 in technical terms – military intelligence, army, logistics – yet resists confronting its own profound and enduring moral blindness; the habit of occupation as a way of life, the blindness to the legitimate right of another people to the Promised Land, the denial of indiscriminate destruction and vengeance perpetuated killing in the Gaza Strip, and the withering empathy vis-à-vis the suffering of others.

Even among those who call themselves "the other Israel," or "new Israel," moral weariness can be felt: Opposition to injustice no longer stems from political consciousness, but from a cultural consciousness that is soothing, almost therapeutic.

Aftermath of an Israeli military strike in Gaza Strip, on October 9, 2025. Even among those who call themselves "the other Israel," or "new Israel," moral weariness can be felt. Credit: Ariel Schalit/AP

Israel is experiencing collective melancholia. The shadow of loss has fallen upon it: Unable to part with its self-image as a victim, it alternates between self-blame and blaming the world – and yet continues as though nothing has happened. The shadow of the Palestinian is falling upon Israeli democracy. Instead of recognizing him as a political subject, Israel is entrenching itself in a Spartan model of survival in which every "other" – whether outside critic, Arab or oppositionist citizen – is treated as a threat.

This is how democracy loses its first condition: The recognition that the "other" belongs to the community, not beyond its borders. Public discourse becomes hollow. Words like compassion, justice or responsibility lose meaning, and "the other Israel" shrinks into a small circle of intellectuals and professionals with little political influence. They constitute a critical, nostalgic form of consciousness without agency. Theirs is a melancholy protest.

In this sense, "the other Israel" recalls West Germany of the 1950s. Both prefer rapid reconstruction to deep moral reckoning. As W.G. Sebald wrote of German cities rebuilt "so that we would not have to ask what had been there before" – so too in Israel, walls, settlements and new myths regarding civil society substituting for failed leadership rise to cover what lies buried beneath: decades of occupation, indifference to moral duplicity. Construction supplants remembrance and working-through.

In a reality where democratic values have become empty symbols, even conscience loses its power. Israeli society is preoccupied with normalization, not reflecting.

On the surface, "the other Israel" appears defiant. It calls for an independent state commission of inquiry into October 7, condemns government corruption, defends the dwindling free press and insists on preserving institutions of thought and critique. Yet behind this struggle for a "different normality" lies a trap: the wish to forge an all-embracing consensus – a "unity of camps" – born of the desperate political hope that the previous election was a historical accident and that the next one will undo its outcome.

It is precisely here that the movement risks repeating the Mitscherlichs' diagnosis: replacing working-through with reconciliation, change with nostalgia, and inner reckoning with self-congratulatory consolation. Politicians such as Yair Lapid, leader of the opposition in the Israeli parliament, are unlikely to take post-October 7 Israel any further than that.

The litmus test of "the other Israel" and the sincerity of its intentions may be how it responds to the world's gaze. International criticism and boycotts – often directed indiscriminately and tainted with ignorance and hypocrisy – act as a moral mirror, reminding Israelis of what they would rather forget. Yet almost every critique is immediately translated into the language of siege and historical Jew hatred: "The whole world is against us." This victimhood turns critique into persecution, guilt into defensiveness, defensiveness into alienation, alienation into hardening of its positions.

In place of dialogue, a closed circuit of guilt and denial emerges. This is the pattern of melancholia that Freud wrote about: The self-accusation that changes nothing because the melancholics have no desire to acknowledge what they have lost in their own self along with the loss of the concrete object. In other words, they recoil from clarifying the inner significance of the loss and the trauma. "The other Israel" may offer a conscience, but no transformation. To matter politically, it must breach the cycle of victimized identity and recognize the "other" not solely as an enemy but as part of the national identity, as part of the Israeli story.

In Israel the concept of otherness is being ever more reduced to security-related dimensions. The Palestinian, the Arab, the critic – all are perceived as a danger. In this way democracy loses its primary condition for existence: The recognition that the "other" is part of the public, even when he or she undermines its feeling of cohesiveness.

A protest demanding a deal that would secure the return of the hostages. The immense trauma of the past two years is likely to tip the balance toward a death-drive political culture. Credit: Tomer Appelbaum

The role of "the other Israel" should be to restore a moral and critical gaze – one that evokes not only what was lost on October 7 (the citizens' feeling of personal security), but also what was never here prior to the Hamas attack (full and equal rights for all the country's inhabitants). Yet Israeli politics has mastered the art of neutralizing dissent through mockery, silencing and political branding. A danger exists that this so-called other Israel, which in the past two years succeeded in speaking with a clear, lucid voice only on the subject of the return of the hostages, will keep speaking in a depoliticized idiom that comforts the old liberal elites – those who sense that something horrible has happened to them but have yet to find a new lexicon with which to interpret and understand their part in the disaster.

We have seen this before. After 1945, "good Germans" – intellectuals, jurists, psychoanalysts, educators – spoke loftily in the name of a moral renewal while remaining strangely detached from political reality, as if observing history from a safe distance. Israel, unlike postwar Germany, has not yet faced a total collapse that would force national soul-searching or an aggressive external intervention. And so the "other" in "the other Israel" remains suspended – neither exiled nor central, neither ostracized nor fully engaged. With the exception of the unequivocal demand for the return of the Israeli hostages it exists mostly as a faint moral undercurrent, a patchwork of anxious WhatsApp groups, a facade of nostalgic uneasiness that does not constitute genuine resistance, serving only to prevent Israeli society from sinking completely into oblivion and nationalist delirium.

At present "the other Israel" is like a conscience with no power: a community of the educated, of therapists, teachers, physicians and people of culture and science who speak of healing and hope – but it cannot yet offer a new political language other than repeating "Bring them all home – now" for the return of hostages. Once the goal of returning the hostages has been achieved, the "other Israel," like the postwar "good Germans," risks becoming a voyeuristic elite, aware of the disaster but unable to articulate its causes or to convert moral consciousness into political action.

There is little cause for optimism. Israel, battered and brimming with hatred after Hamas' assault and the subsequent war of annihilation in Gaza, is easier prey for the mirage of messianic nationalism than it was on the eve of the regime coup. The determination of Benjamin Netanyahu's ultra right-wing coalition to continue its assault on democracy was already evident in last week's decision not to invite to president Trump's "End of War" address in the Knesset two public figures targeted by a delegitimization campaign that has become a central pillar of the government's political agenda: the attorney general and the president of the Supreme Court. Without an international framework – political, legal, financial, perhaps even military – comparable to what the Allies provided to Germany and its victims after World War II, the immense trauma of the past two years is likely to tip the balance toward a death-drive political culture.

A civil war is lurking for us, around the corner, and some are already eager to ignite it. In a reality where democratic values have become empty symbols, even conscience loses its power. Israeli society is preoccupied with normalization, not reflecting. In such a climate "the other Israel" may soon become not just marginal, but a nuisance – a voice invoking what the majority longs to forget.

Yet precisely that voice is needed most. When no one can tell truth from lie, or fact from denial, when no one dares to ask what is concealed beneath the everyday routines of occupation of the West Bank – the possibility of repair is also voided. "The other Israel" isn't capable of changing the face of the country, but it can safeguard memory, the commitment to identify the true pulse of Jewish history as a history that is also universal, and to hear an inner voice even when society has ceased to hear it. Should this voice fall completely silent, neither democracy nor a humane society will remain here.

Eran J. Rolnik is a psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and author. He is currently facing disciplinary proceedings by the Civil Service Commission because of his critical writings in Haaretz.