I’ve been thinking about corrosive Israeli anxiety since I read a response to my recent columns on Iran from Eran Lerman, the director of the Israel/Middle East office of the American Jewish Committee. Lerman framed his piece around his “vulnerable” 17-year-old daughter, who, he wrote, often asks him what he’s done “to make sure that she gets to be 25,” given Iran’s annihilationist rhetoric and nuclear program. Israel, Lerman suggested, faces “simply the challenge of staying alive in a hostile environment.” But it’s not that simple. How frightened should an Israeli teenager really be, how inhabited by the old existential terror, the perennial victimhood, the Holocaust fear and vulnerability from which Israel was supposed to provide deliverance?
