Can Israelis be wistful? It is not the characteristic we usually associate with them; more typically they are said to be tough, sweet, angry, thoughtful, demanding—not wistful.
Yet that is how I am finding many during my current visit, as I asked them to analyze events in the region in which they live and what to do about them. They look north to Syria and see the savagery, the massacres, the now over 14,000 dead, and the world doing absolutely nothing. “You get no help in this region if you are weak,” one IDF general said to me. “It is a reminder to us of just what would have happened to us and could still if we were not strong enough to defend ourselves. But now we watch as these women and children are slaughtered and no one acts to save them. We can’t, for all the obvious reasons; it isn’t up to us, it’s up to the Arabs and to Europe and to you. And you do nothing.”
