Israeli novelist David Grossman tells British writer David Hare why the Jewish state behaves as it does:
When a people have suffered as much as we have it’s not a bad feeling to be masters for once. And we became addicted to that feeling, like a narcotic. Now we have terrible trouble imagining any other reality than the one we live in. You become habituated, you cannot believe there is another possible way of life. And so effectively you become a victim of the situation. And here, again, is the central paradox, the idea of Israel was that we should cease to be victims. Instead we hand our fate over to the security people, we allow the army to run the country, because we lack a political class with a vision beyond the military. Survival becomes our only aim. We are living in order to survive, not in order to live.