Sociologist Eva Illouz is director of studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, at Princeton and in Zurich. Her books include Les Emotions Contre la Démocratie ("Emotions Against Democracy," 2022). She has taken a stand against Benjamin Netanyahu's government and, in August, signed a petition condemning "an apartheid regime" for the Palestinians.

How can we describe what is happening to Israeli society after the Hamas attack, with its 1,300 dead, thousands wounded and hostages taken?

It's hard to find the right words to describe this unprecedented event. Terrorist attacks on this scale have never been seen before, in any country. There have been massacres, of course, but not a terrorist attack whose number of victims in proportion to the population is much greater than that of September 11. It was the equivalent of 10,000 people in France massacred in a few hours. I would venture to add that there were a series of unprecedented variations of horror: waking up on a holiday to the sound of machine-gun fire with an enemy infiltrating your home, the weak becoming the strong, the strong becoming the weak, the army we've been waiting for not coming, terrorists killing babies, decapitating people, killing children in front of their parents, and parents in front of children, kidnapping old people, children, men, women, recording and broadcasting massacres on social media, all this has no precedent. There has been an increase of horror techniques.

It has been the biggest shock in post-Holocaust Jewish history. The whole ontological reality of Israel has been called into question. The Nazis were trying to hide atrocities, not broadcast them. Death itself has become a propaganda motif. There has been a regime shift in atrocity. This is why the war has become total and existential. Israel appears strong, but this strength is underpinned by an existential fear that has become radicalized. For an Israeli, the possibility of genocide never seems far away. There is also an unprecedented confusion of terminology, as "decolonial indigenous people" in France and on American campuses have borrowed the vocabulary of resistance to describe a crime against humanity.

Israeli society is a fractured one, as demonstrated by the massive protests of recent months against the Netanyahu government's reforms. What are the possible political repercussions?

The horror and fear are on such a scale that the whole of society has rallied around one objective: to restore a sense of security to its citizens. In 1973, the Yom Kippur War also came as a shock, and there were 2,800 deaths, but these included zero civilians. In the present situation, the division between civilians and soldiers has been erased. This is not only characteristic of terrorism but also because states such as Iran act as terrorist organizations.

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