Has global politics faced its own mortality, and if so, how has it responded? Can the Israeli experience shed a unique light on this conundrum? We argue that during the Covid-19 crisis, global politics has indeed faced its own mortality, but then went on to deny it. We propose that the crisis has created an unprecedented upsurge in death awareness, driving divergent responses that have nonetheless converged on avoiding the inevitability, and availability, of death. To make our case, we decode mortality salience (growing awareness of death) as well as mortality management (coping mechanisms with death awareness), both theoretically and empirically.
In the first part, we discuss the relevance of Terror Management Theory (TMT) to Covid-19 by showing how the pandemic has effectively run a real-life TMT experiment on a global scale. We show that Israeli society, being exceptionally experienced with death, and with mortality salience, may serve as the “Covid world’s crystal ball.”
In the second part, we outline a novel model for discerning political responses to mortality salience – on a scale from resilience to resistance. We distinguish two ideal-type dispositions: the “oak” and the “reed.” While the oak heroically boasts about its strength to withstand the challenging storm, the reed “bends with the wind” to survive. Is Israel an oak or a reed? Using surveys and discourse analysis, and by comparatively analyzing the pandemic politics of Germany, Sweden and the USA to Israel, we show that the latter is, for better and for worse, a manifest oak.