JERUSALEM (MarketWatch) -- Every year as the Day of Atonement approaches, Israelis of all walks take stock of both their personal and national failures over the past year, and every autumn since 1973 this has included particularly somber introspection in the wake of that year's Yom Kippur War, the Jewish state's Pearl Harbor.
This Wednesday, however, as a sense of Pearl Harbor grips the world's financial capitals while Israeli highways empty and synagogues overflow for Judaism's holiest day, Israelis will have the rare experience of beating other people's chests, not just their own as ritual dictates.
Surely, one thing Israelis are intimately familiar with is crisis, and that includes the economic type. But past financial crises either involved Israel directly -- the 1974 oil embargo and the 1985 hyperinflation, for example -- or were altogether about other people's money, as with Black Monday in 1987, which was too remote for pre-globalization-era Israelis to even understand, let alone feel.
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