Israel killed thousands of children in Gaza. How can so many Israelis remain indifferent? / In Israel, 20,000 Gazans are responsible for their own deaths. I’ve never been so ashamed

Amira Hass: For decades we’ve been brought up believing that only military force can ensure the state’s survival, while denying rights to the Palestinians. That’s just one of many sad answers to the question

GAZA casualties live statistics

United Nations Documentation on the Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem

Children walk along a street in Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip on December 12, 2023.Credit: MOHAMMED ABED – AFP

The Gaza Strip is gradually being erased, along with its families, its people, its children, their smiles and laughter. What enables the majority of Jewish Israelis to support this systematic and mass erasure?

What enables them to see it as the only suitable response to the massacre that Hamas and its accomplices perpetrated, to the military humiliation of Israel and to the indescribable suffering of the hostages, the wounded, the survivors, their families and the families of the hundreds killed?

Israel’s military is erasing the streets of Gaza’s cities and the alleys of its refugee camps. It’s erasing Gaza’s beach promenades, villages and its unexpected yet existing agricultural areas. It’s erasing its cultural institutions, universities and archaeological sites.

Hamas’ military infrastructure is being destroyed and may be destroyed entirely. Thousands of its armed men are being killed and will be killed. But the organization will be rebuilt; it and its leaders will flourish in every community and place where the erasure of Gaza continues.

What enables the majority of Jewish Israelis to remain unshocked by the fact that in about two months we’ve killed around 7,000 children (a provisional figure) with the help of America’s improved bombs? What enables most of the Jews not to gasp in horror at the crowding of 1.8 million or 1.9 million people into about 120 square kilometers (46 square miles), a “safe area” that’s constantly being bombed? What’s preventing those Jewish Israelis from screaming when they hear about the thirst and hunger of 2.2 million Palestinian civilians and the diseases spreading due to the crowding, the water shortage and the out-of-action hospitals?

What enables this erasure and the slaying of children with both our active and passive participation? Here are some answers:

• For decades we’ve been educated to believe that only military force can ensure the state’s survival and ability to flourish, while denying rights to the Palestinian people.

• We’ve erased any “context” – incitement has made this word a synonym for support of Hamas and justification of its horrors.

• We Jews have assumed a monopoly on the suffering caused by the cruelty of the Other.

• We’ve chosen not to look at the unbearable pictures of trembling Palestinian children, faces gray with dust, being rescued from between bombed concrete walls. And there’s no way of knowing who’s more fortunate: those children or the ones who were killed.

• Every mass or gradual killing that we’ve been carrying out against the Palestinians for years, every theft, humiliation and abuse passes through thousands of media, psychological and academic filters. The sifted product is our conviction that the Palestinians are better off than the Somalis or Syrians, so they shouldn’t complain.

• We remember every massacre of Israelis by Palestinians. We forget every massacre of Palestinians by Israelis.

• For decades we’ve gotten used to living in comfort while five minutes away Israel (in other words, us) demolishes Palestinian homes and builds for Jews, channels water to Jews and makes Palestinians go thirsty. All the rest is written in the reports of the rights groups HaMoked, B’Tselem and Adalah.

• For decades we’ve been ignoring the “moderate” Palestinians’ warning that the continuous grab of freedom and land and the settlers’ violence – assisted by the state and inspired by its violence – narrow their children’s horizons and generate despair and faith in arms only and revenge.

• We’ve embraced an essentialist worldview: The Palestinians are terrorists because that’s the way they are. They were born with genes for hating us – the offspring of Roman Emperor Titus and the pogromists of East Europe’s Khmelnytsky Uprising of the 17th century.

• We’re convinced that we’re a democracy, even though for 56 years we’ve been ruling over millions of subjects without civil rights, controlling their land, money and economy.

• We have profound racist contempt for the Palestinians, which we developed to justify, both cognitively and psychologically, our trampling over them.

• We’ve been in denial of Palestinian history and the rootedness of Palestinian existence between the river and the sea.

• The erasure of Gaza is possible because since 1994 we have deliberately missed the opportunity – offered to us by the Palestinians – to shed some of our traits as a dispossessing and settling entity and let them have a state on 22 percent of the area west of the Jordan River (including Gaza). I wrote in July 2021 that “in all the heat of the talk about apartheid, a dynamic, active and dangerous dimension of it – the Jewish settler colonialism – has become dulled and blunted.

“According to the ideology and policies of Jewish settler colonialism, the Palestinians are superfluous. In short, it is possible, worthwhile and desirable to live without the Palestinians in this country between the river and the sea. Their existence here is conditional, dependent on our wishes and our goodwill – a matter of time.

“The ideology of ‘superfluousness’ is a poison that spreads especially when the process of settler colonialism is at its height. … Settler colonialism is a continuous process of grabbing land, distorting historical borders, reshaping them and then expelling indigenous peoples.”

I referred to the “superfluousness” of the Palestinians in the West Bank and warned about the intentions to expel them. I assumed then that the viewing of Gazans as superfluous sufficed with severing them from their people and their families on the other side of the Erez checkpoint that separates Gaza from the rest of the land (Israel and the West Bank).

But now the “superfluousness” is being reflected in expulsion, disguised as voluntary under the shelling. It’s being reflected in the physical erasure of the Gazans, and in plans to return Jewish settlers to Gaza. Woe to them and woe to us.

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-12-18/ty-article-opinion/.premium/israel-killed-thousands-of-children-in-gaza-how-can-so-many-israelis-remain-indifferent/0000018c-788c-d55c-a7cc-fb8edb100000

*****************************************************

Gideon Levy: In Israel, 20,000 Gazans Are Responsible for Their Own Deaths. I’ve Never Been So Ashamed

Journalist Ben Caspit epitomizes the Israeli center. He lives in Hod Hasharon and co-hosts a radio talk show with journalist Yinon Magal, who is on the extreme right. Caspit, supposedly, is not. He is a well-connected journalist, highly respected and successful. Over the weekend, the executive director of the anti-occupation group Breaking the Silence wrote on X: “Don’t look away. A CNN correspondent entered the southern Gaza Strip and opened a ‘window on the hell’ of Gaza.”

This is what Caspit, a moderate and decent person in his own eyes, had to say in response: “Why should we look? They earned their hell honestly; I don’t have an ounce of sympathy.” Caspit, as usual, is the mouthpiece of Israel’s mainstream.

Eight thousand children are to blame for their own deaths; 20,000 people are responsible for being killed; 2 million people caused their own uprooting. This is how a rich person always talks about the poor, the successful person about the less fortunate, the healthy person about the disabled, the strong about the weak, the Ashkenazi about Mizrahi Jews: They are to blame for their victimhood.

In post-October 7 Israel, one can blame 10,000 children and babies for their own deaths without Israel having even a hint of responsibility and culpability. In post-October 7 Israel, one can feel blameless only because Hamas started committing atrocities first. A country lies in ruins and all its residents are in hell, and the generator of this hell bears no guilt, not even a tiny bit, not even together with Hamas’ guilt. The epitome of the Israeli center doesn’t even have an ounce of sympathy for the amputee children shown in the courageous, horrific report of Clarissa Ward from a Rafah hospital.

Let their limbs be amputated, let the children die, let all Gazans expire, let them suffocate in hell, it’s not our business. They are responsible for their disaster, only them. Caspit is on to something here – the victim is responsible for his victimhood. Putting aside the issue of guilt and responsibility – these are all on Hamas, not at all on Israel, whose soldiers and pilots are running wild and unbridled in Gaza – we have no hand in it, the main thing is that we feel no guilt for any of it.

Putting that aside for a moment, one needs an unbelievable degree of obtuseness, cruelty, and even barbarity to not feel at least some empathy for children dying on hospital floors, to a father crying over the body of his child, to an infant covered in the dust of his bombed house, looking in vain for someone in the world, for people living for two months in terror, in despair and with nothing left in their lives; for the hungry, the sick, the disabled and the dispossessed of the Gaza Strip.

Even empathy is prohibited in the eyes of Caspit and his ilk, lest a dangerous, forbidden thought creep in – that it is human beings who live in Gaza. This is something Israelis cannot cope with. This is a crossing of a dangerous line which may be followed by thoughts that are alien to Israelis, regarding how far it is permissible to go for a just cause; what is permissible, and, mainly, what is prohibited under any circumstances.

There are things that are forbidden under any circumstances. The killing of 8,000 children in two months, for example. Caspit and his folks only want to cheer the heroic army without seeing its handiwork.

Humaneness is forbidden, we are Israeli. When an earthquake happens anywhere on the globe, we’ll send aid and be proud of ourselves, but mass killing in Gaza is not our business. That’s the way Israel’s morality works. It’s meant to allow Caspit, not just Magal, to feel good about themselves about Gaza.

At an international conference held last weekend in Istanbul, I said, among other things, that never have I been so ashamed to be Israeli as I have been in viewing pictures from Gaza. These words were posted on a popular Israeli entertainment website. Over the weekend, I received hundreds (perhaps thousands by now) of abusive calls and text messages. One can often learn about a society through its sewers. Together we will win, goes the current slogan.

However, the distance between the sewage flowing my way and the ostensibly respectable words of Caspit is smaller than one imagines. There is no difference between the hatred of Arabs and their dehumanization, as expressed in the vulgar, inarticulate language of my callers, and the well-formulated words of Caspit. Both the lower and higher Israel have lost their human image. This is reason enough to be ashamed of being Israeli.

Source: Haaretz

**************************************************

Israel-Hamas War: US arms industry stocks rocket (October 10)

Settler colonialism

This Is Not a War Against Hamas / Top ten US Politicians taking Israel Lobby Cash

Indiscriminate slaughter of innocents

HOW ISRAEL COMMODIFIES MASS KILLING THROUGH ITS “PALESTINE LABORATORY”

The Guardian view on Gaza’s devastation: don’t look away. See the bigger picture too

Israel wants to slay the monster next door, but with this lethal bombardment, it is feeding it

Repeal the Exclusionary Nation-state Law, for the Sake of All Israelis

A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance

Gaza is the terrifying Dystopia sci-fi writers warned you about