It’s a terrifying irony--Israel, a country born out of the tragedy of the Holocaust, stands accused today by an International Court of possible genocide in Gaza. The Jewish state, whose people were victims of vicious ethnic cleansing in Europe, is charged with perpetrating horrific ethnic cleansing itself in Gaza and the West Bank.
The tragic parallels don’t end there: Most Israelis are outraged by those charges. They dismiss them as anti-Semitism--of biased judges and hypocritical courts.
The Zionist State is defending itself against a savage, brutal enemy. It has no choice.
The fact is, however, that most Israelis have no real idea of the horrific crimes being committed in their name.
And they don’t want to know.
How different is that attitude from the situation after World War II in Central Europe? That’s when millions of Germans, Austrians, Ukrainians, Poles, French, and countless others in countries occupied by the Nazis, claimed they had no idea of what had happened to the Jews—and other persecuted minorities—who had lived in their communities--fellow citizens, neighbors: There one day. Gone the next. We had nothing to do with it. Saw nothing. Heard nothing. No idea such terrible things were going on. Disgusting!
The lie to those excuses came later: Researchers found that millions of those who perished in the Holocaust were not gassed in isolated, walled-off camps but were slaughtered right in their villages—in their synagogues, or public streets, or trucked off to nearby forests—a bullet in the back of the head, then dumped into mass graves. Those often assisting in the process were not ruthless SS of the occupying Nazis but the victims’ own countrymen—often their fellow townsfolk.
There was no way they couldn’t have known of the terrible barbarities that claimed millions of live
s. And yet…somehow…they claimed that they didn’t;
That’s what is happening in Israel today. That’s the charge made by the relatively few Israelis with the courage and ethical outrage who daily attempt—and fail—to rouse their fellow citizens from their moral stupor-- to get them to finally comprehend the horrors being perpetrated in their name.
But Israelis don’t want to know what their government is doing. They don’t want to hear about the 41,000 Gazans—mainly women and children, slaughtered, blown apart, buried under rubble, since October 7.
They don’t want to know about the vicious ethnic cleansing being carried out in the West Bank, with the encouragement of Israeli’s rabidly right-wing cabinet ministers and the protection of the Israeli Army.
All they can think about is the nightmarish terror of October 7. There’s a national thirst for vengeance, which has still not been satiated.
Israeli mainstream media give the atrocities being perpetrated by the government only minimal coverage—if they cover them at all. Meanwhile, more than ninety journalists have been killed in Gaza since October 7. On the West Bank, Al Jazeera’s offices were raided and shut down. Other Palestinian journalists have been brutally beaten and imprisoned.
But Israelis can’t blame the media for not knowing what’s happening. The atrocities are not being committed in some far-off land or walled-off concentration camps. They are happening one or two hours’ drive from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, sometimes in Palestinian villages just next door. They’re being perpetrated by civilian “settlers,” men of supposedly deep religious feelings—backed up by a citizen army. In other words, by your sons and daughters and husbands or fathers. When they call home or return on leave, what do they talk about around the family table? In the crowded restaurants and discos? On the broad boulevards and sunny beaches? What do they talk about?
Each week, Haaretz reporter Gideon Levy bears witness in excruciating detail to the atrocities committed by the Israeli government. Levy knows most Israelis don’t give a damn. Yet he keeps on reporting the horrors. Why? Because he once told me, morally, he has no choice.
You feel the tears of outrage as he writes in a recent column.
“Israel is turning, with alarming speed, into a country that lives on blood. The daily crimes of the occupation are already less relevant. Over the past year, a new reality of mass killing and crimes of an entirely different scale has emerged. We are in a genocidal reality; the blood of tens of thousands of people has flowed….”
“This is the time that all Israelis should ask themselves if they are willing to live in a country that lives on blood. Just don't say that there is no choice – of course there is – but first, we must ask whether we are even prepared to live like this.
“The Palestinians will continue to be massacred, and Israelis will continue to close their eyes to it? Hard to believe. A time will come when more Israelis will open their eyes and recognize that their country subsists on blood. Without bloodshed, we are told, we have no existence – and we make our peace with this horrific statement….
“The media tries to sell us that this is a necessity. Through campaigns that demonize and dehumanize the Palestinians, a unified and monstrous chorus of commentators is successfully selling us the idea that we can live for eternity on blood. "We will mow the grass" in Gaza every two years – we will execute generation after generation of young regime opponents, imprison tens of thousands of people in concentration camps, we will expel, cull, expropriate and, of course, kill, and that is how we will live: in the country of blood.
“We have already killed the Palestinian people. We began with the mass killing in Gaza, and now we have turned to the West Bank. Blood will be shed in gallons there too, if no one stops the battalion. The killing is both physical and emotional. Nothing is left of Gaza now.”
The detainees, the orphans, the traumatized, the homeless, will never return to what they were. The dead certainly will not. It will take generations for Gaza to recover, if it even can. This is genocide, even if it does not meet the legal definition. A country cannot live on such an ideology, certainly not when it intends to continue doing so.
“The very concept of war as an opportunity points to a sick mindset. Viewing war as a sole and primary means of solving problems suggests a mental distortion. But in a country in which Karni Eldad, a columnist in the daily Israel Hayom, calls the dozens of people killed, the thousands of people wounded, and the hundreds blinded by exploding pagers in Lebanon "an immense gift to our nation, which greatly deserves it ahead of the new year," one is not surprised by anything.”
Another outspoken Israeli attempting to get through to his countrymen is David Shulman, an Israeli poet and expert on Indian culture, part of a group monitoring the violent upsurge of attacks by armed “settlers “and the IDF on the West Bank.
Shulman was encouraged at first when the International Court of Justice ruled last July that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank was illegal. It ordered the State to immediately cease all new cease all new settlement activities and withdraw from the Occupied territories.
That decision, however, has been attacked by the Israeli government and ignored by the great majority of Israelis. Indeed, writes Shulman –echoing Gideon Levy-- the doings in the Occupied Territories “hardly counts as news.”
Shulman is stunned by the wilful ignorance of his fellow Israelis.
“…even peace-oriented, left-wng Israelis often express shock when I tell them of witnessing violent attacks by settlers and soldiers on Palestinian shepherds and peasant farmers. It is as if that kind of knowledge were pushed away from conscious awareness, or as if the knowledge itself exists somewhere in the mind but knowledge of that knowledge does not. (Classical Indian logicians claim that one doesn’t know something unless one consciously knows that one knows it.) In short, much of the population of Israel has lived through the last five decades in varying modes and intensities of denial.
'“Simply stated, they don’t want to know, or maybe they don’t much care.”
“Reality is a strong drug, too strong for many. The temptation to deny it is usually irresistible… “
“Denial, as we see in Israel today, is an illness. Some might think that, like fear, it’s an evolutionary advantage; denial allows people to live in conditions of severe cognitive dissonance. But denial always comes at a cost. It is a form of lying to oneself, consciously or not. And what happens when millions of people succumb to this lie in highly charged, dangerous circumstances?
“Denial of the very existence of a Palestinian people who share the land with the Jews but who are disenfranchised, without legal recourse, indeed without any basic human rights, inevitably generates violence and aggression. One needs violence to maintain the lie, including violence against the denying self. Routine acts of destruction by state-backed settlers against their Palestinian neighbors, over years, have a cumulative effect on Israel as a moral community. Denying or ignoring or (even worse) rationalizing such acts destroys our potential to become fully human.
…“In his song “Blowin’ in the Wind,” Bob Dylan asked, “How many times can a man turn his head/and pretend that he just doesn’t see?” Probably not an infinite number of times. Truth has a way of eventually piercing the veil, as the ICJ has shown to anyone who cares. Despite everything, despite the rampant hypernationalism and the relentless drive toward Jewish supremacy, despite an extremist, totally dysfunctional government intent on destroying the state, millions of Israelis still yearn for peace, though by now they are too terrified and full of despair and anger to admit it.
“As long as Israel insists on deepening the occupation and stubbornly denying the Palestinian right to self-determination, the existential threat to the state remains, indeed continually escalates. There is an alternative to endless war and eventual self-destruction, but Israel may no longer have the political means, or the will, to achieve it.”
Apartheid and supremacy have been revealed for what they have always been. Israel has shown the world what it stands for, what any ethno state must inevitably be: a fountain of injustice and indignity.
It’s not just the Israelis who are in denial (and many of them cheer the bloodshed openly), it’s we allies to the genocide here in the West who also must shoulder much of the blame as we continue to send Netanyahu and his ilk for weapons and silence with extreme prejudice those foolish idealists who dare to raise their voices against this horror.
It isn’t Israel, (because who can blame an ethno-state for being what it is. It is we who must accept the blame as we willingly laugh about Trump’s racism re: Haitians in Springfield but shrug our shoulders at Harris’ open willingness to support and arm supremacists in Ukraine and Israel.
It is we who don’t want to know the truth.
It is we who are truly culpable as we tune out and wait for the next pundit to tell us how good and fine we are to ‘defend democracy’ by voting the correct way in November.