Israelis: But We Never Knew

I didn’t want to write so soon again about Israel and Gaza. I figure that you, my readers, are supersaturated with my outrage.

Then I read the latest column from Gideon Levy, the journalist from the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz. He has done as much as anyone to report on the daily atrocities Israel is committing in the West Bank and Gaza, even though most of his fellow Israelis don’t want to know.

By its silence, most of the Israeli media has obliged them.

As much as we’d like to avoid it, that brings to mind a terrible but obvious comparison with the state of mind in Germany during—and after--World War II. There is absolutely no way you can compare the scale of the Holocaust to the slaughter in Gaza. But that doesn’t mean that the ongoing massacre of more than 50,000 Palestinians is not, in its own right, a horrific crime against humanity. Attempting to justify it by citing the barbaric Hamas killings in Israel on October 7. doesn’t wash.

Label it ethnic cleansing or genocide; what Israel is doing is a massive, outrageous bloodbath carried out in broad daylight that the Israelis--and most Jews in the diaspora--refuse to acknowledge. Just as the Germans—and the Poles, Lithuanians, Austrians, and Ukrainians- turned a blind eye to the horrific atrocities all around them during World War II.

Indeed, Gideon Levy is one of the few who, by his relentless reporting, attempts to confront his fellow Jews with the horrors that Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces are committing in their name.

But no one wants to know.

Here is Gideon’s latest…

An Israeli professor who has been living in the United States for decades was in Israel this week during one of his frequent visits. He teaches at a prestigious university, was born on a kibbutz, is the scion of a family of fighters in the 1948 war and intellectual aristocrats, if there's such a thing in Israel.

He is still deeply rooted here, despite the distance of the years, and not only because part of his family is here. From his place of residence in the United States he makes sure to watch the news on one of the Israeli TV channels every evening. Some of his friends are here, and he researches and writes about Israel, among other things.

We're both from the same generation and the same city, but until a few days ago we had never met. A few days ago he came to my house. It was his last day in Israel, yesterday he left. Before we parted he told me that this time he feels suffocated. He really wanted to leave already. He didn't understand how it's still possible to live here. In his contacts during the past year with university heads in Israel, he felt a sharp change in the direction of moral corruption. The wife of his childhood friend, a former Supreme Court justice, told him this week that it's hard for her to accept his opinions. She has never said that to him before. Her husband was one of the liberal mainstays in the Supreme Court.

He's convinced that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza – he's knowledgeable about the subject due to his profession – and he explains why: There's no definition for ethnic cleansing in international law, but it's a stage on the way to genocide. When a population is evicted by force, and not to a safe haven, but towards a place where they continuing to kill them, that's genocide. There's no longer any doubt that Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing in the northern Gaza Strip. Israel is declaring that, and its acts are clear evidence of that. In addition, the IDF's systematic destruction of the entire northern Strip, leaving nothing but ruins in its path, testifies to the intention not to enable a return.

The visitor is convinced that when the International Court of Justice comes to decide whether Israel committed genocide, it will focus on the northern Gaza Strip, as it did at the time in Srebrenica. There "only" about 8,000 Bosnians were slaughtered, most of them men, despite the fact that the city had been declared a "safe area." The Hague and the entire world determined in perpetuity that it was genocide, and the guilty parties were tried and sentenced.

When you mercilessly bomb a displaced population in its new location, as the Israel Defense Forces is doing, that's genocide. If it looks like genocide and acts like genocide, it's genocide. In Israel it's impossible to say that, not even to liberals. In the prestigious universities in the United States, whose donors are Jews, it's also hard to say it. Israeli and Jewish ears aren't willing to hear it, and never mind what reality demonstrates.

My visitor discovered that even his best friends, the Israeli liberals, intellectuals and people of peace and conscience, are unwilling to accept it. The differences of opinion have turned into hostility. That never happened before. There was always a supportive camp here even for radical opinions. There were exhibitions of hatred, sometimes even violence, but on the other side there stood a camp that was smaller but just as determined. That's over.

The occasional visitor sensed that clearly. It may still be possible to find a few radicals on the margins, but not a radical camp – in this, the most radical situation in the country's history.

Israel has become mired in its bereavement and its disaster and has become totally blinded. Nobody is paying attention to the far more horrifying disaster of Gaza. A great deal has already been written here about the despicable role of the media in creating this situation, but responsibility for this total "sobering up" lies on the conscience of every Israeli who has come to his senses. It may haunt him yet one of these days.

The guest left. He'll surely return, but all he has left here is a very few interlocutors, a child could count them.