[TheIronMaiden]

This is a well written and positioned long form analysis of the current situation in Israel. I really appreciate the Ambivalence and intellectual hospitality. My quotes don't do this work justice.

As a former IDF soldier and historian of genocide, I was deeply disturbed by my recent visit to Israel

The Hamas attack on 7 October came as a tremendous shock to Israeli society, one from which it has not begun to recover. It was the first time Israel has lost control of part of its territory for an extended period of time, with the IDF unable to prevent the massacre of more than 1,200 people – many killed in the cruellest ways imaginable – and the taking of well over 200 hostages, including scores of children. The sense of abandonment by the state and of ongoing insecurity – with tens of thousands of Israeli citizens still displaced from their homes along the Gaza Strip and by the Lebanese border – is profound.

the Israeli public long ago became inured to the brutal occupation that has characterised the country for 57 out of the 76 years of its existence. But the scale of what is being perpetrated in Gaza right now by the IDF is as unprecedented as the complete indifference of most Israelis to what is being done in their name. In 1982, hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested against the massacre of the Palestinian population in the refugee camps Sabra and Shatila in western Beirut by Maronite Christian militias, facilitated by the IDF. Today, this kind of response is inconceivable. The way people’s eyes glaze over whenever one mentions the suffering of Palestinian civilians, and the deaths of thousands of children and women and elderly people, is deeply unsettling.

One young woman, recently returned from long military service in Gaza, leapt on the stage and spoke forcefully about the friends she had lost, the evil nature of Hamas, and the fact that she and her comrades were sacrificing themselves to ensure the country’s future safety. Deeply distraught, she began crying halfway through her speech and stepped down. A young man, collected and articulate, rejected my suggestion that criticism of Israeli policies was not necessarily motivated by antisemitism. He then launched on a brief survey of the history of Zionism as a response to antisemitism and as a political path that no gentiles had a right to deny. While they were upset by my views and agitated by their own recent experiences in Gaza, the opinions expressed by the students were in no way exceptional. They reflected much greater swaths of public opinion in Israel.

Knowing that I had previously warned of genocide, the students were especially keen to show me that they were humane, that they were not murderers. They had no doubt that the IDF was, in fact, the most moral army in the world. But they were also convinced that any damage done to the people and buildings in Gaza was totally justified, that it was all the fault of Hamas using them as human shields.

They showed me photos on their phones to prove that they had behaved admirably toward children, denied that there was any hunger in Gaza, insisted that the systematic destruction of schools, universities, hospitals, public buildings, residences and infrastructure was necessary and justifiable. They viewed any criticism of Israeli policies by other countries and the United Nations as simply antisemitic.

Unlike the majority of Israelis, these young people had seen the destruction of Gaza with their own eyes. It seemed to me that they had not only internalised a particular view that has become commonplace in Israel – namely, that the destruction of Gaza as such was a legitimate response to 7 October – but had also developed a way of thinking that I had observed many years ago when studying the conduct, worldview and self-perception of German army soldiers in the second world war. Having internalised certain views of the enemy – the Bolsheviks as Untermenschen; Hamas as human animals – and of the wider population as less than human and undeserving of rights, soldiers observing or perpetrating atrocities tend to ascribe them not to their own military, or to themselves, but to the enemy.

Thousands of children were killed? It’s the enemy’s fault. Our own children were killed? That is certainly the enemy’s fault. If Hamas carry out a massacre in a kibbutz, they are Nazis. If we drop 2,000-pound bombs on refugee shelters and kill hundreds of civilians, it’s Hamas’s fault for hiding close to these shelters. After what they did to us, we have no choice but to root them out. After what we did to them, we can only imagine what they would do to us if we don’t destroy them. We simply have no choice.

Two days after the Hamas attack, defence minister Yoav Gallant declared, “We are fighting human animals, and we must act accordingly,” later adding that Israel would “break apart one neighbourhood after another in Gaza”. Former prime minister Naftali Bennett confirmed: “We are fighting Nazis.” Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu exhorted Israelis to “remember what Amalek has done to you”, alluding to the biblical call to exterminate Amalek’s “men and women, children and infants”. In a radio interview, he said about Hamas: “I don’t call them human animals because that would be insulting to animals.” Deputy Knesset speaker Nissim Vaturi wrote on X that Israel’s goal should be “erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth”. On Israeli TV he stated, “There are no uninvolved people … we must go in there and kill, kill, kill. We must kill them before they kill us.” Finance minister Bezalel Smotrich stressed in a speech, “The work must be completed … Total destruction. ‘Blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.’” Avi Dichter, agriculture minister and former head of the Shin Bet intelligence service, spoke about “rolling out the Gaza Nakba”. One Israeli 95-year-old military veteran, whose motivational speech to IDF troops preparing for the invasion of Gaza exhorted them to “wipe out their memory, their families, mothers and children”, was given a certificate of honour by Israeli president Herzog for “providing a wonderful example to generations of soldiers”. No wonder that there have been innumerable social media posts by IDF troops in Gaza calling to “kill the Arabs”, “burn their mothers” and “flatten” Gaza. There has been no known disciplinary action by their commanders.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/ar...an-omer-bartov