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

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

By Omer Bartov

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.

Today, across vast swaths of the Israeli public, including those who oppose the government, two sentiments reign supreme.

The first is a combination of rage and fear, a desire to re-establish security at any cost and a complete distrust of political solutions, negotiations and reconciliation. The military theorist Carl von Clausewitz noted that war was the extension of politics by other means, and warned that without a defined political objective it would lead to limitless destruction. The sentiment that now prevails in Israel similarly threatens to make war into its own end. In this view, politics is an obstacle to achieving goals rather than a means to limit destruction. This is a view that can only ultimately lead to self-annihilation.

The second reigning sentiment – or rather lack of sentiment – is the flipside of the first. It is the utter inability of Israeli society today to feel any empathy for the population of Gaza. The majority, it seems, do not even want to know what is happening in Gaza, and this desire is reflected in TV coverage. Israeli television news these days usually begins with reports on the funerals of soldiers, invariably described as heroes, fallen in the fighting in Gaza, followed by estimates of how many Hamas fighters were “liquidated”. References to Palestinian civilian deaths are rare and normally presented as part of enemy propaganda or as a cause for unwelcome international pressure. In the face of so much death, this deafening silence now seems like its own form of vengefulness.

Of course, 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.

Meeting my friends in Israel this time, I frequently felt that they were afraid that I might disrupt their grief, and that living out of the country I could not grasp their pain, anxiety, bewilderment and helplessness. Any suggestion that living in the country had numbed them to the pain of others – the pain that, after all, was being inflicted in their name – only produced a wall of silence, a retreat into themselves, or a quick change of subject. The impression that I got was consistent: we have no room in our hearts, we have no room in our thoughts, we do not want to speak about or to be shown what our own soldiers, our children or grandchildren, our brothers and sisters, are doing right now in Gaza. We must focus on ourselves, on our trauma, fear and anger.

In an interview conducted on 7 March 2024, the writer, farmer and scientist Zeev Smilansky expressed this very sentiment in a manner that I found shocking, precisely because it came from him. I have known Smilansky for more than half a century, and he is the son of the celebrated Israeli author S Yizhar, whose 1949 novella Khirbet Khizeh was the very first text in Israeli literature to confront the injustice of the Nakba, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what became the state of Israel in 1948. Speaking about his own son, Offer, who lives in Brussels, Smilansky commented:

Offer says that for him every child is a child, no matter whether he is in Gaza or here. I don’t feel like him. Our children here are more important to me. There is a shocking humanitarian disaster there, I understand that, but my heart is blocked and filled with our children and our hostages … There is no room in my heart for the children in Gaza, however shocking and terrifying it is and even though I know that war is not the solution.

I listen to Maoz Inon, who lost both his parents [murdered by Hamas on 7 October] … and who speaks so beautifully and persuasively about the need to look forward, that we need to bring hope and to want peace, because wars won’t accomplish anything, and I agree with him. I agree with him, but I cannot find the strength in my heart, with all my leftist inclinations and love for humanity, I cannot … It is not just Hamas, it’s all Gazans who agree that it’s OK to kill Jewish children, that this is a worthy cause … With Germany there was reconciliation, but they apologised and paid reparations, and what [will happen] here? We too did terrible things, but nothing that comes close to what happened here on 7 October. It will be necessary to reconcile but we need some distance.

This was a pervasive sentiment among many left-leaning, liberal friends and acquaintances I spoke with in Israel. It was, of course, quite different from what rightwing politicians and media figures have been saying since 7 October. Many of my friends recognise the injustice of the occupation, and, as Smilansky said, profess a “love for humanity”. But at this moment, under these circumstances, this is not what they are focused on. Instead, they feel that in the struggle between justice and existence, existence must win out, and in the struggle between one just cause and another – that of the Israelis and that of the Palestinians – it is our own cause that must be triumphant, no matter the price. To those who doubt this stark choice, the Holocaust is presented as the alternative, however irrelevant it is to the current moment.

This feeling did not appear suddenly on 7 October. Its roots are much deeper.