Israeli liberals are growing uncomfortable with the genocide. The vast majority of Jewish Israelis would never dream of using the G-word to describe their country’s actions in Gaza over the past 21 months. Still, the discomfort is much more palpable now than it was just a few weeks ago. Prominent pundits struggle when asked to describe the images of emaciated children and adults coming from the strip. Recently, on a respected current affairs podcast, a guest described Defense Minister Israel Katz’s latest idea — to construct a “humanitarian city” on the ruins of Rafah. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would be herded into the “city” after lengthy security checks (to verify that they were not members of Hamas). Once they were inside, they would not be allowed to leave. The guest, Haaretz journalist Nir Hasson, is one of an extremely small group of Israeli journalists who are willing to use the G-word. He asked the host of the podcast if the “humanitarian city” reminded him of something. The host, audibly rattled, hesitated, then said it reminded him of a “prison.” Hasson corrected him gently: “It’s a ghetto.” As in, the ghettos created by the Nazis to imprison and starve Jews. In a similar podcast, neither host nor guest could say the words “mostly innocent” to describe the population of Gaza. They did manage to say that some parts of the population were innocent.
The Holocaust weighs heavily on the Israeli liberal conscience, though it is easy to disavow the resounding echoes stirred by the images. The leaders of the protest movement, the “anti-Netanyahu” camp that is calling for a ceasefire in the name of obtaining a deal for the release of the remaining hostages, have opted for a two-pronged approach. They now tweet that what is being done in Gaza is “not in their name,” and then they move directly to talking about preparations for the next elections, in which they plan to defeat Netanyahu. The implicit message, as it has been for years, is: “The Netanyahu government is an aberration leading Israel toward an extreme future. We are moderates. Let us take control again, and you will see how everything falls into place.” Still, their discomfort is clear, even if only in the intensity of their denialism. This time, it is the Palestinians themselves who are absent from mainstream liberal accounts of Gaza. When one admits crimes are being carried out by Israel in Gaza and in the West Bank, who are the victims of these crimes? When Yonit Levi, who anchors Israel’s most-watched television news broadcast, looks at the camera and calls Israel’s actions in Gaza not simply a strategic failure but a moral failure as well, what are the circumstances and the consequences of these failures? Levi is a household name; she supported the war almost without reservation until very recently, along with the vast majority of the Israeli media. But now the dots have been connected. This is no longer “merely” a military occupation that has continued so long that it has been completely normalized. Now we are looking at the most egregious crime of them all, carried out on a livestream by hundreds of thousands of Israelis who are complicit in its numerous aspects. And, perhaps most importantly, the overt results of this crime place liberal Israelis in a remarkably uncomfortable spot.
Why now? What caused this tipping point? I can think of two main connected reasons. The first is the systemic nature of Israel’s starvation of Gaza. The hunger now causing people to succumb, to faint while walking in the ghosts of streets that once were, has been long and relentless in the making, and the entire Israeli system has been complicit. Most Jewish Israelis, having at least some experience of military service, consider the myriad individual acts of which “war” consists as inherently legitimate. Death is a consequence of “war,” after all, with its never-ending justifications for killing and violence. “Good things happen to bad people,” “sometimes you need to do bad things to accomplish good goals,” ad absurdum ad nauseam. If you are ordered to carry out an aerial bombing or to shoot to kill at anyone (including a mother and her children) who enters a “kill zone,” you should not be held individually responsible for your actions. Your pressing of a button or pulling of a trigger may have “bad” results, while you can remain a “good person.” After all, in war it is always “us” or “them.”
Hunger is different. I use “hunger,” rather than “famine,” to convey the tension between the immediate, familiar individual sensation and the lengthy, multistaged reality that must take place for hunger to sweep a society. Hunger is not similar to “war.” Nothing about the creation of hunger is legitimate or natural, from the initial “plans” (remember the Generals’ Plan for besieging parts of Gaza after evacuating civilians in order to starve out Hamas fighters?) to the ultimate execution. When people die of hunger, it is the culmination of a complex process. They must have been denied not just nutrition but the infrastructure required to cook and disseminate food (power, roads), as well as medical care and various other staples that cannot be wished away by maxims like the ones quoted above. Hunger, complicated and elaborate in its own right, draws a simple and straight line between those who are hungry and those who are not. While liberal Israelis can think of themselves as traumatized victims who have a moral obligation to destroy their enemies, they cannot think of themselves as hungry. There are those on the Israeli right expressing anger at Israeli media for providing the Israeli public with images of dead and dying skeletal children when “kids go hungry in Israel and the liberal media doesn’t show them at all.” When Israeli liberals scoff at such statements, it is clear that they understand on which side of the line they are standing. Hunger is a universal constant.
The second reason for the discomfort of liberal Israelis has to do with the images themselves. We know these images. We grew up on these images. Jewish Israelis are taught about the Holocaust starting in kindergarten. Children are not shown images of the death camps, but the first seeds are sown. They understand the message: “Bad people wanted to do bad things to us because we were Jews, but we ended up defeating them because we built our country where we were free to live as Jews.” The presence of the Holocaust is gently but consistently ratcheted up as Israeli children grow older. There is a national day of remembrance. When I was a teen, we often met Holocaust survivors who shared their experiences. No comedies are broadcast on television, and restaurants close the previous evening. These things are all a part of life in Israel. But the images, the images depicting Jews being abused and persecuted, the images (most harrowing of all) of what in Nazi death camps were called “Muselmänner” — hollow-eyed men, women and children so thoroughly emaciated they have nearly lost human form — these images occupy the most primordial layer of collective Israeli memory regarding the Holocaust.
We have not only seen those images of emaciated death camp survivors, but we understand the message they carry: “The only difference between us and those Jews is that we have an independent state.” As far as the world is concerned, we learn, without necessarily even being told directly, that we are the descendants of the emaciated ones. This runs so deep it almost cannot be articulated. Israelis see themselves as perennial victims and identify with victims all over the world because of these images. The connection to the systemic nature of hunger is nearly self-evident. Jews cannot be “the system” that creates mass hunger. We are a people unto ourselves, rejected to the point of death by anyone and everyone. The notion that we command this power, that we would use it willingly, that all of us are involved, is a jarring experience.
I need (and I’ll say something about my needs at the end of this piece) to stress this again: This is not about the morality of the issue. Israelis still consider their individual and collective actions in Gaza to be legitimate. “We rose to kill those who would have killed us, did we not? If anyone is guilty of genocide, it is Hamas; they stopped merely because of logistics, but not for lack of intent. Read their charter! Look at their crimes on Oct. 7 (a date forever yearless, plucked out of all the years to come)!” Israeli liberals are experiencing enough discomfort to distance themselves from the genocide because the Holocaust is a primal element of Israeli identity. The analogies to the Holocaust can no longer be denied because they present liberal Israelis with truths and images against which their entire being resists. “We” cannot be the system that perpetrates hunger. We can be fighters, we can be loyal citizens, we can even put morals on the back burner when we need to do something odious to save the collective. We cannot be the system. And even less articulated, we cannot be the ones who caused children to be in this state. We cannot. We were the ones destined to end up as emaciated corpses. We spent all our effort and resources on avoiding that fate. It is impossible to accept that we have come full circle and are now the perpetrators, not the victims. This cannot be a result of our morality. This cannot be a reflection of our existence. There is no way we have become what we have become.
Overcoming the Holocaust has always required a measure of denial in Israel. The founding myths of Israel are those of the “new Jews,” taking their destiny into their own hands, never dependent on the goodwill of others. When Holocaust survivors came to Israel after World War II, they were treated with awe and pity, but also with scorn, based on the perception that they went passively like lambs to the slaughter. Jews born and bred into Zionism would never allow such a thing. We would protect them since they obviously needed protection. But we would reject whatever they had to offer as a foundation for a reemergent Jewish culture. We would remember them and learn about them so we could make sure we would never be them. We would tolerate the existence of our brethren in “the diaspora,” but the hierarchy would always be clear — we are better because we don’t need them. They will undoubtedly need us (when we foist our genocide on their narrow shoulders and insist that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic). Israeli Jews have for nearly two years rejected any comparison between what was done to their forebears in Europe during World War II and what their army is doing to Palestinians in Gaza today. Try as they might, though, they can no longer deny the images and the numbers from Gaza, the hunger Israel has planned and sustained.
To end on a personal note, writing this piece was not easy. I am a product of my culture. I assimilated these mechanisms of rejection and denial from a very early age. Reflecting on them, identifying the power relations and politics these “sacred” principles generate in the world, these were and are not easy for an Israeli. I have been a vocal critic of Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank for years, even more so over the past 21 months, and I found myself taking two steps backward for every step taken forward in an attempt to articulate the shift Israeli liberals are experiencing. Most Israeli liberals are only too happy to conform, to embrace a narrative in which Israel could be a paradise if only they were in charge. Their discomfort may not signal a sea change, or any change at all. It may end up being a rhetorical flourish at most, a fixation on the status of Israeli liberals and no more. Still, their discomfort comes from the deepest, murkiest places of the Israeli id. Even they are no longer safe from the effects of our genocide in Gaza.
Sign up to our mailing list to receive our stories in your inbox.