‘Let the IDF mow them down!’: In Israel, violence saturates everyday life

Eclairs sold in a bakery in Modi’in with icing reading ‘Let the IDF mow them down’

Josie Glausiusz writes in Haaretz on 6 May 2025:

A row of eclairs, oozing cream, are lined up in a bakery refrigerator, their sweet surface glazed with blue writing: “Allow the Israeli army to hit them hard!” or, literally, “Let the IDF mow them down!” When I saw these eclairs in a bakery in my town of Modi’in three days before Independence Day, I felt sick with rage. A child’s gooey treat, iced and enticing, is “inked” with a violent message, meant to be savored while children in Gaza survive on one meal, or one pita bread, per day. The eclairs are accented with little Israeli flags, poking up from the innards.

The Hebrew word written on the eclairs means “mow” as in to lawn-mow, but mowing is also a euphemism for something more brutal. “Mowing the grass” is a term popularized in 2013 to refer to Israel’s “strategy of attrition designed primarily to debilitate the enemy capabilities.” To put it more crudely, mowing the grass means bombing Gaza periodically to facilitate temporary quiet for Israel.

Earlier this week, Israel’s security cabinet “unanimously approved” a plan to expand operations in Gaza, relocating the population to the south and then maintaining “a sustained Israeli presence.” The cabinet also approved a plan to renew humanitarian aid to the Strip, but only once the military operations begin (slated for earliest, mid-May), and managed by private civilian companies instead of by the UN and humanitarian groups already familiar with the Gazan context.

What does it say about a society that sells eclairs inciting destruction while, less than a hundred kilometers away, children in Gaza wait in lines at community kitchens, holding out empty pots and plastic tubs for their allocation of one meal for the day, perhaps a stew of lentils, chickpeas or rice, and unable to enjoy even one cookie?

What does it say about a society that celebrates Independence Day with barbecues while approximately 60,000 children in Gaza are currently showing signs of malnutrition, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry?

It’s not as if the food doesn’t exist. The World Food Program says it has “more than 116,000 metric tons of food assistance” – which could feed approximately half of the Strip’s residents, one million people, for some four months – waiting to enter Gaza as soon as border crossings reopen. Israel halted all food and humanitarian aid to Gaza on March 2, then broke a brief cease-fire with Hamas on March 18, when the IDF resumed “mowing the lawn” in Gaza.

On April 25, the World Food Program announced that it had run out of food in Gaza.  As I read media reports and scan social media posts, I’m struck by the profound cognitive dissonance experienced by so many in Israeli society. We revel in sugary-and-creamy abundance, a year-round array of fresh vegetables and fruit and stores with names like “Meatman” that advertise marbled steaks. Not far away, Palestinians in Gaza burn plastic and toxic waste to cook the little food they can obtain or scavenge.

I myself spent Independence Day feeling nauseated as a result of smoke from the previous day’s wildfires that had drifted into my town. At the same time, I could smell the roasting meat from barbecues in my neighborhood. I wondered at the apparent obliviousness to human suffering so close by.

It’s not as if Israelis don’t know, or can’t find out, about the hunger and malnutrition in Gaza. A stream of media reports are documenting the malnutrition in meticulous detail and illustrating their reports with videos of supplicating children.

As a science journalist who has reported on cross-border cooperation between Israeli and Palestinian scientists – even in war time – I follow many Palestinian tech entrepreneurs in Gaza on LinkedIn. Sometimes while scrolling, I see videos of women cooking up huge vats of lentils, while children and adults wait in line with their bowls and pots. I see photos of emaciated children. I learn the price of a liter of vegetable oil in Gaza from their posts: 80 shekels, or $22. A kilo of sugar, they write, costs 100 shekels, or $28.

Hunger isn’t only affecting Palestinians in Gaza. There are still 59 hostages in Hamas captivity, almost all Israeli but including three Thais, one Nepalese, and one Tanzanian. Israel believes that 35 of these remaining hostages are dead. It’s almost certain the remaining living hostages, shackled in tunnels by their Hamas captors, are severely hungry: Families of three gaunt Israeli hostages released in February compared them to Holocaust survivors.

At a hearing at the International Court of Justice, the UN’s legal counsel Elinor Hammarskjold said Israel had a clear obligation as an occupying force to allow and facilitate humanitarian aid for the people in Gaza. Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar responded by describing the hearings as “a circus.”

On Holocaust Remembrance Day a group of protesters affiliated with the Israeli organization Parents Against Child Detention stood in a line on a street in Tel Aviv, holding empty saucepans to protest at Israel’s ongoing aid blockade on Gaza, while passersby screamed and cursed at them.

I asked Moria Shlomot, the CEO of PACD, what she thought of those eclairs. She wrote, “While the children of Gaza are starving, the children of Israel are eating eclairs filled with hate. Poisoned eclairs. It shocks me.” She added, “more than 10,000 children in Gaza have been diagnosed with severe malnutrition and more than 1,600 children are in severe acute malnutrition,” since the start of 2025, as reported by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

It’s definitely not a circus for these children or their families. And as far as I know, none of them are indulging in fluffy eclairs.

This article is reproduced in its entirety