In Gaza, Israel Is Racing to the Moral Abyss
Palestinians evacuating survivors of an Israeli bombing of Gaza on Sunday. Much more natural than humaneness is the desire to take revenge.Credit: Hatem Moussa/AP
Moral corruption is a mechanism that fuels and justifies itself in a cycle that can become endless without powerful and insistent intervention.
For us Israelis, the 75 years of refugee status that we’ve imposed on millions of Palestinians, the 56 years of occupation that we’ve imposed on millions more, and the 16 years of siege that we’ve imposed on the millions of Palestinians in Gaza have eroded our moral principles. They have normalized a situation where there are people worth less. Much less.
Corruption usually moves into the depths of the abyss at a constant speed with frightening periods of acceleration, but there are also moments of hope for a slowdown – until the black Saturday of October 7.
The incomprehensible cruelty that we’ve been exposed to – which proves the degree to which the occupation and the siege corrupt the occupied as well as the occupier – has penetrated our soul. And like nuclear fuel, it has spiraled us on our way to a moral hell.
It took a few days for a day of unbridled and systematic slaughter of civilians – children, women, the elderly and men – by members of an organization that has lost any shred of humanity to lift some of the barriers that we still seemed to have.
- Israelis must maintain their humanity even when their blood boils
- Israel labels all Arabs as enemies until proven otherwise. Even then, suspicion lingers
- No to collective punishment against Gaza
Israel today is a country and society where calls to erase Gaza aren’t only the province of pathetic and marginal people leaving comments on social media. It’s a country where lawmakers from the ruling party are openly and unashamedly calling for a “second Nakba,” where the defense minister orders a denial of water, food and fuel to millions of civilians, a country whose president, Isaac Herzog, Israel’s moderate face, says that all Gazans are responsible for Hamas’ crimes. (If I hadn’t seen this part myself I wouldn’t have believed it.)
In Gaza with its 2.3 million inhabitants, over half of them children living under a government combining totalitarian dictatorship with religious fundamentalism, our president couldn’t find a single Gazan – man, woman or child – who wasn’t responsible. It’s a good thing no news channel has ordered a survey to find out what percentage of the Jewish community supports ethnic cleansing in Gaza.
And maybe not only in Gaza; why stop there? When the political and military leadership loses all restraint and approves ideas about a massive blow to civilians, we’re creating a society where the process of stripping away the humanity of the people on the other side of the border has been completed.
And when that happens, the inferno is near. On October 8 we carried out a giant leap in our campaign of moral corruption, and we are now dangerously close to the black hole. It’s no wonder that there are thousands of dead in Gaza – thousands! – and the voices asking if we’ve done enough to prevent harming the innocent are barely heard in the Israeli public debate.
And that’s not all. No social moral corruption is only directed outward. There is always the enemy within – the same enemy the police commissioner declared war on last week when he ordered his subordinates to forcibly prevent protests against the war in Gaza and against harming innocent people there. And he proposed that we deport the protesters to Gaza.