Netanyahu’s ‘killing for the sake of humanity’ lie keeps Israelis’ conscience clear

Palestinians sit next to the body of a relative, looking at the rubble of their building after an Israeli strike in Beit Lahia, in northern Gaza, 29 October 2024

Zvi Bar’el writes in Haaretz on 29 October 2024:

Here’s a small exercise in populist demography: This week, the death toll in the Gaza Strip rose to more than 43,000 people – around 2 percent of the territory’s population. If you killed the same proportion of Israelis, it would be 180,000 deaths. The same proportion of Americans would be equivalent to more than 6.5 million people killed. But as noted, this is merely an exercise in populism, because “facts” rebutting it will immediately be brought forth.

Roughly a third of those killed in Gaza are defined as terrorists, even if they worked for Hamas’ medical service, taught in schools subordinate to Hamas’ Education Ministry or were involved in charities funded by Hamas. They are all Hamas.

The other two thirds are “collateral damage,” which is “normal” in every war. And in the end, the numbers are low compared to the number of innocent civilians killed in the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. So we come out looking righteous.

But even after all these arithmetical discounts, and even without any complex calculations, the death toll in and of itself ought to horrify us, or at least elicit some kind of tut-tutting, maybe a little throat-clearing. Something.

The dry daily reports by the Israel Defense Forces Spokesperson’s Unit about the number of terrorists killed tell us our progress – that is, the distance we still have to cover to reach total victory. And it is steadily growing smaller. Another few hundred, or perhaps a few thousand, and we’ll have reached the end of the story.

What do we care about former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah or former Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar? Killing them, destroying the “terrorist infrastructure,” liquidating stockpiles of arms and ammunition both above and below ground, even destroying hospitals and clinics, schools and apartment buildings – none of this has satisfied our thirst for vengeance. We ought to have been sated long since, after the number of Palestinians killed over the last year vastly exceeded the number killed during the entire previous 57 years of occupation.

But we have momentum, so we won’t stop. It’s not just that the killing gladdens our hearts. It’s that every truck that enters Gaza laden with staple foods wrings our hearts. The satanic “generals’ plan,” whose goal is to starve tens of thousands of human beings and force them to flee to slightly less dangerous areas to provide the IDF with a killing zone, has already turned into a strategy and gained public legitimacy, wrapped in the lie of an effort to free the hostages.

But even people convinced that only more military pressure, more assassinations and more cleansing operations will bring the hostages home are already shrugging their shoulders; they are willing to give up on the hostages as long as we get compensation in the form of more dead Palestinians. And the supply never dries up.

Another 2.25 million people are still living in Gaza and waiting for the bomb that will land on them. Like rats in a maze, they are running between Jabalya and Beit Lahia, between Rafah and Khan Yunis, from north to south and then from south to west and back again, seeking shelter for a few months in the ruined homes or in tattered tents. And along the way, they hope they’ll be able to post their last words on social media.

Former Deputy Attorney General Yehudit Karp, a woman whose conscience is a human, moral, ethical compass, sought to shake the pillars of the earth in Tuesday’s Haaretz in Hebrew.

“Save us Israelis from the burden of conscience over the massacre we are committing against the other, over the mass killing being done in our name in Gaza and the territories under our control, over the shame of our theft of rights and lands, and over our apathy toward the fate of anyone who isn’t us,” she cried out with her heart’s blood. “Save us from the evil government because of which we are all responsible for the war crimes being committed in our name, and for the fact that Jewish ethics and Israel’s values are being erased there.”

But it’s already too late.

What we are seeing in Gaza will from now on be considered the fundamental values both of Israel and of the warped Jewish ethics that have been instilled in it. Nothing in Gaza is being done “in our name”; we and our children are doing it ourselves, with pride. And as our prime minister said, “Our victory is for the sake of humanity as a whole.” With messages like that, our conscience is clear.

This article is reproduced in its entirety