Netanyahu’s willing executioners: how ordinary Israelis became mass murderers
Israeli soldiers stand next to their military vehicles just outside the Gaza Strip, on 10 March 2024
Faris Giacaman writes in Mondoweiss on 30 July 2024:
In 1996, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen published a book that proposed to rewrite the history of the Holocaust. Its central point was that the Nazi genocide was chiefly made possible by the existence of a deep form of “demonological antisemitism” that had seeped into German society; Hitler and the Nazi regime weren’t so much agitating against Jews as they were simply giving ordinary Germans the green light to act on their already virulent genocidal attitudes. Without this form of “eliminationist antisemitism,” which according to Goldhagen was essentially a part of the fabric of German society long before the Nazis came to power, the Holocaust would not have been possible.
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Most Holocaust scholars harshly criticized Goldhagen for his overly simplistic and reductionist narrative, which they believed flattened the diverse historical processes that made such a systematic act of mass murder possible
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It would be tempting to conclude, after ten months of relentless genocidal war, countless victim testimonies of indiscriminate killing, mass executions, and systematic prison rapes, dozens of gleeful TikTok videos from Israeli soldiers boasting of their destruction of civilian infrastructure, and most recently, insurrectionary riots from Israelis over the right to torture and rape Palestinian prisoners without repercussions, that Israeli society is afflicted with a demonological and eliminationist hate against Palestinians that goes as far back as Zionism itself.
These observations aren’t wrong, of course. But they aren’t the entire story either. Much like the Nazi gas chambers created a routinized assembly line of death that insulated the perpetrators from the victims, so too is the latest Israeli technological innovation through the use of AI systems to loosely identify targets for dropping bombs from a distance. Yet since the Israeli military is a people’s army made up of a remarkable cross-section of the Israeli population, and since many of the atrocities on the ground in Gaza were the product of the individual voluntarism of Israeli soldiers — Israeli outlets like Haaretz and +972 Magazine explained this away as “lax rules of engagement” — it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that both the Israeli state and society are partners in the genocide. It is in significant measure a genocide from above and from below.