The antidote to the Government’s gaslighting is a stubborn insistence on the truth
Protesters hold cutout pictures of hostages and a banner, as they block a road during a demonstration demanding the immediate end of the war and the release of all hostages, Tel Aviv, 19 August 2025
Noa Limone writes in Haaretz on Aug 20, 2025
In the past 24 hours, the gaslighting headquarters, aka the Israeli government, issued its usual dispatches with greater intensity and increased cruelty. The main point: Referring to participants in the day of strikes for a hostage release as a negligible “handful” of people, cynically exploiting the pain of the hostage families for the sake of a political, anti-government campaign, which strengthens Hamas and buries the hostages.
“They’re burning highways and damaging infrastructure,” cried Transportation Minister Miri Regev, who has done more damage to highways and infrastructure than anyone else. The prime minister went as far as to say that the disruptive activities “guarantee that the horrors of October 7 will return,” and Finance Committee Chairman Hanoch Milwidsky dubbed the protests “riots in support of Hamas.”
Israel’s citizens are in an abusive relationship with their government. It’s as though the coalition members read the guide to poisonous behavior, studied it well and are devoutly implementing it.
Gaslighting is the use of lies and reversing the reality in order to weaken people’s hold on it and their ability to distinguish between truth and fiction. The government is thereby inciting citizens against one another and sowing divisiveness in order to rule more effectively.
The antidote to gaslighting is a stubborn insistence on the truth. What exactly is the “order” that the “anarchistic” strike threatens to disrupt? The sequence of days between the sirens and the missile attacks? Between one “cleared for publication” headline and the next? Or the many hours during which the disaster of abandoning the hostages, the photos and the testimony, are repressed? Is the “order” a denial of our crimes in the Gaza Strip? Erasing the faces of the dead children there?
For 682 days our lives have been a hollow routine, the appearance of normalcy: We get up in the morning and go to work, send the children to school and summer camp, sit in restaurants and go on vacation, but many are incapable of answering the simple question “How are you doing?” Because an honest answer would reveal that we’re already beyond despair. Language collapses in the face of catastrophe.
We’re granting the situation validity by the fact that the appearance of routine continues. The order that’s being maintained enables its exacerbation and deterioration. Symbolic activities are no longer sufficient. Neither hostage pins, which even government ministers wear, nor “yellow” films about the cars, nor the rallies at the city squares and intersections on weekends. Even the partial strike and the disruptive activities, if limited to a single day, won’t help, because they won’t rescue them from the symbolic plane, which can be contained.
What will everyone talk about today?
In a sense, the symbolism serves the opposite purpose. It enables a momentary release, provides temporary relief to our heavy consciences. The symbolism swallows up the goal and enables us to continue with the imaginary routine.
The order of the day requires more than that. It demands continual disorder. Disorder is the real order. Because the truth is that reality itself is distorted, chaotic. It was repression that brought about the horrors of October 7 and the horrors that followed, and we must oppose it.
For that purpose, there’s a need for courage and a need for determination and perseverance; withstanding our employers, our concerns about making a living, our natural attraction to what’s familiar, easy and convenient. As fate would have it, we’ve been thrown into this moment in history. This is the moment when we cannot be obedient or blind.
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