What else needs to happen for Israelis to shake off apathy over war crimes perpetrated by IDF in Gaza?
Palestinian children after an Israeli airstrike in Khan Yunis, July 2024
Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz on 8 December 2024:
What else needs to happen before Israel’s citizenry shakes off its paralyzing apathy? What further horrors must take place so that middle-of-the road media outlets deign to fulfill their role and report them? What could crack the October 7 narrative Israel is mired in, with the shocking claim that in its wake everything is permissible, and that only it is the victim?
It now appears that nothing can help. Nothing will shatter the glass ceiling Israel has constructed for itself so as to avoid facing the facts. And the facts are arriving now, accompanied by definitive evidence: Israel is perpetrating barbaric war crimes in Gaza. Not as exceptions, but as policy.
Not as irregularities but as a matter of routine. One can no longer deny the message, even though Israel is still trying to. Will another ten thousand dead children do the trick and shock this country? Will one thousand more snuff videos touch anyone? Perhaps the execution of one thousand handcuffed men facing a wall? That is very doubtful.
The immoral armor Israel has wrapped itself in is impenetrable. It is impervious to any atrocity. Perhaps if it embarked on a campaign for eliminating 100 dogs in Gaza a day, the rafters would shake and the national conscience would be awakened. Only then.
It’s no coincidence that the military has a specific order forbidding the killing of dogs, as reported by reservist Haim Har-Zahav in his model testimony, which should have caused an upheaval. Anything else, other than killing dogs – which is shocking in itself – including harming masses of innocent people in Gaza, will be justified or denied by all Israelis, the bad and the good ones. With such a conscience, population transfer will also be met with a yawn here. Concentration and even death camps will find some advocates. It’s October 7.
The rattling, factual and pertinent testimony of Har-Zahav should be compulsory reading for every Israeli. In the army, in schools, in synagogues, in yeshivas and universities. Everyone must read Har-Zahav. This won’t happen, because Israel doesn’t want to know. No one can deny Har-Zahav’s claims. He is not an enemy of the nation and he was there, in the Netzarim corridor, in contrast to the vast majority of people denying the horrors. If Har-Zahav’s testimony weren’t enough, the next day came a story by Nir Hasson in Haaretz about a documentation project carried out by the courageous historian Dr. Lee Mordechai.
This story is even more disconcerting. Dr. Mordechai has presented the most systematic and detailed array of war crimes perpetrated by the Israel Defense Forces in Gaza. Even the restrained Hasson testified that delving into the plethora of Mordechai’s evidence was a terrible experience.
One thousand, one hundred and forty families have been completely wiped out; perhaps the most horrific figure is the dead 710 babies less than a year old; 489 members of health teams, including 55 physicians; 100 professors; 243 athletes; and four premature infants, who died when the army forced the nurse caring for them to abandon them to their death. 240 wounded and sick people were imprisoned in a hospital for a week without any food.
What does one do after seeing all this data? What can one say? But please, avoid a retail-style score-keeping kept by good Israelis such as journalist Nadav Eyal (“that’s not a report…it’s a cocktail”): the data is unreliable, it’s the Hamas health ministry, who told you that this was the truth, one should wait for a commission of inquiry, which will never be established – all these excuses are no longer valid. Not with these alarming numbers of fatalities, not in view of the evidence piling up on all sides, until even former IDF chief of staff [and right-wing politician] Moshe Ya’alon is calling these crimes.
It’s not a commission of inquiry that’s needed, but a commission of conscience. Not precise statistics, but eyes and a heart. Watch any TV station that is not Israeli and see for yourselves. If 700 dead newborn babies cannot touch the hearts of Israeli parents, who love their own children so much, then Israel’s conscience is mortally ill, perhaps already having died in this war. Barbarism has overrun the country. It has become devoid of any vestige of humanity. And it may remain with us for generations to come.
This article is reproduced in its entirety