The orgy of weeping by Knesset members leaving the screening of a video compilation of raw footage documenting the October 7 massacre and the theatrical, open _expression_ of their emotions told a fascinating tale to us and a terrible one to the world.
We’ll start with us, a miserable and battered population afflicted by a gang of egocentrics, headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his family, who always, in any situation, even a horrible disaster, consider themselves the main protagonists.
One by one they stumbled from the hall, bawling as though they had not heard or read any testimonies by survivors, who have been telling their stories for four weeks now. As though they haven’t seen the broken Zaka volunteers, whose eyes still show memories of the horrors they’ve seen.
We are told that tranquilizers were handed out before the screening. Great conditions. The people who underwent the atrocities were forced to do so without the benefit of Klonopin. Galit Distel-Atbaryan, tender soul that she is, took a pill, and it didn’t help.
She couldn’t take the terrible sights, she said, and ran out shrieking and sobbing, shaking all over, in one of the worst anxiety attacks she has ever known. She tweeted: “Erase Gaza from the face of the earth. Let the Gazan monsters rush to the southern border and flee into Egypt, or die. And let them die badly. Gaza should be wiped off the map, and fire and brimstone on the heads of the Nazis in Judea and Samaria. Jewish wrath to shake the earth around the world. We need a cruel, vengeful IDF here. Anything less is immoral.”
The social media platform formerly called Twitter, whose new management permits the distribution of particularly base content, hid the tweet. Even it has a limit, which apparently ends before calls for genocide, ethnic cleansing and expulsion.
It is important to remember that Distel-Atbaryan (who recently resigned as public diplomacy minister) and her former cabinet colleagues have not visited residents of affected Gaza border communities who were evacuated, have not offered them an attentive ear or solace. Nor have they mobilized to provide aid and relief. Instead, they wept, shook, cried out and contributed to the voices in the world that have been saying for a month that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip and will go on to do so also in the West Bank.
Alongside cabinet members who vie with her to head the most useless ministries, such as Gila Gamliel and Amichai Eliyahu, Distel-Atbaryan caused terrible damage. Her tweet garnered 3 million views, retweets and appalled comments by leading journalists from around the world.
The post by Eliyahu, the minister of the heritage of absolutely nothing, began with the pastoral line “The northern Strip, more beautiful than ever, bombing and flattening everything,” received much media attention; the editor in chief of The Economist even mentioned it.
The responses were unequivocal, and rightly so: An Israeli cabinet minister called openly for ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Alongside it is the pro-transfer document of Gamliel, who in all her years in politics has done nothing significant except to look after her own interests. The Intelligence Ministry paper has starred on news outlets including CNN, ABC and The Associated Press.
The proposal, in short, is to carry out a transfer of all Gaza residents to Sinai. To be fair, we must admit that they are only carrying out Netanyahu’s egocentric ethos – zero accountability, maximum selfishness. But these are three legal and PR disasters in two days.
I am not arguing that Gamliel, Distel-Atbaryan and Eliyahu have any influence over operational decisions, but to the global media they represent official Israel. Anyone who wants to interpret Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide that will end in ethnic cleansing can do so using quotes by these three freeloaders.
If Israel wants the latitude to complete its military mission in Gaza (whose implications are in dispute), it had better do something about this, and quickly, because the analytical debate over its actions in Gaza will be conducted, in part, in light of their statements.