Israel Is Blind to Rafah's Inferno, but Its Own Ruin Is Entwined With Gaza's - Opinion - Haaretz.com
The sights from the explosion of the displaced persons camp in Rafah this week were horrifying, even for a war that is providing more and more unbearable pictures. Beheaded toddlers, scorched bodies and a huge fire that destroyed the rickety tents in which civilians were sheltering, in an area that Israel had declared "safe."
"This is one of the most horrifying things I've seen in all the weeks I've been working in Gaza," a British doctor told the New York Times, and a foreign journalist described it as "a real vision of hell."
- When the Gaza war ends, Israel's mainstream media will have a lot to answer for
- The only ones still buying the Israeli army's version of the Rafah strike
- Israel denies strike on camp near Rafah that Gaza officials say killed 21 people
And meanwhile in Israel, in another vision of hell, there are some who enjoy seeing dismembered children and charred civilians. For example, the frenetic troll Yinon Magal, who shared a photo of the burning tents alongside the caption "The main bonfire this year in Rafah"; the security chief of the settlement of Kfar Adumim, Avihai Shorshan, who is known for harassing his Palestinian neighbors, expressed his enjoyment at the disaster with the words "Lag Ba'omer, Rafah version," and my former colleague in the opinion section of Haaretz, Naveh Dromi, who shared Shorshan's post and added: "Happy Holiday."
In the State of Israel, the sheol (dark underworld) that is being built for us by insane, hard-hearted people like Magal, Shorshan and Dromi, happy holidays are days when dozens of innocents are killed and all the jokes are made about other people's dead babies.
But as in Dante's Inferno, even the hell to which Israeli society has sunk consists of different circles. Surrounding the heart of darkness, where people dance on the blood, resides a circle of self-declared or implicit deniers. From there comes the yelling and growling of all those who, at the sight of the bodies and the fire, could immediately say that these are fake propaganda videos, that it wasn't a bombing by the Israel Air Force but "the launching of a failed rocket" (as invented by Channel 14 reporter Hallel Bitton-Rosen), that the numbers of dead are inflated, and why were Hamas terrorists in the displaced persons compound anyway?
Avihai Shorshan's tweet, that reads 'Lag Ba'omer, Rafah version.'
In this circle, there are no monsters who are happy about dead children, only chatterboxes and fabulists who find sophisticated ways of erasing the suffering of others. As it is said: It didn't happen, and if it did happen, so what?
In an adjacent circle, the verbal jugglers are jumping about: members of the government and the army who operate the euphemism mechanism that whitewashes the killing of civilians. "The attack was carried out in accordance with international law, using precise ammunition," the Israel Defense Forces quickly reassured us. That doesn't make dozens of people any less dead, but it may convince The Hague to refrain from issuing injunctions.
Alongside them, sitting on upholstered chairs, are all the submissive journalists, who refrain from reporting on Israel's actions in Gaza. According to them, the horror that took place in Rafah really is a somewhat unpleasant matter, but not because of the children who lost their limbs, but because it harms public diplomacy efforts and photographs badly on the TV screens of the goyim.
And all these are surrounded by the largest circle of sheol, the place where the blind, deaf and simply bored sit. Here the silent majority proclaims its innocence, the people who don't celebrate soot-covered civilians and don't deny the terrifying sights – but are completely indifferent.
Palestinians fleeing Rafah with their belongings following renewed Israeli strikes in the city in the southern Gaza Strip arrive in Khan Yunis on Tuesday.Credit: Bashar TALEB / AFP
In 2002, after the assassination of Salah Shehadeh, commander of the military wing of Hamas in Gaza (who was far more senior that the duo who were assassinated this week in Gaza), the country was in an uproar and dozens of pilots declared that they would refuse to bomb concentrations of civilian population, because along with him 15 children and adult civilians were killed.
Today, about 45 incinerated refugees fill the role of "collateral damage" – and the country is silent before the sight of Rafah's red sky. Toddlers go up in flames, and the Israeli public celebrates, erases, chatters or yawns – that's what our hell looks like. When you embark on a campaign of vengeance, as the saying goes, dig two graves; Israel has such a strong desire for revenge that it is slowly sinking in a dark abyss, hand in hand with the ruins of Gaza.