Israelis Must Recognize the Massacre in Gaza Before the World Forgets October 7 - Opinion - Haaretz.com
When Israelis talk about a massacre, they are talking about October 7, only about October 7.
The concept of "massacre" has taken over the public conversation, and is now synonymous with the October 7 attack. This way it's clear: There was a massacre. Only one. There was no other, and there is no other, even today.
The Holocaust, too, not to compare the two, was entirely unique, and all rights to the term are exclusively registered to the Jewish people and the State of Israel, for all eternity. Not Armenia and not Rwanda, nor any other nation that were, God forbid, to experience a holocaust: We hold the copyright. The Holocaust is only the Holocaust of the Jews, just as the massacre is only the massacre of the Israelis.
But while the Holocaust embodied evil that was unprecedented in both its planning and in the dimensions of its killings, treating the October 7 massacre as the only massacre in the vicinity is another sign of Israel's disconnect from reality: the idea that only Jewish blood counts, of the brainwashing and whitewashing of crimes, of the suppression of the other, bigger massacre in Gaza and the denial of its disaster.
Almost everyone in the world who talks about a massacre today, except for Israel's propagandists, refers to what Israel is doing in Gaza. Almost every person in Israel sees the use of the word "massacre" in relation to Gaza as a manifestation of antisemitism. Jews never perpetrate a massacre, they are always only its victims.
Sometimes when I hear Israelis talking about a massacre, I am tempted to think that their eyes have finally been opened and are referring to what we are doing to Gaza. The disappointment is nearly always immediate.
A horrific massacre took place on October 7, this cannot be denied. Israel stopped its clock that day, and has not stopped wallowing in the massacre, night and day, to the point where it can no longer perceive what has happened since: a massacre that is many, many times worse. This does nothing to minimize the force and cruelty of the October 7 massacre.
But, the nine months that followed turned the Gaza Strip into a slaughterhouse with production lines of mass killing and the Gaza border area into an increasingly forgotten image. Every day dozens of Palestinians, most of them women and children, are killed.
The moral minimum is to acknowledge this massacre. One may defend it, argue that it is a necessary evil; more than a few rejoice in it and yearn for another massacre, but not to acknowledge its existence is a despicable lie.
One can be outraged by October 7 and, at the same time, by what Israel has done since then. This is the appropriate reaction. Israel fears that the designation of its actions in the Gaza Strip as a massacre could dull the intensity of the horror of October 7 and cause it to be forgotten.
A member of Ibrahim Abu Alya's family sits with a child on the balcony of her house heavily damaged by Israeli bombardment, in the town of Bani Suheila near Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on Wednesday.Credit: AFP
In fact, this is exactly what happened outside of Israel. As a result of the second massacre, which is much greater in scope and no less brutal than the first – if cruelty can be compared to cruelty – the memory of the first massacre has dimmed to the point of being forgotten.
It's not antisemitism, it's the scale. It's the endless, wholesale bloodshed by a powerful state that launched a punitive campaign against a helpless population, from which the perpetrators of its massacre came. But one massacre does not make another one right. When will we ever learn?
It is very difficult to talk outside of Israel today about October 7, about those who were killed, and even about the hostages. After around 40,000 people have been killed in Gaza, almost 8,000 of them children, and thousands of Palestinians have been taken prisoners in Israel, it is very difficult to arouse sympathy. With its actions, Israel erased the sympathy it had enjoyed in the first days after October 7. It isn't hard to understand.
One need only observe from the outside, beyond the saccharine, propagandist mantle of the Israeli media during the lowest, most disgraceful period in its history: Gaza destroyed, its inhabitants destitute and Israel continues to slaughter them without mercy. In July 2024, when they say "massacre," that is what they're referring to.