A Country That Dehumanizes Millions in Gaza Will Do the Same to Its Own People -
Our lives depend on if we stop killing Palestinians. This simple equation has become clearer in recent weeks: If we continue to kill Palestinians, the lives of David Cunio and Matan Zangauker, Gali and Ziv Berman, Alon Ohel and all the other hostages in Gaza will be in even greater danger than they are now. All the hostages who have returned home testified to that.
But this equation is more profound and of far greater impact: Our lives here are dependent on ending the killing of Palestinians. An end to the bombings from the airand the sea with planes and missiles, and especially with increasing indifference to the number of those killed, their identity, their age or their degree of innocence.
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If we don't stop killing, the lives of our children here will also be in danger. Many of them will pay with their lives for this insatiable and unstoppable lust for revenge, even a year and a half after the October 7 massacre.
Our democracy and freedom in Israel are also dependent on ending the killing of Palestinians. Otherwise, neither the High Court of Justice nor the attorney general and certainly not the head of the Shin Bet security service can help us.
A state that kills hundreds of Palestinians in one night out of total indifference to their identity – they're no longer even trying to explain the justifications for the strikes – won't stop with that.
A Palestinian woman mourns over the body of a relative killed in an Israeli strike in the yard of the Indonesian hospital in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on Saturday.Credit: Bashar Taleb / AFP
Only a few years ago, such mass killing of civilians would have stopped wars.
But the country in which we now live is a country in whose language there are no longer any human beings – only faceless enemies. This country is one without inhibitions, neither legal nor moral.
Meanwhile, the killing is focused on eliminating external enemies, in their thousands, and without any distinction between terrorists and the innocent. We can assume that it won't continue like that. A regime that lacks legal and moral inhibitions in its war in Gaza will be – if it isn't already now – a regime without inhibitions wherever it exercises its power. A country that has dehumanized millions of innocents in Gaza will do the same to its own citizens.
It's impossible to oppose the unchecked exercise of power in one place and to accept it with equanimity when it takes place somewhere else.
Palestinians carry the body of a relative, killed in Israeli strikes, during their funeral in Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on Saturday.Credit: AFP/-
The main price for our dehumanization of the Palestinian people was and is being paid by the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have been killed since the start of the war, and the hundreds of thousands who were wounded and uprooted from their homes and their lives.
But yes, now it's also clear – as a small number of people have warned us throughout the years – that we are also paying for it with our lives, and we'll continue to pay a high price. We've come to terms with the country's violence, after October 7 many of us even encouraged it – and now this violence has gone out of control – and violence that rages uncontrolled also burns everything in its path.
But it's still possible to repent and to change our minds. To try to put an end to the spree of revenge that has engulfed the state of Israel, even if it happens very belatedly. To go out and demonstrate – but this time, not only for the release of the hostages, or the demand to bring down the government of revenge and rampant violence, but simply because it's forbidden to continue to slaughter Palestinians.
If we go out to demonstrate in the name of this demand – simply to end the killing in the Gaza Strip, first of all – we may be able to save the lives of the hostages and bring them home. As well as the little remaining hope that this country in which we live won't become a regime whose only language is violence, and which doesn't acknowledge the existence of human beings, only of targets.