Once Victims, Now Israelis Are the Silent Bystanders Who Are Letting Genocide Happen - Opinion - Haaretz.com
The question "Can this really be what it looks like?" is beginning to nag at us. While masses of people worldwide already know the answer, here in Israel, people still have trouble answering.
Maybe that's because they understand that the truth threatens the foundations of what we thought we were and who we wanted to be, and will also require us to recognize very difficult truths about the future. But the price of not seeing is far higher than the price of recognizing the truth.
The term "genocide" describes something that's hard to grasp. For Israelis of our generation, it's a distant nightmare, something from another place and another time, something that happens on other planets. Anyone who grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust has asked themselves at least once in their life, "How did ordinary people go on with their lives and let this happen?" But in a horrifying twist of history, today we, the people living here, are the ones who have to answer that question.
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For almost two years, we have been hearing our public officials and senior army officers advocate starving, liquidating, razing and destroying the Gaza Strip. And for revenge. They declared from the beginning that this is what they intended to do, and then they sent and led the Israeli army to do precisely that. This, in one sentence, is the definition of genocide – a deliberate, coordinated attack on people belonging to a certain group not because of who they are or what they did as individuals, but with the intention of destroying their group.
Israeli right-wing protesters gather on a hill overlooking the besieged Gaza Strip near the border fence on Wednesday, during a rally to mark 20 years since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza.Credit: AFP/MENAHEM KAHANA
But we failed to hear what was explicitly said. We told ourselves a story that would allow the soul to bear the atrocities so we wouldn't have to take responsibility for them and to keep the guilt and pain at bay. We became those ordinary people who go on with their lives and let this happen.
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I'm trying to recall the first moment when I felt that something in reality had changed, that we were in another world. I think it was two months into what I then still called "the war."
These are people who have worked with the organization for years – true partners, leading human rights defenders – and they were telling us about relatives buried under the rubble, about their complete inability to protect their children, about a paralyzing fear.
From there, a chain of events began for them that may or may not be told someday, because it's banal – all in all, it's just the story of three people out of millions who were lucky enough to escape hell. But precisely this, the inconceivable efforts to rescue innocent people from death in exchange for a cash ransom per head (a Palestinian's life was worth about 20,000 shekels in those days, a child's a little less), that made me realise that the rules had changed.
That was the first time. Since then, this feeling has struck me again and again – memories from other worlds, where I haven't been, but heard about. Stories from places where humanity was erased, where people were left abandoned and exposed. More red lines were crossed, more and more moments when the unbelievable became reality.
Everything we didn't believe would happen has happened – tens of thousands of people killed; mass forcible displacement, and then another, and another; entire cities turned into rubble; buildings collapsing on their inhabitants' heads; starvation; the destruction of dreams for the future; and the almost complete erasure of hope. And the children. Dear God, how many children?
Genocide can't happen without a large part of the public that participates in it, supports it or turns a blind eye. This is part of the tragedy – that almost no group that has perpetrated a genocide has understood in real time the significance of its acts. It is always framed as a story of self-defense, of having no other choice, of something the victims brought on themselves.
Israelis destroying aid meant to be transported to the Gaza Strip earlier last year.Credit: Sapir Sluzker Amran
The accepted story in Israel is that it all began on October 7, with that terrible attack, after which everything that has happened in Gaza is ostensibly necessary and justified in the name of defending Israel.
The atrocity of Hamas's attack on the Gaza Strip that day must not, and cannot, be underestimated. It was a criminal attack primarily aimed at civilians, and included countless serious crimes that the mind cannot bear. An entire society experienced a horrific, concentrated trauma that suddenly evoked deep feelings of existential threat.
But even though October 7 was a significant driving force, other, preexisting, conditions were necessary to enable the genocide, to turn us into a society capable of erasing people's humanity in away that would enable us to lose all our capacity for empathy – to tell ourselves that every baby is Hamas, that every family home is a terrorist cell. To become a society that perpetrates genocide, decades of life under a regime of apartheid and occupation were needed, during which the governmental and emotional foundations of supremacy, oppression, separation and fear were laid and reinforced.
For years, we lived apart, Israelis and Palestinians, because we had been taught to think this was the only way to live here. In recent decades, this separation and distancing reached an extreme in the form of the total closure imposed on Gaza. Gaza's residents, the human beings in Gaza, disappeared from Israelis' minds. They became people whom it was possible to bomb indiscriminately every few years, to kill in the hundreds or thousands, without being called to account.
We knew that millions of people in Gaza were living under siege. We knew about Hamas, and we knew who funded it. We even saw photos of the tunnels. In hindsight, we knew everything. There's only one thing we didn't take into account – that they would manage to break through the wall and get to us.
October 7 wasn't just a failure by the army, which didn't manage to protect Israeli civilians. October 7 was first and foremost a societal failure and a failure of the imagination on the part of anyone who preferred to believe that it was possible to keep the violence and oppression on the other side of the fence while we continued to live our lives in relative peace on this side.
Palestinians check bodies of people killed while waiting for aid a day earlier, at the Al-Shifa hospital morgue in Gaza City on Thursday.Credit: AFP/BASHAR TALEB
This rupture occurred while Israel was ruled by the most extreme right-wing government in its history, comprising people for whom destroying Gaza is nothing less than the realization of an ancient dream. And thus, in October 2023, all the stars from our nightmares aligned.
To stand up to genocide, to fight it, you have to understand it. The report B'Tselem released this week about our genocide has two parts. The first described how the genocide is being committed – by combining the practices of mass killing, destroying the conditions for life, social disintegration and starvation, all fueled by unbridled incitement to genocide from within Israel. In the second part, we described how the conditions that enabled the Israeli regime to become a genocidal one developed.
This analysis was done jointly by Palestinians and Israeli Jews. It required us to see reality in a similar way. In this shared reality, there is history. There is the Jews' national trauma, and there is also October 7. Yet none of these facts contradicts other facts. Even if the truth is hard to swallow, there's no other choice.
One fact is that Palestinians as a group were always inferior subjects of the Israeli regime. Some of them were defined as citizens and enjoyed additional rights than the others. Some of the others had fewer rights, while the smallest group was abandoned entirely to incessant violence. We must not continue looking at reality through the false narrative that brought us to this point – a narrative of separation, perpetual war and a nation that dwells alone.
Genocide, being an assault on humanity itself, requires us to look at reality from the standpoint of human beings and fight together for what it means to be human. We need to recognize that this story is ours, the people living in this place. It's a long, painful and bloody story that has now reached an extreme – an abyss we couldn't have imagined we would reach. And it's still not clear when we will hit rock bottom.
Palestinians mourn by the body of a man killed a day earlier while waiting for aid at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on Thursday.Credit: AFP/BASHAR TALEB
Even we, the men and women at B'Tselem – human rights activists who have been living, studying and reporting for years on the violence Israel employs against the Palestinians – didn't believe we would reach the point where we had to deal with the crime of genocide. During months of in-depth research, during which we scrutinized everything again and again, we experienced in our own persons the way the mind rejects the facts, like poison that the body seeks to expel.
But now, we know that the poison is already inside us. It is real, and it's flooding the people who live here, Israelis and Palestinians alike, with inconceivable fear and loss.
Israel's government is perpetrating genocide. And the moment this recognition seeps in, we already know what comes next. After all, we've been thinking about this all our lives, every time we asked ourselves "what would I have done had I been there, on that other planet?" And this question has only one right answer – I would have done everything I could to stop the genocide.
Yuli Novak is the executive director of B'Tselem