Europe and Arab States Are Asleep. Soon, Anything That Moves in Gaza City Will Be Killed -
My friends in Gaza will likely soon be ordered to "evacuate" from their makeshift shelters and be "absorbed" into the southern part of the Gaza Strip – just as my parents were once "evacuated and absorbed": my mother to Bergen-Belsen, my father to a ghetto in Transnistria.
The army's flattened language of lies pollutes every report, every discussion. This is not my exhausted, starving friends' problem. It is ours, the Israelis'. So is the outcry of the willfully blind and hard-hearted who insist: "You should never compare."
The Minister of War, Israel Katz, made a promise, and he's keeping it: The mission of moving and transporting, concentrating and crowding, compressing and crushing hundreds of thousands more human beings into a tiny scrap of land in Gaza's south is going ahead, undeterred by protests, condemnations or historical parallels.
No one is saving the Palestinians, the hostages, or us from our own repulsive self.
I write, still hoping for a miracle. That Europe and the Arab states will wake up. That they'll use the real levers of power they actually hold.
Our heroic pilots' bombings, our brave tank commanders' shelling, will ensure Gaza City is emptied of its people and crushed in the jaws of bulldozers driven by the jubilant, God-fearing Zarviv-ites.
The Israeli soldiers are imbued with values, raised to perform meaningful military service. Even those who protest alongside their parents and the hostages' families against the government do not refuse the draft or disobey orders.
When Southern Command Chief Yaniv Asor declares Gaza City a "criminalized zone," every soldier will be licensed to shoot anything that moves. Even a 78-year-old woman. Even her 12-year-old grandson.
I can already hear the unshaken saying: It's their fault; they were given time to evacuate south.
The Kaplan Street protesters have one remaining lever to derail the decisive plans of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, plans bound up in the Putin-style regime overhaul: a mass refusal to participate in these campaigns of destruction and expulsion.
But they don't pull it. For them, the flag is never black enough.
My limited imagination does not allow me to picture my friends and their families – gaunt, sick, grieving – being expelled for what must be at least the eighth time, stumbling into yet another unknown, to a stretch of land even smaller and more crowded than the one before. In a cart? On foot for 20 kilometers? Running, breathless, while shells chase them, columns of black smoke and dust rising behind them?
My terrified imagination refuses to see them staying behind in half-destroyed homes, despite the horror-show advice of IDF spokesperson Avichay Adraee, praying instead for a quick death by bombing.
Their apartments in and around the refugee camps, built and bought with years of salaries, have become smoking, crumbling walls. From the few things they've managed to scavenge or improvise since the last expulsion – mattresses, pots and ladles, planks, blankets, maybe a solar panel – what will they be forced to leave behind this time?
Palestinians transport a shrouded body, killed in an Israeli strike, ahead of a funeral at Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City on August 21, 2025.Credit: AFP/OMAR AL-QATTAA
Surely not the sack of flour they bought for 1,000 shekels. Not the jerrycan with 20 liters of half-purified water. Not the diapers for their 90-year-old mother.
My inadequate imagination can't fathom where, between all the tents packed tight, they will pitch their own.
Where they'll sweat until winter comes, then shiver to the bone as rain and the rising sea soak them, between one round of shelling and the next. And the drones above will buzz on and on, day and night.
Terror. Longing. Hunger. Thirst. Itchy skin. Pain. Rage. Exhaustion. A sick child crying. The letters are the same, but in Gaza, they carry a weight, a substance, a volume that's beyond our comprehension.
The words have fallen from my dictionary – except for these entries: "helplessness," "paralysis" and also, "complicit in crime – against our will."