This Jewish New Year, Israelis Must Break Out of Their Collective Madness on Gaza
Nearly two years have passed since the Hamas-led attacks of October 7 and the start of Israel's destruction of Gaza. Markers of the war's toll are everywhere – and at the same time, nowhere.
On clear and quiet days, thunderous airstrikes in the Gaza Strip echo across the promenade of Tel Aviv's beach. There are nights when explosions in the devastated Strip shake the windows of apartment buildings in Israel less than one hundred kilometers away. Train stations, bus stops and street signs are plastered with hundreds of stickers that bear the faces of the dead; they are shockingly young. The ubiquitous posters of the hostages have grown battered, faded. The yellow flags, the banner of the hostage families' movement, have begun to fray at the edges.
And yet the catastrophic situation on the ground in Gaza remains almost unmentioned, a kind of specter, an absent presence. The images of emaciated children, denied aid and food intentionally by Israel's government, appear in the international press or are held aloft on signs by anti-war protesters (with the important exception of this publication). As Israeli artillery and airstrikes kill dozens, sometimes hundreds, of Palestinians by the day, most of them civilians, Israeli news channels have returned to broadcasting celebrity game shows in the evenings. No state authority has dictated this. It is not top-down censorship, but a kind of Putinization from the bottom up.
The routine of daily life in Israel continues, while just an hour's drive away in Gaza, hundreds of thousands of people have been expelled from the ruins of their homes, forced to live in tents, thin plastic or scrap metal the only barrier between the brutal late-summer sun and omnipresent threat of bombs.
The reality to which people here have adjusted themselves, acclimated to what was once unthinkable, even if begrudgingly, has almost begun to rival the dystopian visions of the novelist Orly Castel-Bloom.
The conventional wisdom about what Israelis could and would tolerate has also been proven wrong. Days after the 12-day war with Iran, when ballistic missiles brought down multi-story apartment complexes, the beaches were full again, the smack of volleyballs interrupted by the occasional helicopter, slicing its way back from Gaza, carrying wounded or dying soldiers to the hospital. Increasingly, this seems less like a form of societal resilience and more like collective madness.
In a recently published book, the Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupancic draws a distinction between denial and disavowal. "Denial differs from disavowal," she writes. "It doesn't deny facts, but gladly announces knowing all about them, and then it goes on as before." Zupancic associates denial with right-wing populism and disavowal with "the business-as-usual mainstream." It is not hard to see how this division applies to Israeli politics today.
The eliminationist Israeli right and the devotees of the Netanyahu cult exhibit a spectacularly perverse form of denial. Take, for example, Likud Knesset member Tally Gotliv, who one day calls for using a nuclear weapon in Gaza, and another day calls the fact that Israel has killed thousands of innocent children in the Strip a blood libel. Gotliv is not just an extremist, but a troll, an encapsulation of the pathologies of the political right in our time.
The vast majority of Israelis, by contrast, remain in the throes of disavowal. They know what is happening in Gaza even if it is not shown on television. They do not need to watch; they themselves have been there, or if not, people they know, siblings, cousins, friends. They also know, for instance, that even the army's highest echelons opposed the ongoing ground invasion of Gaza City – that there is not even a flimsy pretext of strategic justification for the renewed offensive, that it is destruction for the sake of destruction, collective punishment of a society whose fabric has been rent, perhaps irrevocably.
Poll after poll shows that this same overwhelming majority of Israelis wants the war to end and the hostages to return home. Recently, hundreds of thousands of people have taken to the streets to demand this. But just as many have sought solace in the return to "business as usual," knowing that the war must end, but persisting in their routine even as it continues.
Disavowal, Zupancic argues, is a psychological strategy of non-confrontation with a traumatic reality. And in Israel today, the trauma is two-fold: not only the constantly relived trauma of Simchat Torah two years ago, but that which accumulates with each day that the destruction of Gaza goes on.
To end this war, it will be necessary to break out of disavowal and confront the gruesome reality fully: to recognize what Israel's war has wrought and begin to repair the untold damage that has been done. In religious terms, that is the function of the shofar in our tradition – to shatter illusions and self-deceptions, to confront us with the reality of our sins, and thus to catalyze repentance.
We are now on the cusp of Rosh Hashanah and the Days of Awe. The shofar blast is sounding.
Read more about the war:
■ Netanyahu's vision for Israel's future is not Sparta, it's something worse
■ From the Nakba to October 7, the shifts in Israeli-Palestinian narratives
■ We must decide which post-October 7 Jewish story to write in the book of life
■ Israel tragically played the role Hamas scripted in its vengeful retaliation in Gaza
■ What kind of life awaits the six babies born in Gaza this weekend?
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