Will Israelis One Day Say of Their Country's Atrocities in Gaza, 'I Was Always Against It'? - Opinion - Haaretz.com
Optimists say that, ultimately, Israelis will grasp the scope of the atrocity they committed in the Gaza Strip. The truth will seep into their consciousness.
The old videos of infants who were blown to bits by our bombs will at some point reach Israelis' hearts and pierce them. They will suddenly see children coated in the dust of the crushed concrete beneath which they were rescued, shaking uncontrollably and staring blankly with an _expression_ that is all a big question mark.
At some point, the optimists say, Israelis will stop saying, "They deserved it, because of October 7. They attacked." The numbers will stop being abstractions and "Who believes Hamas." The readers will grasp that more than 20,000 children were killed – a third of all the dead – at our hands. More than 44,000 children were wounded – a quarter of all the wounded. They will realize that they abetted and supported a war of annihilation against a people and did not defeat a vicious armed organization.
At some point, they will realize that the individual viciousness of revenge demonstrated by so many soldiers – often accompanied by bursts of laughter and smiles that streamed through TikTok, and the cold, surgical, and anonymous lethal viciousness of those playing video games from the cockpits and control rooms – are not a mark of heroism but a serious illness. Social and personal.
Parents, the optimists believe, will be unable to sleep at night, worried that the Xs on their sons' rifles mark women, old people, and just youngsters gathering herbs for food. The day will come when adolescents will ask their fathers, who were soldiers back then, whether they too obeyed an order to shoot an old man who crossed an unknown red line.
The daughters of decorated pilots will ask whether they dropped a proportionate bomb that killed a hundred civilians for one mid-level Hamas commander. Why didn't you refuse? The daughter will sob.
Protesters holding photos of Palestinian children killed in Gaza by Israel next to Tel Nof air force base, earlier this year.
The grandchildren of a retired prison guard will ask, did you personally beat a shackled detainee until he fainted? Did you obey a minister's order and deny prisoners food and showers? Did you crowd 30 detainees in a cell meant for six? Where did they get skin diseases? Did you know any of the dozens of detainees who died in an Israeli prisonfrom starvation or from beatings and torture? How could you, Grandpa? The nephews of Supreme Court justices will read their rulings that permitted all of that and they will stop visiting them on Shabbat.
At some point, the optimists believe, the Israeli media's obscuring of reality will cease to brainwash and numb hearts. The phrase, "the context," will not be considered a profanity and the public will connect the dots: Oppression. Expulsion. Humiliation. Deportation. Occupation. And all the suffering between them. They are not parts of slogans that self-hating Jews coined, but describe the life of an entire people, for years, under our orders and our guns.
People are not born cruel; they become such. The cruelty of Palestinians towards Israelis is covered extensively in our media, articles and close-ups. It developed in response and resistance to our foreign and hostile rule. Our cruelty, that of Israeli society, is getting ever more sophisticated with the aim of protecting our spoils: the land and the water and the freedoms from which we expelled the Palestinians.
The optimists believe that there is a road back. How lucky they are, the optimists.