Israel Tells the World: This Is Our New, Brutal Face. Get Used to It
In 1948, most Palestinians were expelled from their homeland. Yet the world never stopped expressing solidarity with the young country that the Arabs "rose up against to destroy." The same was true in June 1967. Israel occupied and expelled, but the Israelis still acted as if they were the ones who were attacked by the people they expelled and the residents of the refugee camps. The world bought this absurdity. That's the power of tears.
Now, everything has been reversed. The approach has changed completely. There's no more weeping and wailing. Now, the Netanyahu government and parts of the opposition are displaying their aggressive, messianic face, as if to say to the world: Get used to our new face. If you like it, fine, and if you don't. "Go pave the sea," as the Arabic saying goes.
Listening to the statements of senior Israeli officials is depressing. They speak completely freely about starving the Gaza Strip, about the Gazans being the equivalent of Amalek, about there being no innocent civilians there, about a shell bearing wishes from Israel's president. The new trend is to be crude, violent and devoid of empathy for the other's suffering. And it's all public. The day of the "Jewish soul yearning" as Israel's national anthem says, has passed.
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Anyone who is anyone in the government or its environs is hosted by a single television station whose popularity is breaking records. Judging by their statements there and their campaigns of demonization against the Palestinians, one could write indictments wholesale for the court – the one in the Hague, of course. There's no need to work hard to extract a chilling statement here, a bit of ugly incitement there. Just record and tremble.
Why have influencers both in and out of the government replaced the language of victimhood with the language of force and cruelty? In my opinion, there are two reasons.
The first is an intoxication with power. We'll do whatever we please, and there's no one to stand in our way. AIPAC and the evangelicals are with us, and they will bash anyone who tweets against us. We have an all-powerful military that can even reach the bedrooms of regional leaders. We have booby-trapped beepers that can dismember limbs in a second. And no UN resolution against us has passed, because our big brother protects us.
The second reason is that people who used to advocate for public diplomacy have largely reached the conclusion that there's no chance of Israel convincing the world that it is in the right. The old view, that the Arabs were the aggressors and Israel was only defending itself, has been broken. So the world will get used to Israel's cruel face.
This approach has been internalized to such a degree that people here actually believe the aggressive approach is what will convince the world, and that other nations will support harassing the Palestinians. This internalization of aggression, crudeness and supremacy runs so deep that those who adopt this approach even think the world agrees with it.
David Issacharoff wrote about a delegation of 160 young men and women from Germany who were described as "handpicked future leaders." They were brought to Israel in late 2025 by the Foreign Ministry and the Israeli Embassy in Berlin. Issacharoff's description of what happened on that trip shows that Israel has decided to take off the gloves and market itself without a drop of makeup.
Among other things, he reported that in a discussion about settler violence in the West Bank, the guide accompanying the group made light of the problem. After that conversation, one of the participants discovered that the guide had written in a Facebook post that "Gaza must be emptied out of Gazans, until the last one. … And then it must be flooded with Jewish settlement. … No other revenge would be more fitting than this."
Our aggression and our despair of convincing the world are feeding off each other. Consequently, instead of concluding that if the world no longer buys the story of cruel Arabs facing off against good Israelis, perhaps Israel should adopt a tactic of seeking peace, Israelis have done the opposite. In their blindness, they believe that the world will get used to and even applaud a cruel Israel that thumbs its nose not only at the Arabs, but at every country on the planet.