If Israelis Are Happy 'Despite Everything,' We Should Ask What Everything Means
Israelis may say they are happy despite everything. But if genocide, occupation and moral collapse are included in that 'everything,' what exactly does happiness mean?
It does not include the occupation and military control, war crimes, or those now being expelled from Masafer Yatta and Ras Ein al-Auja. It does not include the humiliated and the frightened, those whose bodies are used in the so-called "mosquito protocol," in which Palestinians are forced to serve as human shields.
It is also unclear whether this "despite" takes into account those suffering from moral injury. Some of them, soldiers who fought in the Gaza Strip and are now forced to confront what they did or saw there, were interviewed by Tom Levinson.
Yehuda, a soldier who returned from Gaza, traveled with his wife to Madrid and visited the Prado Museum. A painting there, depicting a helpless person raising his hands before several soldiers with rifles, reminded him of a Gazan who "immediately held up his hands. It was obvious he was unarmed. The officer came near him, waited a few seconds and just fired – without asking questions, without the suspect doing anything."
Yuval recounted how "I was firing like a madman, like they teach you in platoon drills in basic training," before later realizing what had happened. "When we got to our destination, I realized that these weren't terrorists. It was an old guy and three boys, maybe teenagers. Not one of them was armed."
Maya, a philosophy student studying Michel Foucault, said she was in the operations room when an order was given to shoot at five Palestinians who had not been identified as armed. Hours later, she said, the bodies were buried in the sand, and one survivor was held at the outpost, blindfolded, while a soldier urinated on him, until it was discovered that he had not been involved in the fighting at all.
Does Harel's "despite" take these testimonies into account, testimonies from perfectly ordinary, educated, upper-middle-class people?
And what about the many other testimonies, written and unwritten? Are they included in this "despite everything," within the reality Harel now seeks to define as good, and in which Israel is supposedly ranked high on the World Happiness Index?
To say "despite everything" in this context means that genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, broad moral corruption, disrupted lives, missiles from Iran, existential anxiety, constant violence and tension do not contradict the possibility of living a good life here. How, for heaven's sake?
If such a reality can be considered "good," then the concept of good loses its meaning, or Israel is redefining it. Can life be considered good if it relies on the systematic denial of others' right to a good life, or when they are harmed in the process?
Yesterday I read an article in the Palestinian magazine Sabra that left me stunned. According to the article, in Gaza after October 7, a whole body is no longer the norm. Amputees, people whose bodies are disfigured, are the norm.
I thought about the new norm in Gaza and Israeli normality. It turns out that between the sea and the river, an abnormal normality prevails.