Sara Netanyahu Has Her Photos Retouched, but Israel's Distorters of Reality Are Far Worse
"This time we'll discuss the visible male and female soldiers, and only those in the West Bank."
Israeli soldiers in Nablus' Old City in April. They bark out orders in the heart of civilian neighborhoods. Credit: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP
The 'Anyone but Bibi' camp chooses ignorance. Its members deny the army's role and their own part in molding the mentality that has shaped the young people who will vote en masse for Ben-Gvir and Netanyahu
Sara Netanyahu makes sure that her photos are retouched, and for that she's on the receiving end of a flood of justified mockery from the "Anyone but Bibi" spectrum. But she's an amateur compared to the professional retouching by that same anti-Netanyahu camp of his image, and even more so of the camp's role, legacy and responsibility for the horror shows created by Israel.
This time we'll discuss the visible male and female soldiers, and only those in the West Bank – not in Gaza and not the anonymous pilots in fighter jets or the soldiers on Military Intelligence bases and at plants developing even more lethal weapons. Their anonymity, which is immune to any criticism, condemnation and prosecution, is a Photoshop job in itself.
The soldiers who are visible are also the emissaries and symbols of Israel. Their jobs, faces, images and body language undergo a miraculous process of refurbishing, sanctifying and absolving, all the way from the occupied olive groves and city alleyways to the university halls and the radio and TV talk shows.
In the retouched photo they're heroes and children. In reality, they bark out orders and march with faces masked into the heart of civilian neighborhoods. With their rifles aimed and stun and tear gas grenades tied around their bellies, they stand young men against the wall and kick them. They steal cash from vegetable vendors who pass through the checkpoints in their vans.
They break into homes in the middle of the night and awaken frightened children and detain 50-year-olds who were born into a hostile and foreign occupation. They take foolish selfies and then get angry when they're called idiots.
At the order of the security coordinator of some settler outpost they chase Palestinian farmers from their fields and homes. And on the order of Israel's Civil Administration they confiscate water tanks from shepherds. They race through the forcibly emptied streets of the refugee camps in Tulkarm and Jenin, and with rifles aimed they chase women who had hoped to salvage something from their homes.
These people protest against police who beat their camp's demonstrators but don't want to know about the soldiers who fire at Palestinians who've never tasted a day of freedom.
They supervise the uprooting of thick olive trees and house demolitions, and they slow the pace of inspections at checkpoints – just when people are rushing home or to work. They're rude: With faces covered with their Hague masks (to evade prosecution for war crimes) they wave their hands at the shop cashier as if swatting away a mosquito, and menace a grandmother with a stick.
They're heroes when it comes to teenagers and younger children throwing stones from a distance, and they kill them with their rifles. Armed from head to toe, they open fire on a car containing a family and explain that they felt that their lives were in danger.
You may say: They're young, oranges that have rotted a bit, don't forget October 7, they're keeping us safe, you don't know how many terror attacks they're thwarting, they're only following orders.
All this provides a facelift for an army whose supreme mission remains to ensure Israel's grab of what remains of the Palestinian homeland and the elimination of any chance for a life for the two peoples between the sea and the river.
The "Anyone but Bibi" camp chooses ignorance. Its members deny the army's role and their own part in molding the mentality that has shaped the young people who will vote en masse for Itamar Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit and Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud. They will obey – at first gladly, until they suffer from PTSD – the orders of annihilation in Gaza and destruction in Lebanon.
The anti-Netanyahu camp embodies what sociologist Baruch Kimmerling wrote in the journal Theory and Criticism in 1993. "Militarism has become a source of vested interests in perpetuating the conflict, transforming it into an integral and routine part of Jewish society and embedding it as an unalterable given," he wrote in his Hebrew-language article "Militarism in Israeli Society."
This camp's immediate interests, which in this version of Photoshop are called "state security," include a guaranteed career in high-tech, a stipend for those completing army service, a startup in an industrial zone in the West Bank, a boutique villa in Binyamin in the West Bank or in the Galilee, a pension at age 45, and then a job as a CEO.
These people reject Ben-Gvir but not the Israel Prison Service's cellars of torture, starvation and killing. They protest against police who beat their camp's demonstrators but don't want to know about the soldiers who fire at Palestinians who've never tasted a day of freedom. They reject Netanyahu and suspect that his motives are only personal, but they support his wars on Iran and don't say a word about the occupation of additional parts of Syria.
They're busy glorifying the army, as if they didn't know that it's a tool in Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich's "Decisive Plan" to annex the West Bank and expel Palestinians, as if there were no plans to complete in the West Bank the erasure and destruction that the army "achieved" in Gaza.
In the 1962 open letter "My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation," Harlem-born writer James Baldwin prepared his 15-year-old nephew for the world of injustices created by the enslavers – the white people in the United States.
Baldwin taught his nephew to pity white people – "those innocents who believe that your imprisonment made them safe." But he wasn't merely compassionate and emphasized that "it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime." Innocence in the sense of ignorance by choice.