Again, Israel Is Choosing Death

The massacre in the Gaza border communities is the new formative ethos of Israeli society. It’s a perfect and horrifying welding of the Holocaust and the horrors of the Nazis to Hamas and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to the new ethos, the slaughterers are not Hamas members alone but all of Palestinian society, in Gaza and in the Palestinian Authority. From now on all the Palestinians are Nazis. Marked for death. to be conquered, expelled, killed.

Since the massacre of 1,400 people on October 7 in a string of border communities, Israelis who are holed up in their homes awaiting the next phase of the war are gathering in front of four TV channels, which are constantly broadcasting testimony from the massacre and the abduction of the hostages. Israeli society is stuffing itself with an assembly line of stories of bereavement. They’re considered good for morale. The wait is being prolonged, the ground attack is being delayed, and the stories continue to flow.

They don’t help pass the time. They’ve become time itself. They reinforce the basic deep Israeli narrative: Jews are innocent victims of horrifying Nazi murderousness. There’s a huge number of stories, which are shaping a collective consciousness. Israeli citizens are undergoing a shift in consciousness now. They’re turning into an enlisted society. A nation that’s an army. A nation of heroes. A united nation. As one. Together.

Once again there’s no distinct Israeli identity. Only Jews who were led like sheep to the slaughter and are vowing revenge. As though there has been no country for the 75 years since the Holocaust. The orphaned Jews in the Land of Israel are waiting for the Messiah, for redemption. The embracing, paternalistic Joe Biden wasn’t received here as a father figure. People clung to him as to a savior.

How many horror stories should someone reasonably consume in a day? Israelis feel a moral obligation, out of a shared destiny, to hear all the stories. All the time. At almost any moment that they sit down to watch television, late at night or early in the morning, during the day or in the evening, they’ll hear horrors. And when they zap among the channels they’ll be able to choose the horror that speaks to them most.

The competition among the TV channels is a marketplace of horrors. They’re selling the stories as content. They’re trying to attract viewers with them. They promise new emotional peaks at every level: in the depth of grief, the intensity of rage, the dimensions of shock and trauma, the recognition of a miracle.

Just before I sat down to write, I watched Shai Golden trying to tempt viewers with a promise of a story unlike anything they’ve heard. There’s never been such a thing, he boasted, like a peddler describing his wares. The horror stories are blinding the public. Paralyzing it, eliminating its ability to think rationally. Israel is looking forward to war. The war covers up the fury and the protest over the hostages, who are being betrayed by their country overtly and criminally. It neutralizes the fury and protest against Benjamin Netanyahu.

Like blind people, we are trailing behind a leader who is a malignant national disease that thinks only of himself, into a war that he has a personal interest in prolonging, and whose end is deliberately vague, far beyond the winter. A war that is likely to lead to a regional, multi-front confrontation, and even drag in the superpowers. Thousands of Israelis are likely to be killed on the battlefield in Gaza and in the ruined streets of the country’s center. The war is likely to end in the renewed occupation of the Gaza Strip, along with the tightening of occupation and apartheid in the West Bank.

We are led by a man who even before the massacre managed to cause the country more damage than it has ever experienced. An architect of the inferno. This is the man whom Israel is following. As usual, with typical obedience, while sacrificing the hostages, to the rhythm of the drums of war, with Holocaust logic, Israel is once again choosing death. And Israeli death is always the most justified and unavoidable death of all.