It's not just Netanyahu.
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We are told that the “tide has turned” in the Western discourse on Gaza. Piers Morgan berates pro-Israel guests about dead children (“That’s blood libel,” Israeli Ambassador Tzipi Hotovely said).
The three European doofuses pledged “concrete reactions” (how threatening and highly specific) if Israel doesn’t stop their “Gideon’s Chariott” ground invasion and starvation campaign.
Editorials in mainstream papers (not the New York Times though!). A conservative MP (no US Republican though!) And 380 ‘literary giants’ or whatever signed a letter calling Israel’s genocide a genocide after 20 months of genocide. Even former Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and other senior Israeli officials have spoken out; as well as anonymous army officials protesting the invasion as militarily pointless.
Critics point out it’s a little too late. And that it’s a scramble for reputational ass-covering now that speaking out is no longer taboo.1 I think that’s largely true. But, also, images of skeletal kids hit hard—so again a lot is probably genuine, although I don’t see why images of kids without heads or burned alive or buried under rubble didn’t hit hard too.
Anyway. I think these documents serve one other, very important purpose: they try and contain the moral culpability to the Netanyahu government. They are never indictments of the state or society. In an NPR interview Olmert, for example, singles out Netanyahu. And when he accidentally says “the state of Israel” he corrects himself. “But to be very sincere with you, look, state of Israel can't eat the cake and have it at the same time. The government of Israel, I'm sorry, not the state,” he told NPR.
Conversely, when party chairman Yair Golan warned that Israel risked becoming a pariah state because “A sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set itself the aim of expelling populations” the outcry was volcanic. He was forced to walk it back, claiming he meant “extremist politicians in the government sought to.”
“I wasn’t speaking about the military at all. I didn’t say that,” Golan said. I mean …while I don’t doubt that if they weren’t busy celebrating ethnic cleansing Ben-Gvir and Smotrich would be more than happy to take a shot at a Palestinian child—it’s not the politicians in the government that are pulling the literal trigger. And before I get Hotovely-ed: multiple Western (not that it should matter) doctors say they saw many, many cases of children with clean shots to the head or chest and believe they were snipered. Watch Al-Jazeera’s “Kids Under Fire.” It’s interviews with some of the doctors and English needs a far stronger word than “haunted” for the expressions in their eyes.
To get to my point: the sudden surge of outrage might be self-serving, it might be genuine; it might be both. But what it really serves to do is obscure the horrors that permeate Israeli society by pinning the genocide on one terrible administration. After all, it’s not like Americans don’t know what it’s like to elect a lunatic, amirite???
The message is, get rid of the maniac Netanyahu and everything goes back to normal in “the only Democracy in the Middle East and outpost of Western Civilization in a Sea of Barbaric Arabs.”
A few days ago a University of Pennsylvania poll grabbed headlines. Of 1,000 Israelis polled, 82 percent said they support the forced expulsion of Gazans from the Strip. That’s what grabbed the headlines. I found another figure in the poll a lot more disturbing: 47 percent agreed with the following statement:
"Do you support the claim that the [Israeli army] in conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites did when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, ie to kill all its inhabitants?"
Almost half.
Polls tracking Israeli attitudes about the war have been, in fact, consistently horrifying. A Pew poll last May found that only 19 percent thought Israeli’s response had gone too far (and the poll didn’t break down whether this stance was informed by concern for the hostages). A September poll found 84% of Jewish Israelis believed the attacks on October 7th justified the military campaign including on the left—by that time tens of thousands of civilians had been killed.
And look: there are people that personify the moral best of what our Western values are supposed to be. They are the conscientious objectors who are in military jail because they refuse to serve. There’s Ta'ayush, Israeli and Arab activists that protect Palestinians in the West Bank from settlers. There’s B'Tselem, which tracks abuses in Palestinian territories. There’s Standing Together: When maurading teenagers ran around abusing, harassing, spitting on Palestinians on Jerusalem Day, these brave Israelis in purple vests protected their Arab neighbors. In one scene the teens have surrounded a man and a small woman and backed them against a fence; it looks like it’s about to become a lynching when one badass in his purple vest fights his way into the riot, almost getting bulldozed himself, and leads them to safety. And there have been been recent protests against the killing of children (which police tried to ban).
We do their bravery and morality a giant disservice by pretending that Netanyahu is the sole problem. And why do we have to do that?
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Weirdly, of all the examples, I think it’s Morgan who’s undergone a genuine transformation, just because he’s dumb enough to have been blinded by Israeli hasbara at the start—that’s a long way to demanding Hotovely tell him how many children they’ve killed (“We don’t kill children.”) Zadie Smith, one of literary signatories, on the other hand is not dumb. And critics point to a garbled New Yorker essay from last May where she likens student protestors’ language to “weapons of mass destruction.”