Firstly, shock and fear; then pain and anger. Now, a month after the deadliest day in 75 years of history, with the army surrounding Gaza’s capital and a kind of collective post-trauma, one feeling unites Israel’s diverse social groups: It is time for revenge. It is the lowest common denominator on which the street, political and military leaders and the media meet – with different accents – although they differ on the responsibility of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or the question of how to free the more than 240 hostages , Gaza have different opinions. It is the certainty that the famous post-Holocaust slogan “Never again” has made sense again and Israel has no choice but to violently end the threat from Hamas on the other side of the border, which it believed was and proved impregnable appears permeable, as if the Middle East conflict had begun on October 7th, when the Palestinian militia killed 1,400 people. That the civilian deaths in Gaza are a harm that is difficult to avoid or, as the country’s president, Isaac Herzog, suggested, an accomplice. And as they say in Israel: “This is not Switzerland”: here they eat the weak and it is time to restore the deterrent power.
Depending on your ideological position, two things usually change. First, the word chosen: from “victory,” which dominates the entrance to Tel Aviv with the national flag and images of soldiers, to “revenge,” or the Talmudic phrase “[Si alguien viene a matarte]“Stand up and kill him first,” which is present on West Bank roads traveled by both Palestinians and Israeli settlers. The other is the scope of the usual generic “they”: it can mean Hamas, those who support it, all Gazans, or all Palestinians. Everything with lives in brackets: 200,000 Israelis expelled from the borders of Lebanon and Gaza, 360,000 reservists mobilized, many shops closed and few smiles on the streets.
One of those reservists is Mika Assa’s husband, who restlessly walks with his dog through the deserted and dark streets of the normally lively Yaffa, the Arab-majority city next to his hometown of Tel Aviv, where the city council has posted signs in Arabic and Hebrew with the sentence: “We will get through this together.” Assa, 29, divides his fear into phases. A first that he defines as “existential” and connects it with the experience of his great-grandparents fleeing the Holocaust from the Czech Republic to Sweden. “I’ve seen the pictures [del ataque] and I couldn’t believe they were real. I thought that anything could happen, that I could never leave home again, that terrorists could come here too. Yes, now we have a state and a strong army, but it’s the same feeling that they want to kill us and we can’t go anywhere.” She now dares to make the trip, but she lives in worry for her husband, who is at the border is stationed in Lebanon. “I would be lying to you if I said I feel just as comfortable around Arabs. In general I am for peace, but I see the pictures of Gaza and they seem less harsh to me than before October 7th,” he admits.
The images of Gaza seen in Israel are also not the ones that dominate the news in the rest of the world. There are hardly any bodies of children or families fleeing the bombings. Only the army’s information about the troop advance or the “eliminated” minor Hamas leaders. The television channel 14, the favorite of the right, has a counter in its special program “Israel Wins” in which it lists all the dead residents of the Gaza Strip (more than 10,000, this Monday) as “eliminated terrorists”. It is the same channel on which a military expert from a Tel Aviv University-affiliated institute, Eliyahu Yossian, insisted that there were “no innocents” in Gaza, but only “2.5 million terrorists.” Two weeks ago, two military correspondents discussed on military radio. One of them felt it was provisional and clarified: “Let no one make a mistake: I am in favor of 100,000 people dying.” [en Gaza]“.
At the political level, with a national unity government joined by part of the opposition, the language changes, but not the tone. The president, considered a moderate, described the “rhetoric that is neither known nor involved with civilians in the Gaza Strip” as “absolutely false.” “They could have stood up and fought against this evil regime […]. There is an entire nation responsible,” he said. Merav Ben-Ari, a lawmaker from the opposition Yesh Atid party led by Yair Lapid, recently said in parliament that “the children of Gaza asked for this.” And Galit Distel Atbaryan, the lawmaker from Netanyahu’s Likud party who until recently held the public diplomacy post, called on the army to act “vindictively and cruelly” to “wipe the whole of Gaza from the face of the earth.” . “Let the Gaza monsters run to the southern fence and try to enter Egyptian territory. Or die,” he tweeted.
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One minister, the far-right Amijai Eliyahu (Legado), has just considered “one of the options” to fire a nuclear bomb on Gaza because there are “no uninvolved parties.” [civiles]“. Netanyahu has distanced himself from this, but in his speeches he speaks of the war between “the children of light and the children of darkness” and mentions Amalek, the enemy nation of the Israelites in the Bible, whose destruction God demanded of King Saul: “You have , you must.” Remember what Amalek did to you, our Holy Bible says. And we remember it.”
Animals
The dehumanizing message also predominates. From Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (“We confront animals and act accordingly”) or from National Security Adviser Tsaji Hanegbi (“It is often said that they are animals, but anyone who has a dog at home knows that they are.” are not animals “They are monsters”). Or Gilad Erdan, the ambassador who caused controversy when he wore the Star of David to the United Nations that the Nazis forced Jews to wear: “There is only one solution to cure cancer: eliminate all cancer cells.”
The scale of the Hamas attack, which left about 1,400 dead, mostly civilians murdered in their homes or at a music festival, has raised the specter of the Holocaust among Israeli Jews. As if waiting for hours for the arrival of security forces on October 7 had made the residents of the most powerful state in the Middle East – born three years after the Nazi genocide, which has held the West Bank under military occupation for half a century and has nuclear weapons – and the support of the USA – now see themselves in the mirror as a helpless child in the Warsaw ghetto.
As Osher Yanah, a 25-year-old traditional Sephardi, expresses it in the shop-café he runs in Tel Aviv, “longing” to be summoned to enter Gaza: “We are used to having people who hate us , but we didn’t expect that.” something like that. For the first two days I didn’t recognize my country. It wasn’t the one I grew up in. We have lost self-esteem. But as the saying goes: “Weak people make hard times and hard times make strong people.” Yanah assures that “the children of [la guerra de] 2014, those who told us not to harm, are the terrorists of 2023.” “They don’t want Jews. Job. Neither in their territory, nor in ours, nor in that of, I don’t know, Italy […]. The only solution I see is to kill all Hamas operatives, reoccupy Gaza and educate the people there in love for others and peace. Western education like ours, not Middle Eastern.”
Osher Yanah, in a shop café in Tel Aviv.Álvaro García
Yona Levin’s desire for revenge reaches Iran: “It must be destroyed. “Everyone understands today that we have to go to the end.” He is 59 years old, religious and an employee of an electronics store in the Geullah district of Jerusalem. He wants to expel all residents of the Gaza Strip forever. “There is no room for them here. And if Europe wants to help, it should take it. I’ll pay for it.” Who stays? “They care that their children die, we sanctify life.”
The Israeli historian and writer Gideon Avital-Eppstein made his diagnosis two weeks ago at a demonstration in Tel Aviv against Netanyahu: “The majority of Israelis today are in cognitive dissonance. Until recently they thought there was such a thing as peace and that it worked.” It’s the context that never comes up in conversations.
Yona Levin, an employee at an electronics store in Jerusalem’s Gueulá district. Alvaro Garcia
Although the attack a month ago exposed a chain of failures among the various security forces, trust remains in the army, but not in the discredited Netanyahu. According to a poll published on the 31st by the Israel Institute for Democracy think tank, 55% of the Jewish majority tend to trust the first and only 7% the second. It remains by far the most valued institution, as evidenced by the encouragement of those who go out in uniform or the posters with phrases such as “Come back safe” or “We are all one Israel”. Networks of volunteers cook for soldiers, McDonald’s provides them with 4,000 free meals a day and 50% off, and a network of gas stations invites them for coffee.
Ariel Yuri is not in this cognitive dissonance. He parks his bike on a bridge on the Tel Aviv coast and, despite the situation, insists on smiling for the photo. He admits to being “in shock” because he feels like his “existence is not secure” and “needs to remember Jewish history.” But he also feels that his country has “lost its moral compass” in its response. “I still see the people of Gaza as people like us. My desire for peace was not broken. I didn’t stop learning Arabic or having Palestinian friends. Of course I am angry with the people who did this, but not with the rest of the Palestinians. This is racism. Right now the majority in my country hates. And I refuse to hate.”
Ariel Yuri, on a bridge on the Tel Aviv coast. Alvaro García
Two groups that are receiving a lot of this hatred these days are the minority of anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews (their protest today by burning the national flag hits such a sensitive nerve that it was brutally broken up by the police) and the Arab minority: that 20% of the Palestinian population by their identity, but Israeli by their nationality.
One of the first is Shmuel Brenner in the ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood in Jerusalem, where you can see graffiti of Palestinian flags or phrases like “Zionists = Nazis.” He is 28 years old, has four children, and serves customers in Yiddish who enter his shop, which sells Jewish religious items. He pays for every medical consultation and sends his children to private school so as not to indirectly receive a single shekel from a state that, in his opinion, should not exist until the arrival of the Messiah. “I’m not praying for the army’s victory, but for Israel to disappear, which is driving us ever deeper into the dirt.” “Yes,” he clarifies, “the dead hurt me.” [del 7 de octubre]. Is my city. But no more than those in Gaza.”
Shmuel Brenner, in his shop selling Jewish religious items in Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim neighborhood on October 5. Alvaro García
Amy (she doesn’t want to give her last name) belongs to the second group, the Palestinian minority. In Yaffa, where clashes between Jews and Arabs broke out two years ago, the police are very present and few want to speak publicly. Also, don’t talk on social media. According to the NGO Mosawa, 171 investigations have been opened into incitement of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship to terrorism for messages on social networks such as mourning the bodies of Gaza.
“I understand where their pain comes from,” says Amy, “but now they treat us like we’re all Hamas.” What Hamas has done is not humane, but don’t I have the right to feel pain about what what is happening in Gaza? She assures that she doesn’t dare tell on TikTok because “they would arrest her within minutes” and complains that her Jewish friends don’t like her because she doesn’t condemn the Hamas attack. “I will do it if I can also denounce what is happening in Gaza without being arrested. How can I share the heart? Just as their hostages are there, so are our families. Here you won’t be accepted until you wave the flag and accept even the least logical things. They don’t understand that everything is revenge. Some take revenge on others. And if the death of one child hurts you more than another, what is it but racism?
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