Cotton candy in the heart of the Valley of Death
After more than 14 months of a war of extermination, it seems that hatred and vengeance no longer provide the necessary adrenaline rush, and pampering at the level of an elite hotel is required. Facing the thirsty children and the body parts scattered throughout the area, Israel is building a comprehensive alternative reality in Gaza
By Orly Noy • Translated by Sol Salbe
“The only thing that the fighters are still forbidden here is to enter the waters of the Gaza coast and getting their feet wet.” This is how Yoav Zeitoun, a reporter for Ynet, explains in an article about the holiday village that was established for Israeli soldiers in Gaza. Apart from getting their feet wet, they are offered everything: a physiotherapist who massages their legs and back; popcorn and fairy floss [cotton candy in US English] “like in the cinema and at fairs”; a lounge room for regular treats, including fresh Belgian waffles and pretzels; a corner for strengthening the spirit, with religious books and sets of tefillin and tzitzit, “in a good spirit and without coercion”; Pampering generous breakfasts “like in a hotel”, and lunch and dinner centred on the barbecue “that runs non-stop”.
Extermination, it turns out, is a tiring business. After more than 14 months of a war of extermination whose end is not in sight, the feelings of hatred and vengeance are apparently no longer sufficient to get the adrenaline needed to overcome the exhaustion and difficulty of the long separation from home and all that entails — the heavy economic cost, the distance from the family. Therefore, the army came up with the ingenious idea of turning service in Gaza into a kind of pampering vacation on the level of an elite hotel. Not a bad incentive for soldiers for whom it is highly doubtful that they could afford such a level of vacation in civilian life.
What do the soldiers see from the luxurious spa complex in the heart of the valley of death? In the place where parched children are searching for any sort of a relative who survived the last bombing? In a place where devastated parents are looking for their children under the rubble? In a place where mothers gather grasses and animal fodder to satisfy their children’s hunger? In a place where stray dogs eat human body parts scattered throughout the region? What do the soldiers see when the fairy floss melts on their lips?
I don’t know what their physical eyes see, but I do know that Zionism has always had an extraordinary talent for training its believers to see only what serves it, and to erase everything else from their field of vision. Only in this way can a “people without a land” settle in a “land without a people.” But in Gaza, it has long been impossible to limit oneself to simply wiping the Palestinians out of sight. In Gaza, Israel must create a comprehensive alternative reality.
For so many years, Israel has been steadily pushing Gaza out of human existence in the sense that we understand it, that long before October 7, it became a kind of ghost inhabiting the darkest corners of the Israeli collective psyche. The very existence of the place testifies to something so terrible about us that we have to camouflage this thing in every way, but we don’t have to look directly at it. Dealing with it must always bypass reality, because the reality we have created there is totally unimaginable.
So we install binoculars on the hills that overlook Gaza, so that children can put a five-shekel coin, like in a game machine, and watch the columns of smoke rising over the Gaza Strip. We watch series like Fauda, which transform Gaza into a kind of amusement park of tension and action (and at the same time continue to open the gates of hell almost once a year). And when reality becomes the total destruction of the civilisation that used to be there, we must establish a new simulated civilisation, with a popcorn machine and cotton candy (fairy floss) and massages. And the darker reality itself becomes, the alternative reality needs to become more colourful, circus-like fantasy.
This is how soldiers sit in the valley of death, roasting and eating meat over a barbecue that never stop working, and cannot which is the smell of charred meat that fills their nostrils — whether of the bodies of the animals that were transported there in their honour, or of the people on whose beach the soldiers are not allowed to wet their feet.
