This time we are the starvers and slaughterers – This is Israel’s and the Jews’ darkest hour
At a cardinal point in time in which we find ourselves today, Israelis need to ask themselves what is the meaning of the goals and actions carried out in their name? ■ The choice to support the starvation of an entire people embodies a breakdown in our humanity and morality.
By Noga Wolff • Translated by Sol Salbe
The widely open eyes of the starving children in Gaza will forever haunt us. six-year-old Islam Hadjaj’s skin clinging to her bones betraying the danger to her life, and the anguish of her mother, who has already lost her one-month-old daughter to malnutrition, will be etched in the mind and will become an indelible stain on the darkest chapter in the history of the State of Israel.
The cries of Siwar Ashur, a six-month-old girl weighing 2.5 kilograms, will overpower the tut-tutting of the whitewashers. Furthermore, no archival censorship, like that carried out on the Nakba, could succeed in erasing the consequences. According to the IPC index (as of early May), 93 per cent of the residents of the Gaza Strip suffer from acute food insecurity and half a million suffer from hunger. 244,000 people are in the most severe category of hunger.
Directives, like those of Benjamin Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich, that only the “minimum” amount of food should be provided, will add to the disgrace of the State of Israel. It is not the “red line” that suddenly appeareded in Netanyahu’s mind that triggered it, but US pressure. The “best friends” are the ones who cannot resist the images of mass starvation, God forbid not the Israeli government. It will deliver the aid “in order to achieve victory.” The reason is to do with “practicality and diplomacy.” The concept of “conscience” is not mentioned, because it does not exist.
This famine has been created because the State of Israel has been preventing Gaza from receiving food and medicine for about two and a half months, in order to gain proprietorship over territory — a method that was practised in humanity’s darkest days. Philippe Lazzarini, head of the UN Relief and Works Agency, calls it “absolute cruelty,” and he is right.
Some of us seek to awaken our conscience by silently holding onto images of children who did not survive, by participating in a ceremony that reveals the face of shared bereavement, by the echoing of words in open space, and most recently by descending on the Gaza border. The state is trying to silence everyone — the [Palestinian] Arab citizens are being silenced by violence. Sometimes institutions of higher education take on the role of silencing (the University of Haifa, for example). And the public? It supports this for reasons of convenience: it is easier to live in an illusory world than to bear the burden of the truth.
People avoid acknowledging the tragedy of others in order to escape responsibility — this is one of the conclusions of researcher Ervin Staub, founder of the doctoral program in the Psychology of Peace and Violence at Amherst University and author of The Roots of Evil. This conclusion is also drawn by psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, in a collection of lectures recently compiled in the book Yes to Life Despite Everything. Frankl, who survived four concentration camps, devised the theory of logotherapy, which emphasises the role of humans in taking responsibility for their life by choosing goals and actions that define the meaning of his presence in the world, but in order to choose, recognition and knowledge of reality are required.
At a cardinal point in time in which we find ourselves today, Israelis need to ask themselves what is the meaning of the goals and actions carried out in their name? How do destruction and starvation define the meaning of our existence? Would we want to be characterised by revenge, or by compassion? By territorial proprietorship and technological power, or by pursuing peace and reaching out human to human, in the mould of the Righteous Gentiles of old, who had not been able to dehumanise the Jews and saw them as human beings.
The choice to support the starvation of an entire people, who have been wandering for a year and a half and are constantly being bombarded, while they have no roof over their head, embodies much more than the exercise of arbitrary force and injustice. It embodies a breakdown in our humanity and morality.
The Occupation, and the intensified ethnic cleansing and starvation in the Gaza Strip make us active partners in carrying out the darkest chapter — not only in the history of the Palestinians, who have become the object of a sadistic campaign by a blood-thirsty government. It is also the darkest chapter in the history of the Jewish people and the State of Israel, not only due to the repeated neglect of captive citizens, but because this time the state that purports to represent the Jewish people is consciously joining the blacklist of nations who have inflicted a massive disaster on the sons and daughters of another people.
This time we are the starvers and destroyers and slaughterers on a mass scale and with cruelty that have never been seen before in the history of the Jewish people going back all the way to Biblical times. The absurdity is that while we are committing our crimes. we refuse to let go of our victim status, reinforced in our consciousness by powerful vested interests. These vested interests robbed the citizens of Israel of the ability to recognise in the gaze of a hungry child from our past the gaze of the starving person as they are now, and they also neutralised the individual’s ability to understand the process that is dragging nations into moral abysses.
Frankl, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, notes that sometimes a “terrible thing” that happened to the victims serves as a justification for wantonness and cruelty. “Only one thing changed in their eyes,” he writes, “Instead of being oppressed, they were now the oppressors. They are no longer the objects but the initiators of the exercise of arbitrary power and injustice.”
The choice to support the starvation of an entire people, who have been wandering for a year and a half and are constantly being bombarded, while they have no roof over their head, embodies much more than the exercise of arbitrary force and injustice. It embodies a breakdown in our humanity and morality.
Against this crude situation, Frankl counterposes the option of a person’s inner progress. In this process, he points to the importance of the few who ensure moral existence through activism, each according to their inclinations, despite the heavy price that a society in spiritual collapse, which Frankl interprets as a collapse of values and consciousness, may exact from them.
Staub classifies these few as “active bystanders” who are distinct from the passive ones. And like Frankl, he also notes their potential influence, both on the bystanders who persist in their silence and on the perpetrators. Injustice. By taking a stand and drawing attention to it, they may contribute to cracking the matrix of lies, providing a different view of reality, setting a suppressed moral standard, encouraging responsibility, demanding an end to the engineered starvation, and demanding a peaceful settlement between nations.
These few, who also recognise the tragedy of others, set up the meaning of their presence in the world by choosing the path of “simple truth,” as Frankl put it. This path, conceived as an alternative to the path of oppression and violence, is based on the basic assumption: “No one has the right to do wrong, even if wronged.”
