We are no better than Hamas
By Uri Misgav • Translated by Sol Salbe
Likud MK Moshe Saada was interviewed on the Haredi radio station Kol Barama and declared: “I have no problem with the children in Gaza dying. The only way to restore security is to continue the blockade of Gaza. Our mistake is that we didn’t act that way until today.” He is a seemingly normative person, a lawyer who worked for the prosecution’s internal-affairs branch, and is a God-fearing Jew. But the idea of starving Gaza has long been a commonly held view, and not only among the Kahanist-ultra-Orthodox wing.
Giora Eiland with other retired generals, all fitting that nice “Old Israel” mould, ran with the proposition as part of the “Generals’ Plan”. Eiland and his friends examined international law and military history and found that it was legal and legitimate to suffocate and strangle an entire region of land. They call it a “siege.” The implementation of the plan on the ground is officially denied, but in the meantime the children in Gaza are dying and freezing in rain-soaked tents. The generals, of the other hand, are fine.
The muses are not silent either. Singer Avraham Tal, the nightingale clad in a jellabiy, he of the Shotei Hanevuah band [Fools of Prophecy], explained in an interview on the occasion of his second marriage: “Today I believe that not all of Abraham’s descendants should populate this land… They have been brainwashed for generations into hating us… History repeats itself. Once it was the Crusaders who carried out atrocities, today it’s the Muslims.”
Tal apparently wants our turn to come: “We have to protect ourselves as a Jewish state. Listen, if a three-year-old child starts a good education there today, there is still hope, but it is faint… Obliterating a people is not Judaism. But Hamas should be obliterated, and everyone involved needs to cop it. And it appears that means everyone .” So I didn’t quite understand what Judaism is: obliterating all of them or not all of them? Wipe them out or not wipe them out?
[Leftwing website] The Hottest Place in Hell published this week, and the IDF confirmed it, that a Nahal brigade officer shot and killed a Palestinian who was assisting IDF forces in Rafah. Details of the incident: The Palestinian was forced to serve as a human shield, that is, to scan buildings to see if they are booby-trapped before the sappers move in to blow them up. The commander, unaware of the circumstances under which the Palestinian was there, noticed him with the soldiers and executed him. How many layers of cruelty and brutality was that, where have we got to?
And I reiterate: it’s not just the ground forces [dominated by lower socio-economic groups], and not just units controlled by those who have replaced the IDF’s sword and olive branch insignia with the Messianics’ Crown. The air force is incessantly pounding what remains of the Gaza Strip. More and more “attacks” on “terrorist targets.” The pilots carry out the orders, the commanders sign them off as done, and the jurists provides their seal of approval.
The robot-like killing zone that bisects the Gaza Strip has been labelled the Netzarim Corridor. But Netzarim was a small ephemeral settlement, and this corridor’s width is measured in kilometres. Have you ever seen a “corridor” the size of a city? There is also a whitewashing term drawn from scientific jargon, “perimeter.” They aspire to instil it in Lebanon and the Golan Heights as well. I received a video of soldiers singing and dancing bringing a Torah scroll into an occupied Syrian military post. In the heart of Hanita, the very first Tower and Stockade militarised community, a founding conference was held for the psycho who dream of settling in Marj Ayun.
For the past 15 months, Israel has been abducted and enslaved. What began with terrible trauma and a justified defensive war has turned into a never-ending campaign of carnage and revenge. How does this contribute to the security of the state and its citizens? The loss of what makes us human [Created in the image of God], the erasure of the value of life, and the dehumanisation of the Arab also have a heavy internal price, and not because of The Hague, but in the sacrifice of the abductees and the soldiers, and in what we will become.
The moral pangs and torments of conscience of past generations now seem to be a distant, forgotten twilight hallucination. Alterman Al Zot), S. Izhar (“Khirbet Hiza’a”, “The Prisoner”), Amos Oz (“Warriors’ Talk”), David Grossman (“The Yellow Time”), Amram Mitzna and Eli Geva on the eve of the incursion of Israeli troops to Beirut. This is the absolute victory of the enemies of Israeliness, from the dead Sinwar and Nasrallah, to the living Smotrich, who explained this week that “Nablus, Funduk and Jenin need to look like Jabaliya.”
We are like Hamas, we are comparable to the Jihad
