Israel’s Blind Spot
Despite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plummeting popularity, most Israelis share his view that the Palestinians pose an existential threat
Enjoying a perfectly brewed cappuccino and a crisp croissant on a pleasant street in Tel Aviv, it is hard to imagine that people are being bombed, shelled, and strafed about 43 miles (69 kilometers) away in Gaza (not to mention the constant violence on the West Bank less than 40 miles away). When life seems so civilized on the surface, it is easy to forget about the suffering of others.
This is not to say that Israelis are oblivious to the war. They can see it on their television screens all the time, including images of devastated cities in Gaza and animated discussions about the latest news. Anger about the war, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to prolong it, as well as his attempts to undermine the judiciary and other institutions of Israel’s democracy, is palpable everywhere, especially in Tel Aviv, a mostly secular and liberal city.
There are daily demonstrations against the war, and against Netanyahu’s firings of public officials who stand in the way of his autocratic impulses. People denounce the prime minister and the extremists in his cabinet as fascists and war criminals, and argue about who is the greater influence on the other, Trump or Netanyahu. A former fighter pilot in the Israeli Defense Force told me he would not serve again in a war he found unacceptable. Another person said he might leave Israel if his son were called up. I spoke to a writer who despaired that his country would be torn apart by hatred among Israelis, as well as Arabs and Jews.
Many anti-war protesters and pro-democracy activists feel isolated from the outside world. Cultural boycotts are cutting the international ties of Israeli arts institutions and universities. Israeli liberals feel that they are being squeezed between hostile forces at home, not least their own government and its radical nationalist supporters, and people abroad who condemn all Israelis for the horrors inflicted on the Palestinians.
One can sympathize with such feelings of being misunderstood or even abandoned. Guilt by association is never fair. A good reason to oppose cultural boycotts is that they harm and alienate the very people who should be allies in opposing dictatorship and unjust wars.
There is, however, a glaring void in all the anti-war and pro-democracy demonstrations in Israel: hardly anyone mentions the Palestinians. There are banners everywhere demanding that the government “bring the hostages home.” People on the left and the right of Israeli politics wear yellow ribbons. Amateur art installations outside the excellent Tel Aviv Museum of Art movingly express the anguish Israelis feel about the hostages, many of whom have already died in Gaza’s stifling tunnels.
People on television talk shows deplore the continuation of a war that might cause all remaining Israeli hostages to die. But even though pictures of shattered buildings and streets in Gaza are shown, there are no images of Palestinian civilians being killed, maimed, driven from their homes, and starved. Haaretz still reports on these atrocities, but the readers of this fine liberal newspaper constitute only about 4% of the Israeli population. For the rest, it is all too easy to pretend that the suffering of Palestinians is none of their concern. Or, worse, many Israelis regard even raising the issue as being in bad taste, as though any mention of it were just an encouragement to antisemites. I heard about an anti-war demonstration in Jerusalem where the microphone was taken away from a protester who began to discuss the Palestinian victims.
In Jerusalem, I met a middle-aged person, fiercely anti-Netanyahu and anti-war, who speaks Arabic and has started a worthy charity organization for the poor. When I asked whether her charity benefited Arabs, too, she sighed, and said she wished it were possible. Then she explained that the Palestinians said they wanted peace, but all of them supported the murders and abductions of more than 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023. What happened on that day reminded her of the Nazi Holocaust. How could one possibly have friendly relations with such people?
This view cannot simply be dismissed as bigotry or racism. Her view is widely shared in Israel. There are many good reasons to be critical of Israeli oppression of Palestinians and indifference to their suffering. But it is foolish to underestimate the shock of October 7. Suddenly being subjected to the kind of savage brutality from which Jews in Israel thought they finally would be safe revived memories of centuries of persecution, murder, and humiliation.
This would have been the case even if Netanyahu had been a less cynical leader, bent on continuing a war to maintain his government of extremists. Out of government, he will be tried and possibly convicted of fraud and corruption. He is not the first Israeli prime minister to use the long narrative of Jewish victimhood, culminating in the Holocaust, for political ends. David Ben-Gurion already did that in 1961, when Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat of mass murder, was put on trial in Jerusalem. But Netanyahu has done more than all his predecessors to promote the idea that the Palestinians, and Hamas in particular, are an existential threat to the Jews and that only he can protect them from a second Holocaust.
The October 7 attack made the last claim appear hollow, which is one reason for Netanyahu’s plummeting popularity. But most Israelis share his view of an existential threat. In a struggle for survival, there is no room for compassion toward the enemy. That is why well-meaning people can be vehemently opposed to an illiberal, self-serving leader, while succumbing to the fears he has stoked.
