Where is the military advocate general? The IDF chief of staff? The attorney general? The leader of the opposition in the Knesset? The speaker of the Knesset? The president? Quiet. We are massacring.
They tell hungry people to come and collect food at 11 A.M., but they come – the undisciplined, starving people that they are – at 10. So they tell the soldiers to shell them, bomb them, shoot them. Then the soldiers – disciplined Jewish soldiers that they are – shell them, bomb them and shoot them. By the dozens, by the hundreds.
Do you have a son who serves on an Israeli missile boat? Maybe you have a son who’s a war criminal. Artilleryman? Sniper? And of course – first and foremost, a pilot?
Think about it: You might be the parents of a war criminal. If your son weren’t, he wouldn’t bomb undisciplined hungry people who showed up an hour early. People who came an hour early because they are hungry, hungry because we starved them.
It’s worse than Kafr Qasem – the infamous 1956 massacre of 47 Palestinian citizens of Israel who were shot by Border Police for unknowingly violating a curfew.
It’s much worse. Not just because the “black flag” that marks flagrantly illegal commands has been turned into a rag, and not just because of the terrifying, infinitely greater scope of crimes. It is much worse because of the silence – and the across-the-board public support in Israel, from wall to wall.
After all, it’s clear to anyone who lives here that there won’t be another Kafr Qasem trial, and absolutely, certainly there won’t be Nuremberg trials for our war criminals – the military high command and the political leadership. There won’t be anything, not even a 10-cent fine, like the sentence given to the brigade commander deemed responsible for Kafr Qasem.
Where is the military advocate general? She is silent. She must be busy improving the mechanism of cover-up – sorry, I mean of “investigation” – system of the Israel Defense Forces.
And the IDF chief of staff? Certainly, he is searching the dictionary for the meaning of that now oft-used expression “to be value-driven.” But he is finding nothing there but emptiness, because this is exactly what we invented that expression for. So as not to speak about morality, so as to forget: “Thou shalt not murder.”
And where is the attorney general? Busy with Bibi, and in defending him from The Hague. And where is the leader of the opposition in the Knesset? Give us a break. And where is the speaker of the Knesset? That’s a funny one. The president? Yawn. Quiet, we are massacring.
Do you remember all the speeches marking 50 years since the Yom Kippur War, ceremoniously articulated just days before October 7 – how we had supposedly understood the “heavy weight of responsibility” and learned our lessons? And how all this verbiage turned out to be one big pile of bullshit, vacuous words, in the kibbutzim near the Gaza border and in Sderot, Ofakim and at the Nova festival? Rivers of blood and horror that are impossible to comprehend and will never be.
Above all, over this presides a leadership that has learned nothing, a Machiavellian prime minister who has the honor of unseating Golda Meir from her title as the worst prime minister in Israeli history – a government of the basest nothings who speak lofty words, behind which there is nothing as well. A performance of learning lessons instead of modesty and common sense.
Do you remember all of that? Then remember all the Holocaust Memorial Day speeches, all the ceremonies, all the school lessons. How we learned from the Holocaust not just that Jews will no longer be defenseless, but also that a Jewish soldier will never be like them. Do you remember? Here’s another ocean of empty words, another big heap of bullshit. Empty pretenses of commitment to basic human values – and a reality of shattered bodies all over the Gaza Strip.
Words like sand, rotten down to the foundation – and the bodies rot underneath the sands.
It’s already possible to imagine the mountains of dreck that are yet to come regarding the “military necessity,” the probable danger, the complex circumstances and the intelligence assessment. And of course, the proportionality, and the procedures that have been clarified, oh the procedures!
But how is it possible to bear all these whitewashed words? After all, everyone knows what the “necessity” is; all of us know what Israel is doing in Gaza: Destroying as much as we can, killing as many as possible.
- Photo: An Israeli tank maneuvers in Gaza, as seen from the Israeli side of the border, earlier this month.Credit: Amir Cohen/Reuters