Israel has embraced a worldview according to which every problem must be solved by force, and the people of Israel have become a collective that admires force and brutality.
By Michael SFARD
I have no idea if Iran has already decided to build a nuclear bomb. Even if it had, I have no idea how long it would take them to build one. I also don’t know if the only way to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear military power is by going to war against this ancient nation.
Even after the war has begun, I have absolutely no idea whether our attacks are affecting its nuclear program in any way. I do not have the basic data to form an opinion about the necessity of the war that threatens to plunge the Middle East into a long and catastrophic conflict. I lack information about its justification and legality and the compatibility between its goals and the means chosen to achieve them. I do not have it because I do not believe a word spoken by Israeli government spokesmen. They have proven time and time again that they cannot be trusted. It has reached the point where my distrust of what the prime minister and the IDF spokesman say almost reaches my distrust of reporting from the ayatollahs’ regime.
So maybe there was no other choice but to attack, maybe there was. I honestly don’t know. But there are two things I do know. I know, unfortunately, that most Israelis are not bothered by these questions. That there is almost no one to talk to here. That we are under the influence of drugs, full of arrogant slogans and flying in a military ecstasy.
Millions of Israelis are constantly embracing reports of the elimination of Iran’s military leadership, the pixelated black-and-white images supposedly documenting Mossad operations behind enemy lines (Like Netflix!), not to mention the details of the Israeli deception of the naive Iranians, the culmination of which was the meeting of Israel’s inner cabinet that ostensibly met to discuss a hostage deal but in fact – wow, what a coup – approved the launch of the war. (How shameful that Hamas is not alone in using hostages as a means to an end; the government also cynically exploits their existence, while again playing on the stressed feelings of their families.) This militaristic journey is being directed by the television studios.
They fan the flames of war and glorify pilots. They glorify Mossad agents and Military Intelligence personnel – our “great heroes” – to the point of deification. These media outlets do not even pretend to provide their viewers with complex information. They deliberately prevent other voices, who are not marching to the beat of the military drums, from being heard.
We must admit that this phenomenon is as old as humanity – violent male tribalism that erupts from pride in the ability to deliver the strongest punch. I am not a pacifist; sometimes, the use of force is necessary. But Israel has embraced a worldview in which every problem must be solved by force, and the people of Israel have become a collective that admires force and brutality while scorning dialogue and compromise. And there is another thing I know. Just as, under the noise of the war in Gaza, ethnic cleansing has been carried out in large swaths of the West Bank, there is now a great danger that the government will fully step on the criminal pedal in Gaza.
While all eyes are on the war between the Middle East’s only nuclear power (according to foreign sources) and its second most populous country, Israel will rush to realize the Smotrich/Ben-Gvir fantasy of wiping out what is left of Palestinian Gaza.
No war with Iran will erase our crimes in Gaza. This weekend, Haaretz published a horrific article by Nir Hasson, Yarden Michaeli, and Avi Scharf about the destruction of Gaza. Read it. Look at the satellite photos. This is us, the people of Israel in the 21st century. We level cities, we destroy towns, we turn villages to dust.
There is no military explanation that can come close to justifying this destruction, which, legally, is a blatant crime. And we haven’t even mentioned the tactics of starvation and the use of humanitarian aid as a weapon to carry out a population displacement. Generations of Israelis will have to live with the mark of Cain that we have inflicted on ourselves through our actions. These acts are at best crimes against humanity and war crimes, and at worst they raise suspicions of genocide. So forgive me if my greatest fear about war with Iran is that the little international and domestic opposition there was to the ethnic cleansing and mass murder in Gaza will disappear. We must not take our eyes off Gaza.
