War on Gaza: Israel has lost its humanity as it celebrates its power to kill

Gideon Levy

A hundred innocents, a thousand, even ten thousand dead Palestinian children - none of this changes the new Israeli mindset

The 7 October Hamas attack overwhelmed Israel and utterly changed its face. The country experienced a tactical defeat after a colossal failure by Israeli security forces, but it quickly recovered to launch a campaign of mass killings, population expulsions, territorial occupations, assassinations, and other operations, such as the pagers epic in Lebanon. 

Let’s not argue here over the value or cost of these violent actions, many of which were immoral and illegal. What cuts much deeper is the shift in morality and values that Israel has undergone since 7 October. 

The country’s ability to recover from this transformation is highly doubtful. No military victory can return Israel to what it was before 7 October.

Over the past year, Israel has united around several assumptions: firstly, that the massacre of 7 October had no context whatever, occurring solely because of what they percieved to be the innate bloodthirstiness and cruelty of Palestinians in Gaza. 

Secondly, all Palestinians bear the burden of guilt for Hamas’ massacre of Israeli civilians. And a third assumption relies on the first two: after this terrible massacre, Israel is allowed to do anything. No one anywhere has the right to try to stop it. 

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In the name of the right to self-defence, which from the perspective of Israeli values is a right reserved exclusively for Israelis but never for Palestinians, Israel may embark on unbridled campaigns of revenge and punishment for what Hamas did to it. 

In the name of its right to self-defence, Israel is allowed to expel hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in Gaza, perhaps never to return; wreak destruction indiscriminately across the territory; and kill more than 40,000 people, including many women and children. 

In the name of its right to self-defence, Israel is also permitted to eliminate the leaders of Hamas without any regard for “collateral damage” - which has not been “collateral” for a long time now - and to kill hundreds of people during assassination missions that Israel views as legitimate operations. 

Barbaric discourse

Given the unprecedented death toll on 7 October, Israel felt it could free itself from the shackles of political correctness, while legitimising barbarism in both Israeli discourse and the army’s behaviour. 

As barbarism thus became justified, humanity was removed from the public conversation, and at times even ruled unlawful. It’s not that the discourse within Israel was previously humane and attentive to the plight of the Palestinian people; but after 7 October, all remaining restraints were removed.

It began by criminalising any display of compassion, solidarity, sympathy or even pain in response to the terrible punishment of Gaza. Such views are considered treasonous. Israelis expressing compassion or humanity on social media have been monitored and summoned for police investigation. Some have been fired from their jobs. 

This form of McCarthyism has mainly harmed Palestinian citizens of Israel, but sympathetic Jews, too, have evoked a harsh response from authorities. In essence, compassion has been outlawed. It cannot be expressed towards Palestinians - not even dead, wounded, hungry, disabled or orphaned babies. All are rightfully being subjected to the punishments Israel inflicts.

The Israeli media, which has been more disgraceful over the past year than ever before, voluntarily carries the flag of incitement

Losing its collective humanity vis-a-vis the Palestinian people may prove irremediable for Israel. That the country will reclaim it after this war is exceedingly doubtful. 

The loss of humanity in public discourse is a contagious and sometimes fatal disease. Recovery is very difficult. Israel has lost all interest in what it is doing to the Palestinian people, arguing that they “deserve it” - everyone, including women, children, the elderly, the sick, the hungry and the dead. 

The Israeli media, which has been more disgraceful over the past year than ever before, voluntarily carries the flag of incitement, inflaming passions and the loss of humanity, just to gratify its consumers.

The domestic media has shown Israelis almost nothing of the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza, while whitewashing manifestations of hatred, racism, ultra-nationalism, and sometimes barbarism, directed at the enclave and its population. 

Celebrating Nasrallah's killing 

When Israel killed 100 people by bombing a school sheltering thousands of displaced people in Gaza City, claiming it was a Hamas facility, most of the Israeli media did not even bother to report on it.

The killing of 100 displaced people, including women and children, by the Israeli army is neither important nor interesting as an editorial option in Israel. Nobody thought to protest, or to criticise, or even to ask whether this was a legitimate action - since, after all, the Israeli army described it as a Hamas site, and thus, everything is permissible.

The nadir in Israeli public discourse, however, followed the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut. The Israeli media celebrated - there is no other word - his assassination, while ignoring the price many Lebanese people paid with their lives. Since when is the death of any person, even a bitter and cruel enemy, a reason to party?

Nasrallah's death evoked an outpouring of joy. When such joy is not just expressed, but also encouraged and driven by the media as a whole, the result is a barbaric discourse.

The morning after Nasrallah’s assassination, a reporter for Channel 13, one of the country’s leading television channels, walked around the streets of a city in Israel’s north and handed out chocolates to passers-by in a live broadcast. Never before had there been a live broadcast of handing out candy to celebrate a targeted killing. 

This was a new low. Another journalist, a much more prominent one who represents the self-styled “moderate centre”, wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “Nasrallah was squashed in his den and died like a lizard … a fitting end” - as if the reporter himself had smashed the underground bunker with his own hands. Other newscasters toasted the assassination with arak live on-air.  

This barbaric patriotism was enthusiastically run up the flagpole, and Israel rejoiced. 

The Nazis called Jewish people rats, and Nasrallah is "a lizard" in the eyes of Israel.

Even the dimensions of death sown by 80 bombs in Beirut does not change this calculus. A hundred innocents, a thousand, even 16,000 dead children - none of this affects the new Israeli mindset.