We deserve it

“Do you know why I hate Hamas?” a man named Hai Bar-El told the Financial Times in a recent piece on how hard the last year has been for Israelis.

“I hate Hamas because it forces my children to kill Palestinian children.”

It feels like an extraordinary thing to say but it's not. It's foundational.

It calls to mind the old Golda Meir quote.

“When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.”

Bar-El is a "a human rights lawyer based in Tel Aviv," by the way. The story doesn't say on which side. The rest of it goes on to detail how unfairly Israelis think they are being treated. How their suffering has been forgotten.

“There was a catastrophe here, one of the most heinous days in world history where Israelis went through things that would make the Nazis pale,” a man named Udi Goren whose cousin was killed on October 7 said.

“That was one day, how the war began, but after day one, all you hear is ‘the Gazans are suffering.’”

You engineer one genocide...

I wanted to say the piece is an extraordinary document but it's not. It's a very ordinary one.

Sky News was on hand for a conference in Kibbutz Be'eri in Israel this week where people had gathered to gaze longingly at Gaza. The land they plan to settle. The land that they are owed.

The reporter spoke to a woman named Reshit. Her father is an IDF soldier who had been in Gaza and is now in Lebanon. What should be done about the people that already live on the land she covets the reporter asked.

"We should kill them, every last one of them. And if the government won't do that then we should just kick them out. This is our land. And we deserve it."

That's not extraordinary either. Ben-Gvir spoke at the same conference. "We will encourage voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens," he said. "We will offer them the opportunity to move to other countries because that land belongs to us."

Voluntary emigration. We've heard that one before.

"On the one-year anniversary of the October 7 attack, a survey published by the Israel Democracy Institute found that only 6% of Israelis think the war in Gaza should be stopped due to the 'the great cost in human life," this CNN piece says.

I also want to say the CNN story is extraordinary but it's also not.

"'He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him': Israeli soldiers returning from war struggle with trauma and suicide," the headline reads.

:(

It begins with a trigger warning up top.

"Editor’s note: This story includes details about suicide that some readers may find upsetting."

The suicide of a butcher may trouble you.

It has since been updated to read "suicide and violence" after significant criticism.

Here's how it begins.

A 40-year-old father of four, Eliran Mizrahi deployed to Gaza after the deadly Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The Israeli military reservist returned a different person, traumatized by what he had witnessed in the war against Hamas in the strip, his family told CNN. Six months after he was first sent to fight, he was struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) back at home. Before he was due to redeploy, he took his own life.

“He got out of Gaza, but Gaza did not get out of him. And he died after it, because of the post-trauma,” his mother, Jenny Mizrahi, said.

The piece goes on to explain that thousands of Israeli soldiers are suffering from PTSD or mental illness caused by the trauma of the war. Later it comes back to Mizrahi. I'm going to quote it at length because it has to be read to be believed.

“He saw a lot of people die. Maybe he even killed someone. (But) we don’t teach our children to do things like this,” [his mother] said. “So, when he did this, something like this, maybe it was a shock for him.”

Guy Zaken, Mizrahi’s friend and co-driver of the bulldozer, provided further insight into their experience in Gaza. “We saw very, very, very difficult things,” Zaken told CNN. “Things that are difficult to accept.”

Saw?

The former soldier has spoken publicly about the psychological trauma endured by Israeli troops in Gaza. In a testimony to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in June, Zaken said that on many occasions, soldiers had to “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.”

“Everything squirts out,” he added.

Zaken says he can no longer eat meat, as it reminds him of the gruesome scenes he witnessed from his bulldozer in Gaza, and struggles to sleep at night, the sound of explosions ringing in his head.

“When you see a lot of meat outside, and blood… both ours and theirs (Hamas), then it really affects you when you eat,” he told CNN, referring to bodies as “meat.”

He probably can't even enjoy the meals prepared for the IDF by influencers like Chef Bae here.

"I'm using jarred garlic don't judge me," the LA-based chef says in the video. I won't judge you for that part no.

CNN goes on:

He maintains that the vast majority of those he encountered were “terrorists.”

“The civilians we saw, we stopped and brought them water to drink, and we let them eat from our food,” he recalled, adding that even in such situations, Hamas fighters would shoot at them.

“So, there is no such thing as citizens,” he said, referring to the ability of Hamas fighters to blend with civilians. “This is terrorism.”

It really is.

What do you think? Is any of that extraordinary? It feels like it should be but it's not. A lot of people predicted this very thing.

There's long been a sub-genre of Israeli entertainment dedicated to this. "Shooting and crying" they call it. We have it here in the U.S. too of course. I'm reminded of the old joke by Scottish comedian Frankie Boyle.

"Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people, but what's worse I think, is that they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad."

"The great American war films–among them The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), and Full Metal Jacket (1987)–demonstrate Boyle’s point," this piece in Jewish Currents on U.S. and Israeli cinema explains.

"Although the films attempt to grapple with the horrors of what was done in Vietnam and throughout the region, the Southeast Asian characters brutalized on screen serve as nothing but backdrops for the complicated feelings of the invaders who are murdering them. Certainly, they are never depicted as people struggling against an imperialist force..."

The way what is happening right now in Gaza is treated in much of the media is no different. Think of how difficult it must be for the bulldozer driver to roll his terrible machine over the bodies of the living and the dead alike.

I imagine it must be hard to do so much killing. I certainly do not believe I could do it. I imagine that would take a toll on a person. Engaging in mass murder. Torture. Slaughter. It's something Frantz Fanon saw in his treatment of French torturers in Algeria. It's something even fucking Heinrich Himmler knew. Murdering women and children is a difficult thing for a man to do. Most men anyway. It must nevertheless be done of course so what if there were a way to depersonalize it? To remove the intimacy of it? To industrialize it?

To the point where it is no longer one human being killing another human being it is simply the maintenance and operation of a vast machinery. Insert ammunition on one end and it spits out corpses on the other.

At least 75,000 tons of bombs have been dropped on Gaza in the past year. Although that estimate came from way back in April.

That sort of killing must be so much easier to do.

I wrote in here about a year ago:

Like many of you I've been trying to calibrate my moral compass as it pertains to war and violence this past week and as best I can tell from what I've been reading and hearing is that the formula by which we determine whether or not a killing is either justifiable or "terrorism" is the physical distance between the aggressor and the victim. Up close is barbaric but launched from far away is reasonable.

The civilian deaths in the latter scenario accidental or a regrettable but necessary condition of "self defense."

Maybe it's because we think it would be so much harder to kill someone while looking them in the eye?

Is that why the powerful countries are so prolific at it then? We don't even make our combatants do that anymore.

I don't think it really matters for the victim one way or the other but the killers get to convince themselves there is a moral distinction.

Until they don't. Until they have to get their hands dirty. Or the treads of their bulldozer dirty as the case may be.

Those D9 bulldozers are American by the way. Manufactured by Caterpillar. The same one used to crush Rachel Corrie to death. Their nickname is "the teddy bear."

Here's a story from a man whose sister and nephew were crushed by a bulldozer like this one back in December.

"As soon as the bomb hit us I was thrown 30-40 meters away in the street," he says. "At 12 o'clock at night the bulldozers and the tanks came. I was trying to pull my sister. I was injured. I was trying to pull her from her leg. I couldn't. I kept crawling until I reached her. Then I crawled toward a tree to hide because the bulldozers and tanks came to us. A bulldozer approached me. My sister was close. I could see her three meters away from me. I couldn't pull her. The bulldozer came. She was alive. The bulldozer came and ran over her head. Her son was next to her dead... She was alive. The soldier saw her."

"My sister and her son are here," he says pointing to a truck full of bodies. "They're headless. She doesn't have a head."

And here's how the depressed war criminal Eliran Mizrahi talked about what he did with his bulldozer earlier this year in a TV interview. They're laughing and having a blast.

I want to say that sort of delight in destruction is extraordinary but it's not. Perhaps the only thing of note in all of this is that one of these murderers finally did the right thing for a change. I don't understand why so many others have not.