Extra! Gazans are responsible for their own deaths.
JVL Introduction
IN an opinion piece in Haaretz last month Gideon Levy describes a predominant mood in Israel – blaming the people of Gaza for their own suffering.
For him, respected journalist Ben Caspit epitomises the Israeli centre.
In response to an invitation to look at CNN footage from Gaza Caspit’s answer was simple: “Why should we look? They earned their hell honestly; I don’t have an ounce of sympathy.”
Post October 7, anything goes. One can blame thouands of children and babies for their own deaths: “Let their limbs be amputated, let the children die, let all Gazans expire, let them suffocate in hell, it’s not our business. They are responsible for their disaster, only them.”
These are dangerous thoughts says Levy. “Humaneness is forbidden, we are Israeli.”
RK
This article was originally published by Haaretz on Sun 17 Dec 2023. Read the original here.
In Israel, 20,000 Gazans are responsible for their own deaths. I've never been so ashamed
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Just how easily the Israeli Army and Air Force have descended into utter barbarity is shocking. Don’t any of their senior commanders have a shred of common humanity?
Why would Gideon L (of all people) be ‘*ashamed*’ because of Israel’s crimes? He’s not guilty of committing them, indeed he’s done more than most to expose them.
I’ve sometimes heard fellow-Jews say they’re ‘ashamed to be Jewish’ but only because of Israeli wrongdoing. Is the shame proportional to the strength of their identification with the State, as if accepting Israel’s rendering them complicit in its crimes because ‘it acts in the name of Jews everywhere’? But they haven’t committed the crimes either.
So innocent people somehow feel ashamed: some kind of mix comprising personal identity, shame, guilt and empathy or its lack. People often talk of shame and guilt as if they’re interchangeable, yet there’s a big difference between them.
In their 2002 book, ‘Shame and Guilt’, psychologists June Tangney & Ronda Dearing find empirical evidence for Helen Block Lewis’s 1971 conceptualisation; the difference between self, as in ‘*I* did that horrible thing’ (shame) versus behaviour, as in ‘I *did* that horrible *thing*’ (guilt): shame being that acutely painful emotion of shrinking worthlessness accompanied by a picture of how one will appear to others plus a wish to escape and hide; guilt, for Lewis, being typically less painful or devastating, because the focus is on ‘a particular behaviour, somewhat apart from the self’ and not affecting one’s core identity or self-concept.
We may condemn Israelis for their manifold wickednesses even when, through deficits of empathy, they can feel no guilt themselves. Through some variety of ‘meaning maintenance model’ (‘They’re animals, not fellow-humans so what we did was permitted’) they repress the voice of conscience before they even hear it. As for shame, we didn’t do a horrible thing, and anyway it isn’t just me, my ego, it’s all of us together, Israeli esprit de corps intact. Malignant pathological group narcissism preserved.
The ‘cure’ for diaspora Jews’ who feel shame is, ‘Get your Jewish identity from traditions that aren’t Zionism’.
What the mindset is of someone’s who can say that innocent children including babies deserve to die and be mutilated by Bombs and Missiles, because they brought it on themselves is staggering but he’s not alone in his views of Palestinians.
If you’re on Twitter/X people say the most heinous things about what Palestinians in Gaza deserve.
Every chance I get to reply to these people, I reply with these same comments, (they are the maximum number of words you’re allowed, so it’s short).
“They didn’t rape women or mutilate babies, it was Lies. They’ve had 75 years of Nakba, Murders, Beatings and Land theft, 2.3m living in the World’s Largest Concentration Camp in Gaza, their Water and Power being turned off to make life miserable!! They call Hamas the Terrorists”!
As this is all about Gaza, I want to point out that reports are being posted that Palestinians are being killed in the West Bank as well. As far as the Israeli Authorities are concerned, all Palestinians are guilty and should be treated as such.
Israel is not losing respect, it has lost respect around the World, how can it be recovered?