Netanyahu’s willing executioners: how ordinary Israelis became mass murderers

JVL Introduction

The genocidal impulses, witnessed so strongly in so many ways in the war on Gaza cannot simply be blamed on incitement by a few rabid off-the-wall leaders. But equally it is wrong to blame all Israelis, no matter how complicit some may be with the overall oppression of the Palestinians.

Faris Giacaman tries to make sense of the dynamic underpinning development over the last ten months (and of course stretching back long into the past), drawing on both historical parallels with the genocide of European Jewry and the settler colonial imperative of the “elimination of the native”.

His account of what Israeli soldiers have done on the ground, unbidden as it were, is a litany of appalling atrocities – routine kidnapping, torture, use of human shields, killing without provocation – all taking place within an overarching framework of official government policy where the engineering of famine and the bombing of humanitarian aid is only one aspect.

It may be that Giacaman is unduly harsh about Ha’aretz and simply wrong about +972 Magazine, but the overall account is nonetheless compelling.

So the conclusion is not surprising: the genocide we are witnessing is co-produced, significant sectors of both the Israeli state and society being partners in it.

RK

This article was originally published by Mondoweiss on Tue 30 Jul 2024. Read the original here.