June is here. Summer has arrived. And the beaches in Tel Aviv are full. Just an hour’s drive away, two million Palestinians are on the brink of starvation. The incongruity of those few words and the bizarre contrast of imagery – the busy beach in Tel Aviv, the dystopia in Gaza – are hard to digest, I imagine, for many in Ireland. They are perhaps shocking, incomprehensible, and sickening even. This, however, is the reality of life, and of course death, here in Israel and nearby Gaza.
Writing those words does not come with judgment. I am simply observing. I also went to the beach in Tel Aviv last weekend. My photograph accompanies the digital version of this article. I recently returned from a 10-day holiday in Spain with my two young daughters. As we descended into Ben Gurion airport, I was struck by the casual announcement of the El Al air stewardess when she politely requested passengers to donate to the spare change program to support children in need in Israel. I wondered if, when hearing those words, “children in need in Israel”, any of my fellow passengers thought for a moment about the estimated 18,000 Palestinian children dead in Gaza and the hundreds of thousands more on the brink of famine.
Israelis find themselves now living between two realities. There is the dystopian reality of Gaza next door, and then there is life in Israel, which has returned to relative normality. Yes, some 23 living hostages remain in Gaza, tens of thousands of reservists have been called up, and every week there are sirens because of incoming missiles from Yemen. But the restaurants are full. Schools are open. Each morning you wake up to make your kids’ lunch. The skyline of Tel Aviv is dotted with hundreds of cranes. So how do ordinary Israelis grapple with the dichotomy of a largely known reality of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and everyday, often banal life in Israel?
A recent opinion piece I wrote in these pages and which I shared on social media – about how the mainstream Israeli media continues to ignore the reality of the truths in Gaza – provoked a critical reaction from some Israeli friends. The conversations I have had over the past week or two largely replicated those I have had with Israelis over the past 18 months of war.
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These difficult conversations illustrate how Israelis justify or internalise the reality of the unfolding horror in Gaza next door to them; how many (not all) refuse to look, or choose not to accept the truths of that horror.
There is a clear pattern. At first there’s denial, then dismissal and finally, if the discussion continues, disqualification.
Denial is essentially an attempt at “whataboutery” type deflection. There are invariably a few core talking points, each with a kernel of truth. Each is used, I believe, if not to justify Israeli actions in Gaza, but certainly to assuage the conscience of those who voice them. (If there is a risk of sweeping generalisation here, it is a risk I believe is worth taking.)
“There are no innocents in Gaza.” This is repeated ad nauseam. In the context of the deaths of thousands of children, it is particularly egregious to hear.
“Hamas was elected.” Yes, it was. It topped the vote back in 2006 – almost 20 years ago. Opinion polls do, however, continue to show some popular support for Hamas in Gaza.
“Hamas uses civilians as human shields.” This is undeniable. The reality that, in a highly dense urban environment like Gaza, Israeli air strikes will inevitably result in the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, is often disturbingly shrugged off.
“Hamas brought this upon themselves.” At its crudest, this is the schoolyard retort, the contemporary “they started it”. Everything apparently began with the savagery of the terrorist attack on the morning of Oct 7th, 2023, when 1,200 Israelis were murdered in a few short hours. The brutality of 50-plus years of occupation is ignored.
The second stage is dismissal. Dismissal essentially questions the motives of the person who challenges the Israeli consensus. I have been accused of being “woke”, “virtue signalling” and a lot worse. In the dismissal stage, the attention switches from a denial of the facts to a focus on the tone or language of the conversation at hand. This is often used to bring admittedly heated conversations to an abrupt end.
If the conversation continues, the final and third stage is disqualification. This is the othering phase. You lack the essential rights to criticise. You are delegitimised as not “Israeli enough”, unable to grasp the weight and struggles of Jewish history. The undeniable exponential rise in global anti-Semitism raises its head here.
Deflection, dismissal and disqualification can at times follow each other in a matter of very short minutes.
I have come to understand that the Israelis who cling to them do so as a personal coping mechanism. To acknowledge or accept that the state they hold so dear, a refuge from the Holocaust, is capable of genocide, of war crimes, of imposing starvation on two million people is emotionally crushing. This is not about media censorship, but self-deception. The truth is simply too difficult to bear.
So, a heartfelt message to my fellow Israelis. Outspoken opposition to Binyamin Netanyahu is not enough. Publicly calling for an end to the war is insufficient. It is not necessary to embrace the labels “war crimes”, “genocide” or “ethnic cleansing”. It is necessary to recognise the reality of the horror unleashed by the Israeli state on Gaza, to acknowledge the depths and scale of the humanitarian catastrophe.
I understand many of my fellow Israelis are psychologically and politically broken following the trauma of October 7th. But claims of deniability of what has happened and is happening in Gaza in our name will not be ignored. Indifference will not be forgiven. Silence will not be forgotten.
Paul Kearns is an Irish-born freelance journalist based in Tel Aviv
