Witnessing the Normalization of Genocide
"Watch the footage"
I know what the normalization of genocide looks like because I witness it with my own two eyes.
A few weeks ago, a freezing storm tore through Gaza, where Israeli news has admitted that an estimated two million people are displaced, most structures have been reduced to rubble, and human infrastructure all but destroyed.
A mainstream Israeli headline read:
“Storm in Gaza: Thousands of Tents Flooded. Watch the Footage.”
Scroll down to 664 comments, the vast majority celebrating.
What joy! May they choke and suffer from diseases and cold.
I never read such a happy article.
You wanted a flood, you got a flood.
Now is the time to throw electric bombs and electrocute all the wet ones.
They’re not human beings, they’re animals!
Pleasure to watch.
From the river to the sea, here you go, you got your wish.
I hope you flood and slide into the sea.
Salvation comes from heaven. No mercy, they’re all terrorists, small and large.
God of vengeance, appear!
Die already.
Release piranhas into the water now!
Finally some good news.
Die all of you, stinking dogs.
Praise to God who punishes the evil Amalekites. Amen, may He erase them from the face of the earth.
Heartwarming images.
May the cockroaches be erased from the face of the earth, it would only do the world good.
Amen, may they all die, from the smallest to the largest. All of them!
The Creator is finishing the job for us.
If only there would be total extermination of all the sub-humans in Gaza.
The few who expressed discomfort were met with:
Little Jew, go back to the ghetto. Out, raus!
You’re a sub-human. Comparing us to those monsters? Inshallah they’ll take you to Gaza to live with those dogs you love.
There are no innocents.
This is a moderated mainstream news site. The article does not dispute what it presents. It shows videos of flooding, tents torn apart, buildings in the rubble crumbling, children trying to drain water with buckets, mothers sleeping on mud floors. It reports that after more than two years of war, residents have almost no electricity, heating, or shelter.
The dehumanization of watching the destruction and suffering of human life as entertainment.
This is not fringe, and these comments reflect sentiments I’ve heard my whole life.
Growing up inside the Zionist world in Israel, news was everywhere and all-consuming. Radio broadcasts every hour, news websites refreshed constantly, television news programs every night. I would walk my dog in the evening and see the glow of the news playing through every window. Only later did I come to understand that the news was propaganda, that it manufactured consent and normalized the unthinkable, that it shaped not just what we could see but how we could see it.
I used to participate in these spaces. I believed total destruction was justified, that there were no innocents, that our survival required their erasure, that it was righteous. And I too was shaped by the same psychological hijacking, my identity so fused with the narrative that I could not see what I was part of.
Footage and comments like this are displayed in plain sight because the evidence serves the system. The more individuals participate in the spectacle, the more they become complicit, whether through action or silence. This is one of the ways dangerous ideologies hold people captive and make it harder to turn back. The line has been crossed, the deed is done, and so they go deeper in service of protecting themselves and the ideology.
The discomfort Zionists feel when faced with this truth is nothing compared to the reality of what is being done. Shame protects the system by silencing the voices that attempt to expose it, and that silence allows the desensitization to continue and the dehumanization to spread. It doesn’t take a whole country to participate. It takes only enough people who are indoctrinated and enough denial from everyone else for consent to manufacture itself.
In my own life, I experienced what happens when truth is avoided. The longer I stayed in denial, the more the cost compounded, and the more painful the reckoning became. This applies on an individual level just as it applies at the nation-state level.
People didn’t know the Holocaust was happening while it was happening.
This can be faced now, or the reckoning will come later, when history asks where we stood.
עיניים להם ולא יראו
لهم أعين لا يبصرون بها
Daniel, thank you for continuing to offer your testimonies and analyses. I find myself resonating not only with your description of Israeli society — from my own lived experience there — but also with your explanation of why things are the way they are.
We both know that Israel will not suddenly see the light and reform from within. In fact, in allowing the Religious Right to advance its take over of Israeli society, and creating what Ilan Pappé refers to as the ‘Kingdom of Judea’ — that country is moving even further down its murderous path. It will of course lead to Israel’s downfall (read *Israel On The Brink*) but how many Palestinians it will take with it and how it will impact on the rest of the world is frightening. Israel doesn’t care about the rest of humanity. The Palestinians are at the top of the list of the hated other, but we both know that Israeli society has no respect whatsoever to anyone who is not, in their definition, Jewish. That’s why Israel must be stopped from outside, and I don’t see any signs of this happening from the mainstream of our world at the moment. What a sorry species we are. But thank you for your contribution. I love your writings. Although they’re painful to read, they are truth.
Consent never 'manufactures itself'.
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To consent is an active decision. You choose to say "yes!" You participate.