This is Palestine, In your Inbox, trying to make sense of the madness.

Do Israelis support genocide?

For a moment, however brief, the world rallied behind Israel, a country under attack, a country experiencing its own “9/11,” or so many pundits told us. For the first time, young Americans who pay 0 attention to Israel or Palestine sympathized deeply with Israel. For the first time, the mainstream view around the world was no longer “it’s complicated,” it was, “we stand with Israel.”

Rather than leveraging that sympathy, Israel’s media, political and military establishment plundered it. Their thirst for blood and hunger for revenge were insatiable.

In days that followed October 7th, the Israeli military pursued a campaign of indiscriminate slaughter, starving 2.1 million of people of food, water and electricity, and massacring 3,000+ civilians in Gaza.

And all of it with the support of the Israeli public. On October 10th, a popular Israeli TV channel hosted a panel with five guests. A doctor on the panel expressed opposition to the shelling and bombing, arguing it was inhumane to indiscriminately attack innocent Gazan civilians. All four panelists roared in disagreement. The moderator scolded the doctor: “No one in Israel thinks like you!” The other panelists shouted that Gazan civilians participated in the abuse of the abductees, pointing to video evidence. The moderator emphasized: no one in Gaza was uninvolved in the atrocity. “Everyone who lives in the Strip can and should be killed. Didn't they eat the baklava distributed by Hamas?” The panelists concurred. “There are no innocent people in Gaza.”

The view in Israel seems to be that all 2.1 million people in Gaza ought to be held accountable for the actions of a few thousand militants. Elhanan Gruner, affiliated with Israel’s far-right Otzma Yehudit party, shared a picture of crying men, holding hands, with the caption, “they are probably all terrorists…they’re all damn Nazis.” The so-called “left-wing” Haaretz columnist Chaim Levinson claimed yesterday it was both “false” and “dangerous” to distinguish between Hamas and the civilians of Gaza. “Palestinians are the new Nazis,” reads another Instagram post with hundreds of likes that somehow has not been removed by the platform.

Israel’s military and political establishment have gone even further. Countless Israeli officials have espoused genocidal language against millions of Palestinians in the past two weeks:

This is partly why Israeli genocide scholar Raz Segal has concluded that what is happening right now in Gaza amounts to genocide. The term genocide refers to acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Segal put 2 and 2 together: The statements above signal Israel’s intent, and the actions of the military—mass, indiscriminate bombing, combined with no water, no food & no electricity for a long period of time—can only mean one thing: genocide. "We're seeing the combination of genocidal acts with special intent,” Segal said. “This is indeed a textbook case of genocide.”

Professor Segal is not alone. 800 scholars of international law and genocide studies were so alarmed at the current situation that they put out a statement warning of the possibility of genocide:

The mainstream view in Israel has been that Hamas militants and Palestinian civilians in Gaza are one and the same, indistinguishable. They are all Nazis, and thus all deserve to die.

Alas, instead of winning over the world’s sympathy — Israel has now won over the world’s ire. Friends have been turned into foes, apolitical Israel supporters transformed into apolitical Israel haters. The entire Arab and Muslim world is now protesting en masse against Israel’s atrocities. The Abraham Accords are under threat and Saudi normalization talks have been put on ice. Every Israeli political and military leader must now think twice before getting on a plane to any of the 123 states party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. Dozens of the Israeli and foreign hostages have been reported killed by Israel’s campaign of indiscriminate slaughter. If only love for their own 200 hostages in Gaza exceeded their appetite for dead Palestinians, perhaps the madness would have ended.

Revenge cannot bring the dead to life and it cannot treat emotional wounds. Revenge can only sour the soul. As the Book of Proverbs (מִשְלֵי) teaches, “Say not, I will do so to him as he hath done to me.”

With love,

-Zach