Elana Sztokman
24 באוק׳ 2023
This war is being managed by fragile male egos. God help us all...
The IDF has been very clear and unequivocal that it plans on leveling Gaza. It’s already started. Entire neighborhoods are being destroyed… And the “wassach” — all that posturing, the machismo, the turkey dance that our so-called leaders are doing — are completely normalized. Defense Minister Gallant has called the people of Gaza animals. And that’s it.
And we wonder why Palestinians of Gaza hate us.
I would just like to point out that this is the definition of insanity. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. This is the only response that Israel has ever tried, in the (how many? I can’t even count) mini-wars in Gaza that we have had in the past 20 years. And it has never worked. In fact, the problem seems to have gotten worse! (Could it be any worse than right now???). Israel has tried exactly one way to stop Hamas — with extreme violence, wrapped in language of how nice and ethical we are — and it has not only failed to stop the problem, but here we are.
Oct 7, 2023, Exhibit A: Whatever We Have Been Doing Is Not Working.
Is it possible, I would like to ask, that our wassach response has not only failed to “destroy Hamas” but has actually emboldened Hamas by getting so many more people to hate us for being brutal?
All this wassach. Always wassach. Always bombarding to make noise and prove a point. We do this and claim that we are the most moral army in the world because we don’t INTENTIONALLY kill innocent people but do it only by ACCIDENT while we’re destroying entire neighborhoods. We do this and then say the world hates us and it’s all antisemitism and they just want Israel destroyed. We do this and then cry foul and say, “You see, you see, we can’t even defend ourselves.”
This whole story, though, feeds straight into the narrative of Jewish victimhood. If there was ever a moment in our recent history when we were justified in feeling like our lives are at risk and maybe no place is safe for us, it’s now. So that’s happening, too. It WAS a pogrom, and it IS awful and there’s no escaping the Kishinev feeling. (In Kishinev, btw, only 50 people died, as opposed to 1200 in this one. So try making sense of that…)