It's not About how Evil Israelis are as people, It's About how Vile, Violent and Vindictive Zionism is as a Fantasy and Reality
I grew up in it and know it like home, but I won't forget the universal lessons that it taught me either. The first post in a new series titled 'Leaving Israel'
What does it mean to live in a society while it goes from very bad to insane, and from repressed and denied evil to a celebrated and declared policy of murder, sadism, and genocide? How does it feel to discover that the place you grew up in is totally indifferent, if not outright ecstatic, about masses of innocents being tortured, tormented, bombed, starved, wounded, amputated, displaced, sniped, run over and buried alive, shot by robots and bitten by attack dogs, and every other form of cruelty, sadism, and barbarism known to man?
What happened in Israel? What even is Israel?
What kind of meaning can an individual find, when they find themselves in this kind of reality? What does it mean for their own story and moral and mental integrity?
What am I seeing? What have I seen? Can I trust my gaze, or have I missed something? In times of great duress, the mind and soul want to disbelieve, but I know not to be tempted by that impulse: I know what I see; I know this society, and how this happened.
For a while now I’ve been wanting to write this kind of almost diary, documenting my experiences, thoughts, and emotions in these late stages of Zionism. I’ve been wanting to do it for myself, but I also for other people and history, too. There’s only a very slim chance truth will be told about what happened to Israel, and what happened in it that led to its demise.
This year is or the next, or maybe a couple of years more, I know this demise is coming: psychologically and philosophically, but also militarily, economically, and culturally, Israel has become unsustainable. Even today it would cease to exist quickly without a nonstop American supply of weapons and diplomatic coverage (both equally ignominious and genocidal).
I am part of this society, and it is part of me, yet I retain the ability to look at it like an outsider from the inside. In truth, I believe we are all outsiders, and this is what makes divisions between people so senseless: we are all here for a short journey in which, if we’re lucky, we get to experience some grace (if you think there is a difference except chance between yourself and a Gaza infant who was murdered before they could see clearly, I think you’re deluded).
From this very grounded yet near-metaphysical perspective, whose lesson is universal compassion, the very notion that inherent (rather than foolishly acquired) unbridgeable gaps between people even exist seems to me infantile and absurd.
But I have seen a society throwing everything it has behind a broken fantasy of inherent difference, betting its sanity and future on privilege, supremacy, and hate.
I love life, and I don't want to go down with the society I was born into, surely not in the name of such murderous, suicidal insanity.
I have been given a pen (ok, keyboard), and a storyteller’s gift, and I will use it to heal myself and everyone else I can. And healing can only occur through truth and love.
I am not connected by fate (or faith) with any group of people, and no group can demand that I be stripped of my humanity.
I am the son of my parents, a brother to my brothers and sister, and a grandchild to my grandparents, but more than anything, I am myself, and I am of myself, and true to myself I will remain in this madhouse, or any other.
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I want to begin this important (for me) piece of thinking and writing by stating clearly that it is not intended as a defense of Israeli society. I have expressed my unequivocal condemnation, pain, and disgust over Israel’s genocide countless times and I will continue to do so. Years before this genocide, I had been very vocal on social media and Israeli radical left circles and outlets about the occupation and the sense of dread I had about what I feared was coming.
I do not tolerate, condone, or recontextualize favorably historically obscene behaviors and actions committed and displayed by Israelis in and out of uniform: if a mechanism is created to judge and punish those people, I will consider it a service to humanity; such a mechanism will have to be used to establish international laws and standards that are seriously and equally applied.
As to the political and religious Jewish and Israeli leaders who helped set the scene for the horrors we’re witnessing, they are some of the characters I detest most in the entire world.
My moral and political vision is clear.
What I want to open a window to here is the possibility of peace between my lived experience in Israeli society, a deep rejection of Zionism (which I see as Western, European racism, colonialism, and obsession with domination with a Jewish twist), and what can be learned from this miserably failed experiment in terms of understanding evil.
As I see it, it will be a terrible shame if we don’t learn something universally valuable from Israel’s story. Insisting on the universal is also an excellent tactic for countering the ridiculously exaggerated purported uniqueness and exceptional nature of Jewishness and Zionism. Ridding Jews and non-Jews alike of this nonsense will do both a great service.
No one is unique and exceptional. This infantile, magical thinking must be eradicated for people to live in peace and harmony with each other. We may have different stories, but the human narrative, or grand story, is one for all of us. We cannot have universal morality and justice, we cannot feel closeness, if any group is allowed to be seen, or portray itself as exceptional. This is always, always, a recipe for division and disaster.
I always ground my intellectual work in simple emotion, so I’ll plainly state that I want and need this peace for my well-being, and for an honest closure with the Israeli chapter of my life. Israel has been more than an ideological construct for me: it’s a huge part of my biography; it’s where I was born and raised, where my two younger brothers are buried, as well as my grandparents; it’s where I went to kindergarten and school, and then into the military; it’s where I got my education; it’s where I fell in love and had beautiful and meaningful romantic relationships, and it’s where my daughter was born.
You only live once, and certain formative things will only happen to you a limited number of times; those things happened to me in Israel, among Israelis, who I’ve seen in their humanity and grace (admittedly found less and less in Israeli society the farther it gets from the experiences of the Golah) as well as in their amazing shallowness, shortsightedness, and cruelty.
If you hear pain in my voice, it’s only because it’s there and your heart still works properly, in what should be considered an act of rebellion against culture in 2024.
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It is a dangerous and complicated thing to do, judging one’s society. Setting yourself apart from other people, many of whom you care deeply about and are related to in a million ways, can make you unnaturally stiff and righteous, which I never want to be, ever. I am an Arab Jew from a small town working class background, not a naturally privileged nice-neighborhood-in-a-big-city liberal; people like us don’t hold stiff righteousness well.
But if chance puts you in a time and place where you simply must judge your society, as it tries to force you into accepting and partaking in evil, you need to not be too sentimental about it either.
Nothing must ever replace your judgment and your conscience. No gog, no country, no society, no flag, no job. Nothing. If you lose this, you lose everything.
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Evil is normal (and normal is evil)
When you learn about something truly evil a society is in the habit of doing, your view of it changes dramatically and forever. It can be a family, an organization, a town, or a country, but once you find out or agree to see actual evil committed by them, you cannot look at them without feeling and remembering it. I mean you could forget about it, but it will cost you your integrity and autonomy. You will become their slave and a perpetrator. There’s no middle ground in sadistic abuse. There’s no neutrality.
This happened to me, more and more strongly as I learned about the history of Israel and Zionism, and as I agreed to admit to myself the insult and humiliation I experienced as an Arab Jew in a society that put whiteness - white Jewishness - on every pedestal possible.
Ashkenazi Jews were the pioneers, the intellectuals, the poets, the managers, the judges, the policymakers, the generals, the pilots, and commandos, the media starts, the journalists and anchors, the singers and radio hosts, the survivors of the greatest atrocity, the Mossad agents, the Reconquistadors of Jewish lands and fabled hardworking collective farmers. They made Israel, and they brought us to it, despite all our backward wretchedness, and we should have been thankful.
I was an Aran Jewish kid (in deep denial) from a modest working-class background, and I stood no chance. Unlike many other talented Mizrahi kids I never really wanted to be like them and never admired them, and I think my unruliness and nonconformity are what saved me (and also cost me years and decades of frustration and not going anywhere in a society I never truly felt at home in).
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As I’ve had a chance to say on a few occasions, the difference between evil and simply bad or deeply mistaken or misguided actions is in the intent, the repetition, and the duration of time. Anyone can go in reverse without paying enough attention and maybe hit a pedestrian: these kinds of terrible accidents which can be extremely painful and devastating, are an inseparable part of active existence.
Running over 70 people in as many incidents over 3 years, on the other hand, is the work of an evil psychopath.
When you find out a society or organization is involved in this kind of blatant, violent, deliberate disregard for people (or animals, for that matter), you just cannot see them as normal people anymore.
What happened to me in the past decade or so is I discovered (or made myself emotionally available to see) that Israel was committing unspeakably cruel crimes routinely. More precisely, I came to a realization my country had fooled me into thinking all those terrible things were done haphazardly, in a way that’s not really intentional, deliberate, and systematic.
It had also fooled me into believing there was a debate about what it was doing, when in fact there was none. Palestinian lives, dignity, freedom, and property were never even a fleeting consideration for Israel, and denying Palestine all those things was just something Israel did with ease and comfort every day of its existence.
For Israelis fed a carefully crafted diet of nationalistic, victimized righteousness 24/7 throughout their lives through state-controlled, regulated, and censored media, this matter-of-fact attitude provided one of the most effective deceptions, or allibies.
In our minds, we expect to see a strong reaction to unusual acts of cruelty; but when no such reaction arrives, we are almost reflexively pushed to see it as normal. Action and reaction cannot be separated in the human psyche, and an attempt to separate the two has a fatal confusing, and deadening effect on people.
In a society of well-defined and codified hierarchies, evil is normalized and made banal, as Hanah Arendt famously observed. It becomes effortless, and this is the reason many Israelis never recognized it as such.
This excuse, though, could not be used in a live-streamed genocide.
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The same process is now being attempted against the whole world: Israel and its Western culprits gaslight, deny, and dismiss constantly, with the obvious intention of normalizing evil by preventing a strong reaction to it, or even criminalizing the reaction and denouncing it as this and that.
I doubt an attempt of this magnitude was even carried out as part of a mission to normalize such highly visible hideous crimes, let alone for so long: this attempt is a crime against humanity in itself.
Messing up with people’s humanity and the basic definitions of right and wrong must not be normalized: we must stay adamant we will never let it pass.
We must always talk about this, in all the years to come (dear reader: promise me).
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I have learned, living in Israel for so long and also during some parts of this horror, that evil does not announce itself in stereotypical ways: its most trusted ally is a sense of normalcy.
To an eerily confusing degree, Israelis do not act differently than most people most of the time. Just walking an Israeli street and buying something in an Israeli shop you wouldn’t notice anything unusual.
If you were very perceptive maybe you could notice something was different about Israel, and I think I sensed it my whole life without knowing what it was. But as the people are usually nice and welcoming of strangers, you’d probably dismiss this hardly perceived feeling, and attribute it to cultural differences.
Still, Israel carries out the greatest horror of our time, and many Israelis rejoice in it.
Evil is perfectly normal. No monstrous-looking creatures do it. It is all done by people who look just the same as everybody else.
To this day, the seeming normalcy of some aspects of Israeli life makes me question myself for a second: how could this be? Well, it could.
It is often explained to parents that drowning doesn’t look like they do it in the movies: there’s no drama involved. A little child (god, the horror. I could not have written like this before the genocide) mostly drowns in utter silence.
A similar thing is true of a society’s most obscene evil: it is done in quiet and in the dark, and only finds its way into the light when facing no resistance or sanction.
Israel managed to create an abnormal and scary separation between its occupation, apartheid, and genocide, and the rest of Israeli life. For most people, this barrier still holds. Paradoxically, because what’s being done now is so extreme and abnormal, instead of using it to climb to the other side, Israelis are making this barrier taller and stronger.
It takes courage and resolve to put yourself on the forbidden side of a social taboo. Conformity is cancer: if I have to state all I believe in one sentence, that would be it. People who don’t find their own way cannot be authentically human, or authentically anything, for that matter.
The vast majority of people are creatures, and not creators, of their time and place
I know that this part will be challenging for some, but I will say it nonetheless: Israelis are not inherently evil people. The atrocities Israel commits are not due to the extraordinarily evil nature of Israelis (or Jews). If you were somehow able to exchange Israelis and Palestinians at birth (raising Palestinians as Israelis and vice versa), without deep political narrative change the same situation would have been materialized, and the same crimes carried out.
People are not born with political worldviews: they inherit them from their habitats.
My point is: tempting as this pastime may be, focusing on the personal traits of Israelis, or any other group involved in terrible crimes, is not a good approach to understanding why and how such crimes take place.
For a more mature and constructive political discourse, we need to keep our attention on the political norms, narratives, and institutions that underly a reality.
Our answer for a better society and a better world lies not in analyzing and hating certain types of people, but in promoting healthier norms and narratives.
No colonialism, no supremacy, no hierarchies, no divisions, no exceptionalism, no exploitation, no brainwashing: this should remain our focus.
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There is a lot more I have to say about this, what brought me to my current place and realizations, and how it all connects biographically and politically. I will continue to do this in the next posts in this series, which I expend to expand and evolve in the coming months, as I move ahead in life.
I hear what you are saying and I wholeheartedly agree that indoctrination is powerful, especially if started in childhood, but I have come to understand that after 3 generations those attitudes are also passed on in the genes. Therefore, certain attributes tend to be passed on through the generations. Of course that is no excuse for perpetuating evil; we all have been given free will and discerning minds with which to change course. I think it’s just harder when the propensity is there to ride along with the predominant wave.
While the US saves its genocides for people of color outside its borders, it is as cruel and implacable in its crimes as anything the Zionists have ever done. They took one entire genocide — the Korean War — and made it the "forgotten war," a forgetting they even brag about. (We "forgot" we killed three million people! Non-white people.)
When you realize how evil and barbaric the US government is, you go through a process much like what you describe, Alon. I went through it, I thought, in the 60s, 70s and 80s. But I discovered there were deeper levels of alienation than I thought.
What Americans think they know about their society and history is not only false, the truth is buried under an avalanche of censorship, murder, avarice, and the ignorance and indifference that is uniquely bred in an imperialist nation... or a nation of white settlers!
Thanks so much, Alon, for giving us so much of yourself, and for trying to heal us and stir us to action!