Israel has a new soundtrack. On the radio, in bars or in stores, Harbu Darbu is playing, a powerful hip hop song that has clung to number one in streams in the country on Spotify and YouTube since its release on November 14. The lyrics talk about writing names on the missiles launched by the army on Gaza and killing "Abu Baklava" (a generic mockery of Arabic names) and models Bella Hadid and Mia Khalifa and singer Dua Lipa for standing in solidarity with Palestine. "Another X on the gun because every pig gets its San Martín", "We have taken the whole army and I swear that there will be no forgiveness" or "Get your ass ready, the Air Force is coming, the vibration is felt even in Tel Aviv" are other verses with which the duo Ness and Stilla have connected with the prevailing mood in the country, in which the trauma and pain of Hamas' massive attack on October 7 is now intermingled with a kind of euphoria over the advance of troops in Gaza.
The latest Peace Index, a survey conducted by Tel Aviv University, asked at the end of October, as the ground invasion of Gaza began after three weeks of massive bombardment: "How would you define the use that the Israeli army has made in Gaza so far of its firepower?" 57.5% of those surveyed among the Jewish majority (80% of the population) answered "too little"; 36.6% were appropriate; and 1.8% excessive.
Another survey, the Voice of Israel Index produced by the Israel Institute for Democracy think tank, points in the same direction. The most recent, released on the 5th, showed 87% support for resuming the offensive in Gaza after the week of ceasefire, in the last seven days of November, as before. The differences by ideological affiliation were smaller: 74% among those who define themselves as left-wing; 84% are centrist and 93% are right-wing. Only 2 per cent were sure, and 4.7 per cent thought they needed to change the way they fought in order to reduce civilian deaths and international pressure.
"There is a broad consensus that we have to go all the way, win the war and then go to elections. Everyone has their own image in their head of what the victory picture would look like, but they all have in common that Hamas can no longer control Gaza," said Uriel Abulof, associate professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, a visitor to Cornell University and author of the essay "The Mortality and Morality of Nations" by telephone (Mortality and the Morality of Nations). Abulof points out that, in addition to the fact that "Israelis do not see the same images of what is happening in Gaza as in the rest of the world," the vast majority consider the number of civilian casualties "bearable" given the importance they attach to the mission, by "a small minority who are happy to see them."
The differences are more around the famous "day after". According to a November poll by the daily Maariv, 44% want Israel to maintain control of the Gaza Strip; 22% just safety; and another 22 per cent to rebuild the settlements it dismantled in 2005, when the Government of Ariel Sharon unilaterally decided to remove all soldiers and settlers. Five years earlier, Israel had withdrawn its troops from southern Lebanon. It is now the great stronghold of Hezbollah, the militia that Iran has helped build an arsenal far more potent than that of Hamas. The two cases are the context in which so many Israelis today feel that territorial withdrawals endanger their country. And that's why—within the distinction made in national jargon between chosen and inevitable wars—practically no one doubts which of the two is the latter.
The other part of the context – the 57-year military occupation of the Palestinian territories, with nearly two decades of blockade and offensives every few years in Gaza to "cut the grass" – is instead dismissed, ignored or ridiculed, as shown by the criticism of UN Secretary-General António Guterres for mentioning it or the memes showing the murder of a Jew in front of a Nazi mass grave accompanied by the phrase: "It depends on the context."
The overwhelming support for the invasion of Gaza does not extend to the Government at all. In the Tel Aviv University poll, 53.2% rated Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's handling of the war as poor, and 56.3% that of the executive. According to a poll released on Friday by the Maariv newspaper, the parties that made up the executive (Netanyahu's Likud, ultranationalists and ultra-Orthodox) until the formation at the end of October of a rally would only obtain today 44 of the 120 deputies in the Knesset. They won 64 in the last election, in November 2022. If elections were held tomorrow, National Unity, the party of Benny Gantz – which has joined the coalition government and participates in press conferences alongside Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant – would win almost a third of parliament: 38 seats. When asked who is more qualified to be prime minister, 51% choose Gantz, 31% Netanyahu.
Military Insignia
The change in the atmosphere among the population is visible. The Kadosh cafeteria, a real institution in Jerusalem that has just moved to a larger premises due to the queues that formed at the entrance, has brought out a special collection of pastries with the insignia and colors of the different military units fighting these days in Gaza. The small chocolate delivered with coffee by the main coffee chain, Aroma, is now draped in the national flag. With 360,000 reservists mobilized, in addition to career military personnel and mandatory service of between two and three years for about 70 percent of the population, there are few Jews in Israel who do not fear for the life of a son, father, grandson or nephew, either in Gaza or mobilized on the borders with Lebanon and Syria.
The presence of people in uniform everywhere contrasts with the invisibility of Palestinians, except when fighting troops. The death toll in Gaza is approaching 18,000, 70% of them women and children, according to data from the Hamas government's Ministry of Health, which Israel and U.S. President Joe Biden no longer openly question. However, they hardly appear in the news, such as in the summary of two months of war on Channel 12 television, which concluded with the phrase: "It's either us or them." Journalists themselves often use "we" or "our forces" when talking about military actions. A famous presenter was outraged last week by the criticism of "that Spaniard", in allusion to the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez.
Israeli soldiers, on December 1 in Jerusalem.AMMAR AWAD (REUTERS)
The narrative of what is happening in Gaza usually comes from the hands of the so-called military correspondents, who transfer the information provided to them by the army. On October 31, when a bombing left several huge craters in the Jabalia refugee camp and Arab channels showed people pulling the bodies of children from the rubble live, public television reported on the "elimination" in the attack by a commander of Hamas' armed wing. Sometimes the phrase is added: "Palestinians report several deaths."
In times of war, the flag envelops everyone. The main satirical programme, Eretz Nehederet, has ridiculed the BBC's coverage with a fictional interview with Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahia Sinwar, in which the journalist laments that the world is not mobilising because the cry of a hostage baby prevents her from sleeping or because the forced displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians deprives her of human shields. It concludes with archival footage from World War II in which he mocks how the "heartless" British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, "rejected a ceasefire and continued his genocidal attack" on Germany.
The brutality of Hamas' attack, with some 1,200 people killed (mainly civilians killed in their homes and at a music festival) has awakened the collective trauma of the Holocaust. Although there are hardly any survivors left and the extermination of six million Jews is not part of the personal and family legacy of half of Israelis, because of their countries of origin, the stories of defenseless people hiding in rooms, charred corpses inside their homes or young people hiding in bushes on October 7 refer to the Holocaust.
This sense of insecurity has given way to another key concept: Israel, created three years after the Holocaust, is the guarantee of the famous slogan "Never Again." And the Jews who were gassed defenseless during World War II today have a state and a powerful army that does not accept lessons from the world. A thought expressed by blogger Avi Weiss in his latest entry in The Times of Israel, titled "Dear World: I Don't Care": "I don't care if you're out on the street waving your flag and chanting your slogans. We won't die quietly the way you'd want us to. For the first time in 2,000 years [when the Jews lost their last stronghold of political autonomy] we are organized, motivated and defending ourselves."
Although accentuated by the dimension of October 7, the phenomenon is not new. In the 2014 offensive, the deadliest in Gaza to date, less than 4 percent of Jewish Israelis thought the army was using excessive force. Six years earlier, during Operation Cast Lead, which left more than 1,400 Palestinians dead, the largest daily newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, carried on its front page the death of an army dog by a Palestinian rocket.
What is new is the vagueness of the "them", as in the aforementioned trendy song, in whose video the singer shows the phrase "Fuck Hamas", but mentions among those who must die the generic Abu Baklava or those who "supported" the Hamas attack. "When it says that Hamas must be eliminated, it also means those who sing, support them or distribute sweets [in celebration of the attacks]. They are all terrorists and must be eliminated," far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said in a television interview.
Dehumanizing language
Language that is dehumanizing or that – directly or indirectly – legitimately targets all Gazans is widespread. From President Isaac Herzog, who comes from Labor and believes that "there is a whole nation there that is responsible" because they did not rebel against the Hamas government, to Avigdor Lieberman, former defense and foreign minister who tweeted last Sunday that "there are no innocents in Gaza." A far-right minister, Amikhai Eliyahu, considered dropping an atomic bomb as an option, and Merav Ben-Ari, a lawmaker from Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid party, believes that "the children of Gaza have asked for it." Likud MP Tally Gotlib calls for "merciless bombing from the air" so as not to endanger soldiers and stop "feeling sorry for the uninvolved Gazans" because "there are none"; and his party colleague Galit Distel Atbaryan would consider it "immoral" for the army not to behave in a "vindictive and cruel" manner.
Netanyahu himself mentioned Amalek, the enemy nation of the Israelites whose extermination God asked King Saul to exterminate, and justified the entry into southern Gaza from Egypt of two trucks with fuel a day (breaking a previous promise) on the grounds that the development of an epidemic (the water treatment system needs fuel) would force an end to the war early and could also affect soldiers or even cross into the Gaza Strip. Israel.
This type of discourse worries Israeli researcher Omer Bartov, a prominent scholar of the phenomenon of genocide and professor of Genocide and Holocaust Studies at the prestigious Brown University in the United States. Last month he caused a stir when he published an op-ed in The New York Times in which he clarified that Israel is not committing one in Gaza, but sees "genocidal intent" and warns that "we could be looking at an ethnic cleansing operation that could quickly turn into genocide."
In a videoconference interview, Bartov differentiates between pejorative language between cultures and that which occurs before or during a genocide, and which consists of a "concerted effort by the state or major actors to speak of a particular group as inhuman, in a way that incites violence, gives license to treat it differently" and influences the actions of soldiers. even if there are no express orders.
"The Hutu regime [in Rwanda] spoke of the Tutsis as cockroaches, or the Nazis of the Jews as vermin. Now, unfortunately, when you talk about Hamas there's always a slip between talking about Hamas and talking about Gaza as human animals. And constantly calling them Nazis. It's a very specifically Israeli thing, because if you say of some that they're Nazis, there's only one thing to do with them, kill them. So that kind of language, whether it's dehumanizing or putting it in a kind of ideological frame of mind, is pre-genocidal," Bartov said.
Follow all the international news on Facebook and X, or in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Read more
I'm already a subscriber
_