Excluding from the lexicon the word "occupation": The burning hatred between different groups of the Jewish people is what brought upon us, among other things, October 7 and the terrible war, which is still going on and exhausting what is left of us.
Pro-Palestinian demonstrators riot near AIPAC president's home
Middle East experts have mediated to us, the Israelis, the way Hamas sits and rubs its hands with pleasure while we eat each other, not noticing that the Gaza bulldozer is eating the fence of the envelope.
The corrupter is corrupt
The people that came to their senses quickly and the leadership that did not reset itself to this very point, make it possible to slide into familiar corners without feelings of guilt: soon we will return to hating leftists, settlers, ultra-Orthodox, and sub-groups such as Kaplanists, Goshniks, and more.
Within the boundaries of the discourse that should be replaced, and in order to move in a less emotional and more scientific direction that will weigh the lessons of October 7, I propose to remove from the lexicon the beloved word "occupation."
The writing on the wall: 48 Hakovshim Street in Tel Aviv. The Courage to Live, Photo: Joshua Yosef
A wealth of words have been recruited to excuse the intuitive Israeli hatred of anyone who doesn't look, think, act like me and live exactly in my neighborhood, or maybe lives exactly in my neighborhood, and how dare he come here if he doesn't speak like me.
Of all the words, "occupation" seems to have the most power. God is not in the eye of strife, conquest is.
This word became petrified until it became the bone of contention between the right and the left, as if there were no quarrels here before '67, as if the Red Register and the Blue Register were not recognized as sufficient grounds for loathing, as if the Clalit or Leumit Health Fund did not hint at which camp you belong to and were a hidden camper fault line.
Flares lit during the march to Kaplan in Tel Aviv, Photo: Reuters
Before there was Bibi, who once divided the people and now unites them around the broad consensus that he is a failed prime minister, the quarrels between the right and the left went straight to the occupation, and did not stop at Netanyahu's intermediate station.
Even today, ideological debates are getting there. October 7 requires the Israeli discourse to say goodbye to the beloved word occupation and look reality in the eye.
Want to hate settlers? Cool. You can invent a lot of reasons, they also live far away so it will be hard to refute them, with the only filter for familiarity being funerals in the main edition. But at the end of every sentence in Hebrew that laments the occupation, hides a 4th generation Palestinian refugee who believes that the State of Israel has no right to exist.
The events of October 7 make it clear that if the Jewish state has no right to exist, neither do the Jews.
Kibbutz Be'eri after the October 7 massacre, photo: Yossi Zeliger
In Israel, it's hard to fall asleep because we're waiting for soldiers and abductees, and because more raw materials from the horrors of the envelope are exposed on television. The world has long consumed the films Gaza markets.
The occupation is the excuse we once provided ourselves in the face of terror. They are fighting us because of the occupation, we said, thinking about '67. But terror thought of '48. The borders of our discourse accept that settlements are occupied territory, everything else is demagoguery. But in Gaza, they are not interested in the boundaries of the discourse.
The mythological ex
Conquest is the excuse the world gives itself to sleep at night, after watching the horror movie. If we stick to the narrative that only the occupation corrupts, we can also close our eyes to the understanding that our massacre is a harbinger of what awaits the Western world.
Pro-Palestinian protesters in Toronto, Canada, photo: Reuters
The belief in the occupation goes hand in hand with the belief in the vision of the refugees, the third and fourth generations who choose to maintain their unproductiveness and live off allowances given by enlightened bodies from all over the world in order to quiet their guilt feelings and preserve their simple hatred of the Jews.
Jalal Bana wrote in this newspaper that no Arab country in the world is interested in absorbing the Gazans so as not to unravel the ethos of refugees and occupation, and because the Palestinians have become a violent and exploitative society.
Conquest is a joker that allows anyone interested to fall into a coma, and not connect to the Jewish narrative. When the "occupation" is removed from the Palestinian narrative, there is nothing left.
Israel seems captivated by the concept of a woman in a romantic novel, who thinks it's nice for her to be small and lost. But it is not prettier, not smart, has been proven to be ineffective, and most importantly - incompatible with the period. Just like what became of the word occupation.
Demonstration against the "occupation",
The conscious and subconscious yearn to unite around the recognition that the occupation is terminology that belongs to the relationship with an irrelevant ex. Zionism was not born in '48. Guess what, we're indigenous too.
Israeli or Palestinian Arabs who continue to talk about the injustice caused to their families when they took away Kerem Maharal, Ramat Aviv, Katamon, Ein Hod, and more – recommends adopting less orthodox terminology and the way the left dismisses the traditional relations of the Jewish people with Shiloh and Beit El, which were bald mountains when the settlers came to conquer them.
Alternatively, you can print and frame one of my favorite Instagram tips: "If you really love him, let him go." Like, in what world does an entire clan walk around with maps of a crumbling property in the Galilee that was located in an ex-territory, 75 years after a Jewish state was established there that proved that something can be made of this wasteland?
The family bases its life on the hope of returning to the same home, even though its descendants long ago built other homes in the very same "occupier" country, and condones the cruel slaughter of the inhabitants of that country because there was an "occupation" here.
Living next door to the old property is great. To continue pleasing him and believing in violence? Sorry, that was the nail in the coffin of the "occupation." We need to find other values to quarrel with in their name or another object of our mercy.
Until October 7, Israel also believed that "occupation" was a logical – and painful – excuse for the murder of Jews. Settlers, for example. Will we go back to the same point?
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