By Gideon Levy
There is no way to “explain” Israel’s conduct in the Gaza Strip. Destruction, killing, starvation and siege in such monstrous dimensions can no longer be explained or justified, even by an effective propaganda machine like Israeli public diplomacy (hasbara).
The evil can no longer be hidden by any propaganda. Even the winning Israeli combo of victimhood, Yiddishkeit, chosen people and Holocaust can no longer blur the picture. The horrifying October 7 events have not been forgotten by anyone, but they cannot justify the spectacles in Gaza. The propagandist who could explain killing 162 infants in one day – a figure reported by social media this week – is yet to be born, not to mention killing some 10,000 children in two months.
Israel is already setting up its updated “Yad Vashem.” Hundreds of Jewish functionaries from the United States are being flown by air shuttle to the burnt kibbutzim in the south. Natan Sharansky has also been to Kfar Azza this week, to see and show those antisemites what they did to us.
No official guest will be able to land in Israel from now on without being forced to pass through Kibbutz Be’eri. And afterward if he dares turn his gaze to the Gaza Strip, he will be labeled antisemitic. Wait for Birthright buses with a soldier watching over each one, Czech rifle drawn. They too are already on their way to Nir Oz.
It is very doubtful this will do any good. Hasbara is now an immoral machine. Anyone who makes do with being shocked at what has been done to us while disregarding what we’ve been doing since has no integrity or conscience. One cannot ignore Gaza and only be shocked by Kfar Azza. Of course it’s compulsory to tell and show the world what Hamas did to us. But the story only begins there. It doesn’t end there. Not telling its sequel is a despicable act.
Alongside the awful Israeli suffering, which must not be underestimated, the much greater suffering is now in the Gaza Strip. It’s enormous in scope and causes despair. It has no explanation, nor does it need one. Suffice it for the reports coming out of Gaza and being broadcast all over the world except in one tiny state, whose eyes are shut and whose heart is sealed.
Israeli hasbara is a deception. It tells a story that isn’t the whole truth. By hiding more than half the truth, hasbara should have been seen as a shameful activity. But it isn’t. In Israel a preposterous figure like Noa Tishbi has become the heroine of the moment. The fatuous attack on Benny Gantz, who attended a party in her honor in the home of bereaved father Eyal Waldman and was photographed smiling, a glass in one hand and Tishbi in the other, missed the point.
The point is that deceivers are turned into heroes here. Browsing through Tishbi’s X account will make you puke. Natalie Dadon, but with Hollywood stardust, new age, hugs, tears and Colgate smiles, kitsch and death straight from the area near the Gazan border. The Jewish nation is the indigenous people in Israel, we’re from here, says the woman who migrated away from here. The moment she landed in Ben Gurion Airport she had to run for shelter, filming herself of course to make the heart of every “friend of Israel” tremble and bring them to tears.
And the jewelry, oh the jewelry on Tishbi: two Stars of David, not one, just to make sure; a Chai necklace and a from-the-river-to-the-sea map, all in gold. A quarter of a million followers. Hanukkah is a Zionist holiday. Tel Aviv is a city under attack. “You have to imagine what the Middle East will look like after Hamas is defeated,” she tells Piers Morgan of TalkTV.
Want to know what the Middle East will look like? Gaza destroyed to the ground, two million homeless people and opposite them, also scarred and beaten, an apartheid state, which Tishbi hasn’t even heard of.
Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. Levy writes opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz
Click Here To Get Our FREE Newsletter No Advertising – No Government Grants – This Is Independent Media
Views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
Comments
20 responses to “There’s No Way to ‘Explain’ the Degree of Death and Destruction in Gaza”
Psychopaths, says it all.
Does the Torah say anything about not doing unto others that which you don’t want done to yourself? Does anyone perhaps know?
Hear ya, but they are Talmud Followers ….Period
“There’s no way to explain . . .”?
How about Israel and the USA are under the control of sadistic demonically possessed warmongers who make BILLIONS off of the suffering of the human race? I disassociate myself from ANYONE who STILL believes the narrative about the “righteousness” of Israel! Israel itself was responsible for October 7, ignoring legitimate warnings and standing down the military for SEVEN HOURS, then attacking kidnappers AND hostages to up the Israeli death count. October 7 was MANIPULATED by Israel to maximize the public’s shock/anger so that it could level Gaza and kill its defenseless innocent inhabitants! America, like the rest of the world IS doing, has to pull its collective head out of its collective a*$ and see parasitical criminal Israel for what it really is!
It is hard to believe what humans are capable of doing to other humans .It leans towards not being human to begin with . We can see through the propaganda and the lies ,they only expose the evil lurking underneath .
Zionist Israel must be destroyed.
Zionist Israel must be disempowered and then dismembered. A portion should be reserved for any Jews who families have a long pre 1947 history. They should be totally disarmed as should the Palestinians and a large UN peacekeeping force established. Zionism should be made as illegal as Nazism which it closely resembles.
Gideon is a masterful writer. This piece gave me chills.
There’s some real slick Zionist propaganda and manipulative distortions floating around and I’m getting a little irritated that otherwise independent media outlets and journalists/intellects have done almost nothing recently to counter it.
Dershowitz, Little Benny Shapiro and some other filth are gaining traction with this gibberish; therefore this must be immediately grabbed by the lapels, thrown down into its chair and told to stuff it.
It goes something like this:
“…For almost 20 years the Jordanians occupied the West Bank and the Egyptians occupied Gaza. Instead of fighting them and establishing an independent Palestinian state, what did Palestinians do? They joined forces with their occupiers and started a war against Israel.
Then after losing the war that they started and Israel getting control over Gaza and the West Bank, all of sudden ‘occupation’ becomes an issue? Why didn’t Palestinians care when Jordanians/Egyptians were the occupiers?…”
This is almost a ‘where to begin?’ scenario. First, Israel plainly started the war. Everyone who’s not a pro-Israel shill realizes that basic point. Israeli officials themselves acknowledge this. Moreover, the Palestinian population did indeed care, rather deeply, about Zionist occupation prior to 1967. These are truisms not worth debating.
The most important thing one must remember in the face of this misleading rubbish is that Egyptian and Jordanian “occupation” was essentially in name only. It was a feeble and spiritless occupation. The entire international community always understood the land was Palestinian and that Palestinians resided on it in profusion! Since c. 1896 when Herzl started his Zionist project, it was rabid Zionists who were continually encroaching and stealing Palestinian land. The Jewish population of Palestine was roughly 8% in 1896.
You’ll hear the filthy genocide enablers ask you “who was Palestine’s president?” prior to 1967. This is their supposed gotcha question. Whoa! whoa! whoa! They got us!
It takes the most disgusting, debased and racist liar to argue that Palestinians should have no truck with the Zionist project and that the real villains were always Egypt and Jordan.
All one has to do is read the classic book on this topic, David Hirst’s “Gun and the Olive Branch” (and some other scholarly works) to understand all this.
“The horrifying October 7 events have not been forgotten by anyone” – they weren’t committed by Hamas. And yes, this fact should not be forgotten. The guns, bombs, tanks, destruction, starvation, siege should be turned on themselves. October 7th? What about the over 100 years before this date?
LONG LIVE RESISTANCE
LONG LIVE PALESTINE
We are supposed to believe that the white supremacist Jews of Palestine are victims of Palestinian terrorists. I.e. the white Jews that murdered millions of the middle Eastern Semitic people, stole their homes and land are victims, not the Semitic people who have suffered under the brutal occupation of the white supremacy. The US/Israeli propaganda machinery would like everyone to believe that lie.
The Israeli and US Governments should never be allowed to use the word “ Freedom,” and “ Peace “ in a sentence
With the exception of Spain, the Collective West and the backwards Eastern Block (Russia and its former vassals) are racially-motivated to support Israel’s Genocide against the Palestinians (Arabs). In addition, the West, Germany, The Netherlands, Austria and France in particular are and have been (for decades) turning blind eye to Jewish crimes against Palestinian women and children to whitewash their own history of heinous crimes. Controlled and watched by wealthy influential Jews, Western regimes have used different excuses and pretexts to justify Israel’s barbaric terror, war crimes, Genocide and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians. Listen to Chancellor Scholz when he said,”No matter where we go and no matter what Israel does, we must used “democracy” and “self-defence” to justify and defend Jewish barbaric crimes against the Palestinians”. I mean, you have to be completely racist Fascist to behave in such an ignorant way. Scholz is not alone. Just listen to Russia’s Sergey Lavrov. Lavrov said recently: “…, we need to be very careful about our common history with Israel and, above all, the history of the fight against Nazism. This is the main thing that unites us historically” . The Palestinian people have no relation with the Nazis. The Nazis were the one of the primary facilitators (including the USSR), of the creation of Israel on Palestinian land.
Israel is not “fighting” the Nazis (Never), Israel is an aggressor and an illegal occupier of Palestinian land which is committing Genocide against the Palestinian people. HAMAS is a legitimate Palestinian resistance fighting for their land and people. It is Israel (the Jews) that espouse a Nazi-like ideology of extermination and dispossession of the Palestinian people, not HAMAS . For Lavrov (and Putin) HAMAS resistance is “terrorism” while Israel’s aggression and indiscriminate mass murder of civilians is “disproportionate punishment”.
More than 27000 Palestinians have been killed, including 75% children and babies. Afraid to face HAMAS fighters, Israeli Jews are resorting to indiscriminate aerial bombings and artillery attacks on densely populated areas, including refugee camps, schools, hospital and Mosques full of children and women as “self-defence”. It does not make sense and you cannot win war by killing women and children unless the aim is Genocide, a real in broad daylight Holocaust. The Nazis never bombed hospitals, schools, refugee camps and synagogues full of Jewish children.
RT 28th Dec, Lavrov says in Gaza Israel pursuing similar goals to Russia!
Read further. No sane person can compare HAMAS Resistance fighters with Ukraine. Ukraine is well armed, and well supported by NATO. Ukraine is/was not an open air person like Gaza completely blocked and controlled by Nazi Israel. Ukraine is a nation legitimately at war against Russia, an illegal aggressor. Israel is a Nazi-like agressor at war against defenceless Palestinian civilians. Lavrov (and Putin) compared Ukrainian leaders to the “Nazis”, but they made great efforts to keep them in power.
There is NO relation between HAMAS fighters and Ukrainian fighters, even if they are fighting for similar cause. HAMAs is fighting against Jewish Nazism. There is much similarities between Russia and Israel, and Nazi Germany. Agressor share amny charactaeristics. HAMAS is fighting (on behalf of all Palestinians) against Jewish Nazism.
Furhtermore, Russia is an untrustwirthy Slavic palayer. We shouldn’t be decived by Russia’s war in Ukraine which Russia using it for it own propaganda. For example, Russia continues to call on Syria and Iran to restarin, while the Russian military in Syria coordinates with Israel in its daily terrorist attacks on Syrias. The hypocritic Collective West should stand with the Palestinians in the same way they stand with the Ukarainians.
I agree with you and I try to expose the janus faced Russia /elites and its followers! Thank you for your work here!
The Palestinian people will remember John Pilger as a decent man who had had given them a voice. Rest in Peace and God Bless You, John.
It amazes me that Levy can explain all the despicable behavior by Jews both inside and outside Israel, yet never point the finger to the true culprit, which is world Judaism. Is he himself so brainwashed that he could never see that it’s the political arm of the Tribe he belongs to that is the despicable creature behind all this?
Stop blaming all this on Israel. It’s stupid. Who exactly do you mean? Do you mean the Israeli Arabs? No, you mean the Israeli Jews. And who makes it possible for these Jews to commit such atrocities without accountability? Answer, the US Jewish Lobby. Not the US Israel Lobby, dammit. It’s a lobby made up of US Jews who head 250 US Jewish political organizations and funded to the level of billions of dollars. It’s the entire US Jewish Community who make this Lobby possible and their only concern is that the Jewish Tribe survive for all time.
What is wrong with Levy? Is he schyzophrenic?
I agree. Israel is another name to cover up crimes committed by Jews (who pay for Israel terror and defend it) in Palestine. When I was in the U.S., I was often confronted with this. “It is not the Jews; It is Israel”. Arabs rarely used the word Israel. The use Yahood (Jews) or often Palestine. The good thing is their lies are exposed and Jews can’t hide behind this cover any more. Jews are collectively exposed as war criminals and racist Fascists.
Joe Biden and Nikki Haley both said that if Israel did not exist, then the USA would have to invent it. Israel helps the USA to project power into the middle east. Having said that, the Zionist lobby has gradually become so strong that it now wags the USA tail. They control most of the congress and the senate. They are running the show in Washington, and their malign influence has accelerated the decline of the U.S. empire massively.
There are other lobbies that have played a part in breaking the once prosperous USA nation. Every powerful group pulls the strings within the media, the congress and the senate. The MIC is one of those. The pharmaceutical industry and prison industrial complex are also controlling the broken “democracy”.
But there is no need for bigotry. Lets not re-live the Nazi Holocaust in response to the Palestinian one. Not all the Zionists are Jewish. A larger number are Evangelical Christian Zionists. Not all Jews support the Zionist project. There is a large proportion of Jews outside of Israel who do not support it. Most of those in power in Israel don’t even believe in god at all. They are just Jews on paper, and they are using the religion. Judaism is the wrong target. Zionist Israel and the Israel lobby inside the USA is the right target.