Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist, author and columnist for Haaretz. His new book, The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe, was recently published by Verso.
On October 7, 2023, the Israeli media ceased to be journalists and instead became an agent of nationalistic and militant emotions, stirring up and inciting, a ministry of propaganda, a public relations agency for the army, responsible for elevating the morale of a public at war. It's not even the "Quiet, there's shooting going on" approach of the past; this is "There's shooting going on, we need to hide the whole truth." The Israeli media donned fatigues, saluted the army and began to toe the line.
Gaza is hidden from the eyes of the Israeli public. Anybody watching television in Omaha, Nebraska, and any newspaper reader in Inverness, Scotland, has been witness to more of what is happening in the Gaza Strip than the average Israeli viewer, despite the fact that the lattermost probably lives within an hour's drive from the border with Gaza. The local TV stations turned into nonstop news studios, as happens during war, and began broadcasting the war 24/7. And what it broadcast was and remains to this day propagandistic: Israelis are being fed an exclusive diet of stories of soldiers' heroism and about their fall on the fields of battle; of tales of the Israeli captives in Hamas's hands and their families; about a rear that has suffered greater losses in this war than in its predecessors; of tales of sacrifice and personal stories, kitsch and death.
Only one specific reality is being concealed from Israelis: the reality of Gaza. Life and death in this stricken land is not covered in the newspapers, and it's not on TV. There's almost no coverage of Gaza, except in the pages of Haaretz and on some dissident websites. The children dying on the muddied, bloodstained floors of the hospitals of Gaza; the hundreds of thousands of uprooted individuals who must run for their lives from one place to another, with nowhere to hide; the tens of thousands of dead and wounded; the complete obliteration of entire sections of the Strip; the indiscriminate killing, the blind shelling and bombing as well as the shooting by snipers of innocent people who are waving white flags; and also, the hungry, the thirsty and the sick. The forlorn tent cities as winter approached. The children who barely survived on contaminated water and a lone piece of bread each day. The elderly who were driven from place to place, riding on the backs of halting donkey-drawn wagons from the north of the Strip to the south. The dead bodies left abandoned in the streets. This is a humanitarian disaster of enormous proportions, and it is not covered in Israel. Almost at all. Occasionally there will be a laconic report, mainly of statistics, little more than lip service offered out of obligation, without any professional sense of proportion indicating that in Gaza there is a human disaster transpiring that is almost beyond description, and that the people living there are in fact human beings.
Israel's media have become the most important agent for dehumanization of the Palestinians, without the need for censorship or a government directing it to do so.
- Gideon Levy
Israel's media have acted this way for years. They conceal the occupation and whitewash its crimes. No one orders them to do this; it is done willingly, out of the understanding that this is what their consumers want to hear. For the commercial media, that is the top and foremost consideration. In this way Israel's media have become the most important agent for dehumanization of the Palestinians, without the need for censorship or a government directing it to do so. The media take on this role in the knowledge that this is what their customers want and expect of it. They don't want to know anything about what their state and army are carrying out, because the best way to be at peace with the reality of occupation, apartheid and war is with denial, suppression and dehumanization.
There is no more effective and tried means to keep alive an occupation so brutal and cruel as dehumanization via the media. Colonialist powers have always known this. Without the systematic concealment, over dozens of years, and the dehumanization, it may well be that public opinion would have reflected greater opposition to the situation among Israelis. But, if you don't say anything, don't show anything, don't know anything and have no desire to know anything, either, if the Palestinians are not truly human—not like us, the Israelis—then the crime being committed against them goes down easier, can be tolerated.
The October 7 war brought all of this to new heights. Israel's media showed almost nothing of what was happening in Gaza, and Israelis saw only their own suffering, over and over, as if it was the only suffering taking place. When Gazans counted 25,000 fatalities in less than four months, most of them innocent noncombatants, in Israel there was no shock. In fact, shock was not permitted, because it was seen as a type of disloyalty. While in Gaza 10,000 children were killed, Israelis continued to occupy themselves exclusively with their captives and their own dead. Israelis told themselves that all Gazans were Hamas, children included, even the infants, and that after October 7, everyone was getting just what they deserved, and there was no need to report on it. Israelis sank into their own disaster, just theirs.
The absence of reporting on what was happening in Gaza constituted the Israeli media's first sin. The second was only slightly less egregious: the tendency to bring only one voice into the TV studios and the pages of the printed press. This was a voice that supported, justified and refused to question the war. Any identification with the suffering in Gaza, or worse, any call to end the war because of its accumulating crimes, was not viewed as legitimate in the press, and certainly not by public opinion. This passed quietly, even calmly, in Israel.
In Israel, people were fine with not having to see Gaza. The Jewish left only declined in size, great numbers of people said they had the scales removed from their eyes—that is, October 7 led to their awakening from the illusions, the lies, the preconceptions they had previously held. It was sufficient for a single cruel attack for many on the left to have their entire value system overturned. A single cruel attack was sufficient to unite Israelis around a desire for revenge and a hatred not only of those who had carried out that attack, but of everyone around them. No one considered what might be taking place in the hearts and minds of the millions of Palestinians who have been living with the occupation's horrors for all these dozens of years.
What kind of hatred must exist there, if here in Israel such hatred and mistrust could sprout up after a single attack, horrific as it may have been. This "waking up" among the left has to raise serious questions about its seriousness and resilience. This wasn't the first time that the left crumbled in the face of the first challenge it encountered.
The second wave of potential opposition to the war should have arisen among Israel's Palestinians, the "Israeli Arabs," as they are referred to here. But the Israeli Arabs have been in a state of paralysis since October 7, paralysis caused by fear and near-existential terror. Not since 1948 have they been so fearful. They were scared to come into contact with Jews, they were scared to leave their homes or go to work, they were scared to speak Arabic among the Jewish public. They were scared to breathe, sensing that they were en masse suspected of supporting the Nukhba—the name of the Hamas commando force that invaded Israel that day.
Many Arabs were called in for questioning by the police because of a tweet or other social media post in which they had expressed human concern regarding their own relatives in Gaza, or solidarity with them. Many were fired or laid off from their work, as an Israeli McCarthyism took hold of the public arena, and with it a witch hunt. Under such circumstances, one couldn't expect the Arabs to express opposition to the war or to head to the streets to demonstrate against it. They were silenced and silent.
Israelis don't want to know anything about what their state and army are carrying out, because the best way to be at peace with the reality of occupation, apartheid and war is with denial, suppression and dehumanization.
- Gideon Levy
This is the state Israel was in when it entered the war: bloodied, grieving, fearful and wounded; surprised, shocked, astounded, insulted, humiliated and desirous of revenge; united and of one mind regarding the justice of the war and any means it employed. Democracy, for which so many Israelis had struggled over a period of many months in the face of the Netanyahu government's judicial coup, suffered far greater damage during the war than it would ever have undergone as a result of the coup. The democratic camp, the opponents to Netanyahu, and those who battled against his legal "reforms" were themselves complicit in their silence regarding the blow to that democracy.
It was made clear, and not for the first time, that on the basic questions, Israelis aren't genuinely divided into left and right, that the gaps between those two camps are far smaller than generally described, if they exist at all. And it is all the more disturbing to recognize that this is the case, in light of the impressive wave of protest during the months leading up to the war. When it comes to the fundamental issues that shape the state, there is nearly wall-to-wall agreement. Occupation and apartheid, which characterize the essence of the Israeli regime more than anything else, are accepted and agreed upon by the vast majority of Israelis—on the right, the center and among the Zionist left—and in that regard there is no real opposition.
In times of war, the absence of opposition, or even of alternative voices, is especially striking. Zionism, which today means a belief in Jewish superiority between the (Jordan) river and the (Mediterranean) sea, is accepted by all, and anyone who does question it is perceived to be a traitor. Thus, it has been the case that over the nearly 17 years during which Gaza has been under siege, there have never been any real opponents to the policy, neither on the right nor among the Zionist left. There was a consensus that a blockade of 2 or 3 million people is something normal and legitimate, and therefore something that could continue indefinitely.
On October 7, Israelis learned that this wasn't the case. Not that they will now internalize that truth or draw the proper conclusions from the heavy price they paid on that day. The price paid by the Palestinians is in any event far heavier.
As an Israeli who is connected by every thread of his soul to his land, from which he has never emigrated and never considered emigrating from; as the son of parents who escaped from Europe in 1939, leaving behind their entire lives, and the grandson of a grandfather and grandmother who didn't survive; and as a man who believes in the universal values and has spent an entire professional career covering the betrayal of those values by our state—I cannot not help but feel a profound shame over what my country is doing to Gaza.
Editor's note: This essay is adapted from The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe, recently published by Verso.
