On Saturday, tens of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets of Tel Aviv to demand that their government negotiate the release of two Israeli prisoners imprisoned in Gaza who had been depicted in Hamas footage as starving.
The video demonstrated how the captives’ experience with the Israeli blockade of Gaza in March affected the rest of the population there.
At least 197 people have been starved to death in Gaza so far, 96 of them children. Global outcry over the famine Israel is putting on the island has grown.
However, a survey from the Israel Democracy Institute (PDF) revealed that more than half of Jewish Israeli respondents were “not at all troubled” by Gaza’s reports of Palestinian hunger and suffering.
Images of the enormous human costs of Israel’s actions were featured on the front pages of international newspapers that were previously accused of backing the Israeli occupation of Gaza.
In ostensible defiance of international outcry, far-right Israeli agitators have blocked aid trucks from reaching Gaza’s starving region for the past 24 hours.
Former allies that have a history of standing, including Canada, France, and the United Kingdom, have condemned Israel’s actions in Gaza and pledged to support the recognition of Palestinian statehood if no resolution is reached.
I suppose that Hamas can be accused of stealing the aid because Israeli settlers are stopping and destroying it so that Israel-first politicians in the West can do it. twitter.com/6ECMP23g8r
Two of Israel’s top NGOs, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, Israel, have labelled Israel’s occupation of Gaza a genocide, and there are now more protests.
However, hundreds of demonstrators, led by wounded soldiers and some of the captives’ families, marched on Jerusalem’s Knesset, demanding that the conflict in Gaza continue.
The majority of Israeli society hasn’t yet been fully aware of the extent of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and their government’s role in it, according to Orly Noy, a journalist and editor of the Israeli Hebrew-language magazine Local Call.
This is especially true because the media hasn’t covered Gaza’s suffering.
Noy told Al Jazeera, “I stay away from Israeli TV.” “But yesterday, I was round at my mother’s, and they were covering the incident on the video between the two captives.
She continued, “For once, starvation and famine in Gaza were finally on Israeli news,” adding that the wider Israeli public was being informed that the only two people who were in need of food in Gaza were the captives in the Hamas film.
The widespread hunger reported by numerous aid organizations as “a Hamas-orchestrated starvation campaign” has been the subject of a foreword in Israel’s mainstream media for months.
Political analyst and former government adviser Daniel Levy told Al Jazeera that this perception extends beyond the nationalistic television channels’ framing.
It is the result of decades of self-justification and dehumanization, Levi said.
Most Israelis would find it unsettling to express some moral condemnation of the nation despite feeling that something has seriously wrong. They are able to make sense of it through a kind of cognitive dissonance at play.
According to Israeli sociologist Yehouda Shenhav-Shahrabani, there is also the language being used by politicians, the media, and ultimately the general public to discuss the war.
They have corroded language, they say. They refer to a humanitarian city as “humanitarian city” rather than “concentration camps.” They use the phrase “elimination” instead of “killing.” A biblical name is used today to describe every military operation.
We don’t mention that “such and such a thing” occurred in June. During Operation Whatever, we say “. It teaches understanding of everything. Jargon has evolved into a completely new form of speech. He referred to the dystopian novel in which the state dictates language, which he claimed would become Orwell’s 1984.
tides that change
However, most Israelis continue to see Gaza’s starvation through the lenses of its politicians and media, but there are indications that the mood is beginning to change, according to observers.
A member of the left-wing Hadash-Ta’al party’s delegation in Israel, Aida Touma-Suleiman, said, “This isn’t going to hold up.”
More and more people are becoming aware that Gaza’s population is actually starving, and how can it not have been prevented by Israel’s massive effort to send food there?
In the meantime, standing up for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is becoming more and more prevalent across all facets of Israeli society, though for frequently with very different reasons, activists like Alon-Lee Green of the Israeli-Palestinian group Stand Up.
“We don’t care why people are calling for war,” the leader said. We don’t care if it’s because your children aren’t interested in going to Gaza and killing people because you don’t want to go on another tour with the army. You’re welcome, he said, if you’re opposed to the war.
However, despite the deaths of more than 61, 000 Palestinians since October 2023 and the loss of thousands more to the unidentified and presumed dead, the majority of Israeli society has yet to accept the reality of the suffering Israel is inflicting on Gaza.  ,
According to Shenhav-Shahrabani, “we’ve reached the point where the Israeli state and society have lost whatever moral responsibilities they had as a result of the Holocaust.”
Source: Aljazeera
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