Before we get down to business this week: I just want to thank all of you who have contacted Bernice and myself to ask how our daughter-in-law, Maayan, is coping. As I mentioned previously, in the framework of her work with the organisation Elem, she was leading a team of volunteers at the Nova party in Re’im on October 7.
Last Friday evening, in a 13-minute report, Israel’s leading mainstream TV channel featured the team’s experiences on Black Shabbat. The report does not include graphic visual content, and, by the horrific standards of that terrible day, the narration is not, I feel, disturbingly harrowing. (Having typed that last sentence, I am sitting here rereading it and reflecting on how October 7 has for me, perhaps forever, redefined the disturbingly harrowing.)
I was not able to subtitle it in English, but I have prepared an English transcript of the soundtrack, because I felt that many of my non-Hebrew-speaking readers might appreciate viewing it. You can view the TV segment here. The translated transcript is available for download here.
Day 31
Yesterday, Day 30 (Sunday), marked the shloshim; for individual mourners, this represents the end of the second stage of mourning. Israel’s President Herzog asked all citizens to light a memorial light last night to mark this staging post, a further symbol of the way the country has been bonded together by the glue of Hamas’s unspeakable atrocity.
In May 2021, Arabs rioted in some mixed (Arab and Jewish) Israeli cities – Akko, Yaffo and Lod. It is reasonable to assume that Hamas hoped that their October 7 pogrom would spark similar rioting. However, so far there has been remarkably little visible tension within Israel between Arabs and Jews. The cohesion of the nation has seemed to cross ethnic and religious boundaries.
Individual Arabs have been tweeting that they now identify primarily as Israelis and secondarily as Palestinians, having realised that they would not be prepared to live in a state governed by Hamas. Among the stories that are still emerging are some that involve several Bedouin from Rahat, a predominantly Arab Bedouin city in the Negev. In more than one case, Bedouin who drove to the Nova festival or to one of the Otef Aza kibbutzim to rescue relatives also rescued tens of other, Jewish, survivors they encountered. Hamas did not discriminate between their Jewish and Arab victims; neither did the rescuers.
That cohesion was threatened by the story of Member of Knesset (MK) Iman Khatib-Yassin (of the Arab opposition party Ra’am), who claimed, yesterday, that the Hamas terrorists raped no women and slaughtered no babies on October 7. This morning I watched her interview on the Knesset TV channel, in which she made this claim.
What she is saying in the interview is a little more nuanced than the simple, bald statement: ‘The Hamas terrorists raped no women and slaughtered no babies.’ Rather, she claims that she has been informed by MKs who viewed it that the film screened by Israel for MKs and foreign diplomats showed no rape of women or slaughter of babies. She certainly expresses her horror at what happened, and, as a religious woman, condemns it as being against the principles of Islam.
At the same time, of course, Khatib-Yassin’s attempt, at the end of the interview, to ‘understand’ the pogrom in the context of Israel’s prior treatment of Gaza is difficult to read as anything other than an attempt to justify it, despite her protestations.
Two more points need to be made about this story. First, Khatib-Yassin’s party leader, Mansour Abbas, called immediately for her to resign as an MK, stating that “there is and will be no space in our ranks for anyone who denies or minimizes the severity of the actions which negate our values and also the religion of Islam.” Second, Khatib-Yassin on the same evening issued the following statement: “I made a mistake, I am sorry and I apologize. I had no intention to minimize or deny the horrifying massacre of October 7 and the terrible acts against women, babies, or the elderly who were killed in the south.”
Had I watched the interview first, I know that the level of my outrage would have been rather less than it was having read the brief news report first. The richer the context in which we view a story, the more sensitive we are to the nuances of the story.
And now, in the interest of balance, let me present you with a specimen from the other end of Israel’s colourful political spectrum. Yesterday (Sunday), MK Amichai Eliyahu of Ben-Gvir’s Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) party was interviewed on an ultra-orthodox radio station, Kol Barama. He was reported as saying, in answer to a question, that a nuclear bomb was “one way” to end the war in Gaza. Put like that, the answer seems little short of imbecilic, in light of the battle for the hearts and minds of the free world that Israel is attempting to fight, quite apart from the ludicrous impracticality of a nuclear bomb as a solution.
However, a look at the transcript of the interview highlights a couple of not-irrelevant points.
Interviewer: “Your expectation is that tomorrow morning we’d drop what amounts to some kind of a nuclear bomb on all of Gaza, flattening them, eliminating everybody there…,”
Eliyahu: “That’s one way. The second way is to work out what’s important to them, what scares them, what deters them… They’re not scared of death.”
It’s worth noting, first, that the lunatic idea was raised by the interviewer and not the interviewee. In addition, the interviewer is clearly using ‘nuclear bomb’ as a metaphor (“what amounts to some kind of a nuclear bomb”).
Eliyahu then clearly rejects the idea and proposes instead looking for some solution that will deter them without wiping them all out.
Don’t misunderstand me. Eliyahu’s response was stupidly ill-considered. He should have said explicitly what he implied: “That’s, of course, a ridiculous idea, but we do have to find some solution that will utterly deter them. They’re not scared of death.” In not responding in those terms, Eliyahu demonstrated eloquently (if that’s the right word) his unsuitability to be a Government minister, particularly at this sensitive time.
It would have been very easy for Netanyahu to fire him, particularly since his Government ministry (he is the Minister of Jerusalem and Israel Tradition) is a meaningless entity created only to manufacture a ministerial seat that could then be given to Otzma Yehudit to cement their position in the Government coalition.
However, Netanyahu chose only to suspend Eliyahu from Cabinet meetings for an indefinite period. Demonstrating the Government’s extraordinary fragmentation, Government ministers mocked the ineffectuality of this disciplinary action. “This is a joke, there barely are any cabinet meetings anyway, and most of the work is being done in rounds of votes by phone,” an unnamed minister was quoted as saying.
A couple of hours later, Eliyahu tweeted: “It is clear to anyone with a mind that the statement about an atom [bomb] is metaphorical. But we definitely need a powerful and disproportionate response to terrorism, which will make it clear to the Nazis and their supporters that terrorism is not worthwhile. This is the only formula that democratic countries can use to deal with terrorism.”
He is not wrong about ‘anyone with a mind’. However, it should also be clear to anyone with a mind that a Government minister needs to engage his brain before engaging his tongue when being interviewed on live media.
Which brings us to Netanyahu himself. As the whole country rallies round and pulls together, Netanyahu continues sowing seeds of discord. Having attacked the fellow members of his security cabinet, and then tweeted his support of them, Netanyahu apparently announced that: “The day after the war, the effect, on Hamas’s plans for October 7, of reservists refusing to serve will be probed.”
The remarks were reportedly made in response to a reporter’s question at a briefing for diplomatic correspondents.
According to tweets by Channel 13 reporter Moriah Asraf Wolberg: “I asked the prime minister if he felt guilty and if he had prepared for war as the IDF had warned, and he replied: 1. No warning was received. 2. I warned about [reservists’] refusal to serve and I said that at the moment of truth, it wouldn’t happen [my emphasis]. The day after [the war], the connection between the refusals [to serve] and [Hamas leader] Sinwar’s moves will be probed.”
I would add to this that, on the radio this morning (Monday), another correspondent who was present at the briefing stated that Netanyahu further qualified his comment by presenting the refusal to serve as only one of several possible influences on Hamas’s decision to attack that will be investigated immediately after the war.
Once again, there are mitigating nuances here, even though, once again, Netanyahu’s response was remarkably ill-considered, particularly for a politician as cagey as he is. Unless, of course, he had a Machiavellian agenda that I am missing… but that seems far-fetched… doesn’t it?
My takeaway from all of this is that I shall endeavour, in future, not to react with a jerk of the knee every time I read a breaking story. I will try to read around the subject a little, and to acquire as much as possible of the context. We are living in an atmosphere that encourages instant reactions. No sooner does a message arrive by WhatsApp than we send it on to others. We need, perhaps, to guard against being quite so trigger-happy. Let’s strive to focus a bit less on the breaking news and a bit more on the mending nuance.
Changing the subject, your homework for this week is to come up with a realistic plan for what happens after (if) Israel completely destroys Hamas in Gaza. That is, of course, the huge question that is increasingly occupying everyone’s mind here… and elsewhere.
On a less controversial note: Raphael still thinks gan is the greatest thing since blueberries, Ollie seems a mite bemused, and Tao, having entirely missed the terrible twos, is now embracing the for-crying-out-loud fours.
