46,000 is the New 6,000,000

   On Monday, December 9, 2024 — on the evening before he took the witness stand in a trial accusing him of fraud, breach of trust, and accepting bribes in three separate cases — Benjamin Netanyahu stood before the nation for a press conference on prime time television. Ostensibly, he’d convened the press to discuss the historic fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria. But his true motive was soon revealed. Asked about his trial, Bibi looked down at the comments he had clearly prepared and practiced in advance, and, after making sure he had the wording right, exclaimed: “Eight years I have been waiting for this day.” Pausing, he looked down at his notes again, presumably to check the phrasing, then continued. “Eight years I have waited to present the truth. Eight years I waited finally to burst the unreal and unfounded accusations directed against me.” Bibi thought he was presenting his case to the Israeli public, inflaming his base in advance of his testimony. In reality, he was juxtaposing the fall of al-Assad with his own potential fall from power.

At that moment, for the first time in a long while, Bibi looked, to me at least, like pitchifkes — Yiddish for small potatoes. If Assad, a brutal dictator responsible by most counts for well over half a million civilian deaths, could be brought down in Syria, then in Israel, where institutional and democratic rights were at least partly still intact, Bibi could be brought down too. His press conference contributed to this impression. He appeared out-of-touch with a reality developing at a pace far beyond what anyone could grasp. His self-obsession at a time of such historical import looked like a symptom of his eventual political demise. He seemed completely to miss the fact that, with Syria taken over by former al-Qaida jihadists, the only one really worried about the fact that Bibi was going on the witness stand the next day was Bibi himself.

Yet there was something else about that press conference that betrayed the gap between Bibi’s perception of reality and reality as it unfolds around us. His message, geared at a local audience in its own language, further separated the perception about how the war has been waged within Israel and its perception abroad. Internally, with the help of his so-called “poison machine” as well as the apparently uncoordinated but consistent support of Israel’s main news channels — which ostensibly criticize Bibi but also manipulate people’s perception of the horrors and destruction in Gaza to keep their audience base satisfied — the nation has remained tragically yet purposefully blind to the crimes perpetrated on its behalf. Every victory, no matter how it’s justified by the victor, comes with deep guilt. But this guilt can only be addressed when we acknowledge that a crime has been committed. And most people in this country are not ready or able to accept such a reality.

In the meantime, people abroad are not only seeing images of death and destruction that are not being shown in Israel, they are also learning of the details of the case against Netanyahu through Alexis Bloom’s recent documentary, The Bibi Files. As Ben Kenigsberg noted in the New York Times, while “few of its arguments are new,” the film does “trace, over decades, his strengthening grip on the Israeli government, his apparent taste for luxury items and his aggressiveness in stifling criticism.” This is something that even many Israelis were not fully aware was taking place. I’m not sure that Bibi himself had planned to consolidate power in the way that he eventually did. Like all criminally-minded people, he tested boundaries, then he tested them some more, and then he went into overdrive while the nation was distracted by the pandemic — which, conveniently for him, began only four months after his indictment.

As he did with the pandemic, Bibi leveraged the Hamas October 7 attacks to stay on his path of destroying Israel’s democratic institutions to keep himself out of jail. I remember writing to Robert Boyers, editor of Salmagundi, on October 8, 2023 — we had just been put in email touch by a mutual friend that week and I had not had a chance to write to him before Hamas’s surprise attacks — and, already on that day, I wrote, “it seems, to me at least, likely these events will be used by our corrupt leadership as yet another brick in the prison wall.” I was referring to symbolic prison walls built by Bibi over a period of years, fencing the country in as part of his attempt to avoid jail time. His attempt to eradicate Israel’s judicial system only ended up in fomenting a devastating war that put him on trial in even more cases — first in the International Court of Justice and then in the International Criminal Court. Yet, just as he had built a virtual prison around Israel in his attempt to avoid being tried, he dragged Israeli society into the global mud with him, turning the case against Netanyahu into the case against Israel itself.

One of the most striking realities with which I’ve had to wrestle in the last two years is the profound influence that a destructive leader has on society, especially when that leader empowers a society’s harshest and most extreme elements. Bibi’s Israel is a different nation than the one that existed before his ascent to power. And this now extends beyond the government to its police and military too. This is why, just a couple of weeks ago, Moshe Ya'alon — a former chief of staff and defense minister under Netanyahu — said Israel’s leadership was dragging the IDF down the path of ethnic cleansing, making it no longer the “most moral” army in the world. For many Israelis, this was a mortal betrayal. For me, it was shocking for a different reason. In 2008, when I returned to live in Israel after leaving as a child, I was taken with a group of other Russian-speakers to hear Ya'alon speak. As a California-raised Democrat, it was one of the first times I had to listen to a right-wing speech — and I could barely sit through the whole thing. For this man to now make such a statement, Israel has to have gone so far beyond occupation of the West Bank toward authoritarian control on both sides of the green line, that there’s little political capital for him to lose by calling things by their name.

Still, society as a whole has difficulty accepting the harsh and complicated realities of the war in Gaza. Not everyone serving in Gaza commits atrocities. But war is dirty business, and collective guilt works in unusual ways. Enemies try to kill you, fellow soldiers put their lives on the line for you, and you yourself want to survive and see your partner, your parents, your friends. If you witness or hear about something that is wrong, implicating people on whom your life depends is complicated by loyalties to these same people. With tens of thousands of soldiers in Gaza, a small percentage of them committing war crimes would be enough to implicate the army as a whole, especially when those cases that are so openly visible — with soldiers uploading proof to social media — not properly being investigated and prosecuted by the military. The documentation is so readily available that historian Lee Mordechai has created a massive database in which this material is collected and made accessible online. There is no longer any excuse for Israelis not to know what has happened in Gaza over the period of this war.

But society finds ways of defending against such realities. A new phenomenon sprung up in Israeli society during the early days of the war to counter the horrors of Gaza: death swag. When soldiers die, they are commemorated with stickers, magnets, even keychain bottle openers many of them featuring quotes from scripture or statements left behind by the fallen soldiers. These stickers cover bus stops, car bumpers, vending machines, electrical boxes. They feature pictures or drawings of these fallen soldiers, often appearing with a blue sky behind them like heroic angels guarding from above — a kind of hero-worship that turns people who have died into idealized images to be shared with the public. On an individual level, they express love and loss of someone concrete. Collectively, they create idols of heroism whose images put the tragic and criminal aspects of our reality out of sight.

I remember the extremely mixed emotions I felt during last year’s transition from Memorial Day to Independence Day, which are successive national holidays in Israel, and always represent an emotional roller-coaster from mourning to celebration. I usually avoid the mayhem of Independence Day since patriotism of any kind makes me nervous, but this year it felt important to be with others who might also be reckoning with the damage and destruction caused by this war. I went with my wife and daughters to a transition ceremony at one of the most open-minded communities in Jerusalem, led by a woman rabbi known for being a thoughtful and complex spiritual leader. I had expected there to be some communal acknowledgement of the horrors committed in Gaza alongside the mourning of those who had lost their lives as well as the hostages still held there. There was none. That was when I realized one of the most powerful but also compromising aspects of Jewish consciousness: the ability to focus on our own story, our own experience or narrative, no matter what is happening around us. This kind of memorializing compulsion had allowed Jews across the world to remain a single nation through two millennia of exile and expulsions. But it sometimes made us deaf and blind to what was happening to other people in the world. It was both a strength and a weakness and, judgement aside, I saw that it was a deeply-rooted aspect of our national character. I remember, in another case, speaking to a woman I didn’t know well, whose friend had just lost her nephew in combat. We both lamented the state of the war and I thought we were in agreement about the waste of life that it was causing on both sides when she shook her head and said, “See what they’re doing to us?” I remember thinking, “You mean, see what we’re doing to ourselves?”

All this makes it harder for Israelis to understand how the perception of Israel has changed in the rest of the world — gradually over the last decades and exponentially since the October 7 attacks. The narrative of Jewish success and revival in the shadow of the Holocaust no longer has global value. Israel’s “Holocaust credit” was already running out, and October 7 bankrupted it completely. There is no longer any global consensus about the meaning of the Holocaust, nor its historical status as a Jewish event. Instead, it has been added to the long list of horrendous things Europeans have done to peoples across the world — including their support for the establishment of the State of Israel. That al-Assad killed over half a million Syrians does not relate to this narrative because he massacred his own people. But when a nation who suffered the systematic murder of 6,000,000 of its landless people — targeted, collected, and transported from across Europe to death camps — sets out on a military campaign that has killed well over 46,000 — regardless of Hamas not differentiating between militants and civilians and, according to some reports, including those who died so-called natural deaths — then equivalences are drawn that, in the global consensus, make Israel appear like a genocidal nation. I’m not making an argument about the validity of this change in consensus — I’m not sure it can be argued for or against in any intellectually honest way — I’m merely pointing out that Israelis are not even able to compute the fact that the world has completely changed its perception of their entire raison d'être.

The closest that Israelis have come to perceiving this change is to follow the real instances of antisemitism abroad, which then give them the impression that everyone is out to get them — and that the Gaza offensive is fully justified. From this perspective, the horrors of Gaza represent a tragic price — even if partially deserved — for Israeli survival in the Middle East. I’ve seen close friends who have identified as liberals for most of their lives change political direction since October 7 and decide, very simply, that Gaza and the Palestinians got precisely what was coming to them after they planned and executed the October 7 attacks, that there is no hope for peace, and that militarism is the unfortunate price to pay for maintaining our nation. When your own eradication is the alternative, military control is the lesser evil. In many ways, this, too, is a reflection of reality as it is experienced in this part of the world. Many of those who expect a higher sense of morality from Israelis, this view says, have not stood on the other side of a gun barrel.

The change in the global perspective regarding the “success” of Jewish revival in Israel also reflects changing attitudes about the state of the world itself. The post-WWII attitude of success — globalism, capitalism, the internet — has largely devolved into sentiments of failure and resentment. Globalism exploited the poor all over the world, capitalism never lived up to its promises, and the internet has led people to feeling lonelier than they have ever felt before. Israel — billed as a startup nation in the last decade — no longer reflects the new global zeitgeist of crashes and defeats. The world has been largely overrun by fascists, autocrats, and militants. Israel, in many ways, is following in the same spirit as the other nations of the world. As a whole, this points toward a global political and historical disaster that is inimical to human values. But that doesn’t mean it reflects the spirit of everyone who lives in that world.

Global societies, like local ones, have ways of coping with difficult historical realities. And one of them is wishful thinking. This kind of thinking accompanied Israelis through five rounds of elections in which we continued going to the polls, hoping that decency would come out victorious. This same wishful thinking followed us at the outset of the war, during the first and only period of ceasefire and hostage exchange, when it seemed possible to end the destruction, at least in the short term. What we should have realized is that a man who put an entire nation — nearly ten million people — through five consecutive rounds of elections, regardless of the social and institutional costs, would easily put that nation through months and even years of war, regardless of the human cost on either side of the conflict. The hope that this man could be guided by reason or responsibility is the kind of wishful thinking that ultimately leaves societies destroyed.

The person who benefits most from all this is Bibi. Yet, in some ways, Bibi is the least of our concerns. His hold on power, in any case, is beyond the control of the country’s population. The general global impression that Israelis overwhelmingly support Bibi is false. Power knows how to leverage manipulable and corruptible minorities in ways that make them larger than the sums of their parts. Israeli existential anxiety is also leveraged by Bibi to maintain his grip on power. And we already know from the example of the United States that being on trial for corruption has not stopped a sizable part of any population from voting for a leader who promises to bring order and security to their lives — even if, in reality, he has never achieved either. Unfortunately for us, it will take these same voters more time than we can afford to remove such a leader from power. There’s no doubt that the day will come. But, when it does, Israelis will have even more soul-searching to do than they can presently imagine.