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Living in Tel Aviv, I struggle to understand the apparent indifference of many Israelis to the carnage in Gaza

Israel’s mainstream TV channels have largely avoided showing the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. Instead, viewers are presented with video-game-like footage of IDF bombing, all at a distance

An image Israeli television viewers won't see: a man carries a child injured by Israeli bombardment on al-Bureij outside the Aqsa Martyrs hospital in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip on June 4th. Photograph: Bashar Taleb/AFP via Getty Images

Paul Kearns
Thu Jun 6 2024 - 06:00

After eight months of war in Gaza, and with more than 36,000 Palestinians killed as a result of bombardment by Israel Defence Forces (IDF), Israel – in the eyes of many – has no shortage of villainous, often cartoonish characters. These stereotypical figures are viewed as directly complicit in the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the wider human rights abuses of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. The list is long. It includes marauding violent settlers, messianic religious zealots, buffoonish but no less dangerous far-right politicians the ubiquitous Israeli soldier, and, of course, the arch villain and alleged war criminal himself, prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. For most non-Israelis, who are understandably sickened by the images coming from Gaza, that list instils some contempt. It may surprise some Irish readers that – except when it comes to the Israeli soldier – many ordinary Israelis would probably share that same contempt.

“Ordinary Israelis?” I hear some readers bristle. What of their complicity in the humanitarian destruction and alleged genocide in Gaza? Yuli Tamir, a former minister of education in Israel, writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, is in no doubt. “The current Israeli leadership makes us all complicit. We are complicit in the fact that people are starving and thirsty. Even when we sleep at night, we are complicit”. Perhaps.

But after eight months of harrowing imagery of death and destruction in Gaza, what explains the apparent indifference of many ordinary Israelis to the carnage and unfolding humanitarian catastrophe? There is no easy answer to this troubling question. “It’s complex,” is often a statement of fact, a truism.

When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “it’s complex” usually holds true, but it is also a phrase used by many Israelis to justify and obfuscate a simpler reality.

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This is a land of confounding complexity and contradiction. As hundreds of thousands of Israelis take to the streets to call for the immediate resignation of Netanyahu, the “anti-war movement” among the Jewish population, at least, is invisible. This is a country with a free, vibrant and diverse media. The left-leaning newspaper Haaretz is visceral in its criticism of the government and explicit in its reporting from Gaza. Yet, Israel’s mainstream national television news channels have all largely avoided showing the humanitarian catastrophe of the war on Gaza. For much of the war television viewers have been presented with black and white grainy, video-game-like footage of IDF bombing, all at a distance and from the air. There are seemingly no civilian victims, certainly no heart-wrenching images of lifeless Palestinian children, or bloodied victims in collapsed buildings. The harrowing and graphic images from Rafah recently of screaming children with burnt flesh were not shown on mainstream Israeli television.

There are other contradictions. This is also a country whose military is the most powerful in the Middle East, whose army has virtually levelled Gaza, and intercepted 350 ballistic and cruise missiles and explosive drones fired from Iran. And yet it is a nation that remains profoundly insecure, palpably fearful, and defensive. It’s hard to exaggerate the impact of the Hamas terror attack of October 7th on the Israeli psyche. Those atrocities triggered an inherited historical trauma. This is a nation now consumed by the terror at what might still happen: if 1,200 fellow Jews can be massacred, some butchered by Hamas in eight hours, what scale of atrocity might ensue if they were given the opportunity to do so for 80 hours or 80 days?

“I can’t see or deal with the pain of the other side right now,” is a common phrase I hear in Israel, even today, almost eight months after the Hamas attack. There is a strong sense that the fate of the remaining hostages, now held by Hamas for more than 243 days, has been forgotten outside of Israel.

Political geography is equally confounding. The Middle East is vast. It is 1,500km from Tehran to Tel Aviv, yet Israel proper is just 13km wide at its narrowest point, and Tel Aviv is physically closer to both Damascus and Beirut than Dublin is to Cork city. Daily rockets from Hizbullah continue to render many towns in the north of Israel uninhabitable. And despite an eight-month Israeli onslaught on Gaza, Hamas recently resumed its rocket attacks on Tel Aviv. The sense of claustrophobia or existential threat in every direction is tangible.

Yet just as the national television studios in Tel Aviv appear blind to the reality 60km away in Gaza, they are quick to show every perceived anti-Semitic slight from every corner of the globe – most notably from Ireland. Israelis who consume international news often ask me why the graphic descriptions of the horror in Gaza are, for some in Ireland, just never enough, why there is some inexplicable need to go that one step further – whether it was the accusation, in an op-ed in this paper, that for Israeli and Hamas leaders “the killing of children is the ultimate expression of power”, or the description by Richard Boyd Barrett TD of Israel as a psychopath state followed by his reference to “the filthy, apartheid, racist, colonial settler regime that is Israel”.

More recently, President Michael D Higgins was accused in Israel of having “belittled claims of anti-Semitism in Ireland” following a recent interview with the Irish Examiner in which he denounced as “irresponsible” claims made by the Israeli ambassador about the level of anti-Semitism in Ireland.

Contradictions, complexity, trauma or a selective desire to shut out critical voices from the rest of the world do not, of course, excuse many Israelis turning a blind eye. And whether that is fed by wilful ignorance or denial, we shouldn’t infantilise a highly educated population in an era of almost instantaneous global media communication. It can be hard to understand the deafening silence of the Israeli public on the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. History is unlikely to be kind.

As the world’s journalists gain access to a post-apocalyptic Gaza, the scale of devastation will be revealed and the depth of human suffering will be undeniable, but do not count on Israeli television news channels to start showing Israelis the truth.

Paul Kearns is a freelance journalist from Dublin who lives in Tel Aviv

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