The Israeli majority that decided not to feel
Watching Gaza burn as spectacle, justifying hunger, calling for expulsions and still calling it “defense” is not a minor deviation: it is the social expression of decades of dehumanization.
No, this is not about four isolated fanatics or four brainless teenagers amplified by social media. It is not a small moral accident. When a hill near Sderot becomes a pilgrimage site to watch the bombings of Gaza as if they were entertainment, when paid binoculars are set up to observe destruction, when social media circulates mockups of luxury developments on Gaza’s coast while the Palestinian population is massacred and displaced, what we have in front of us is not an unpleasant anecdote: it is a social obscenity. And a social obscenity sustained over time stops being an exception and becomes a symptom. (Le Monde article about the lookout points)
It must be said precisely, especially if one wants to be relentless without giving opponents the excuse to accuse you of antisemitism. This is not about “Jews” as a religious or ethnic category. It is about an Israeli political and social majority – mainly Jewish, because that is how the State is structured and how polling is segmented – that has normalized the idea that Palestinian life is worth less, hurts less, and may be sacrificed in the name of a security that is always invoked and never fulfilled. Saying this is not racial hatred; it is a political description of a documented reality, and a description also made by Israeli human rights organizations. (Like this one)
The best proof that this is not about a national essence or an ethnic condemnation is that there is an Israeli minority that does rebel against all of this. There are Israelis who protest, denounce, and risk reputation, work, and safety to say that Gaza is a moral atrocity. In April 2025, The Guardian documented protests in Israel led even by Holocaust survivors and Standing Together activists, precisely to denounce the killings and starvation inflicted on Gaza. B’Tselem itself, an Israeli organization, stated in 2025 that Israel is committing genocide in the Gaza Strip and that this genocide rests on decades of separation and dehumanization of Palestinians. That minority exists, so another option existed. And precisely for that reason, the majority cannot fully hide behind ignorance. (Here is The Guardian article)
To understand how we got here, we must stop speaking of “conflict” in the abstract and look at the structure. Organizations such as B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have for years described the regime imposed on Palestinians as a system of supremacy and apartheid, sustained by laws, administrative practices, organized violence, and structural discrimination. When a society lives for generations inside a political framework that teaches it that an entire people must be permanently controlled, besieged, fragmented, and subordinated, empathy does not disappear by accident: it erodes because the system itself treats it as an obstacle. (B’Tselem calling this apartheid)
To all this we must add the deep militarization of Israeli life. The army itself explains that the State requires military service from most Jewish, Druze, and Circassian citizens from age 18, with specific exceptions. This is not a minor detail. In a society where the army is not a peripheral institution but a mass socialization experience, the view of Palestinians is filtered through the logic of enemy, target, threat, and territory to control. The other ceases to be neighbor, worker, student, or child and becomes a security problem. And when that happens at the scale of society, compassion begins to look like naivety or even betrayal. (You can verify this here)
The result of all this is now measurable. According to an Israel Democracy Institute survey published in August 2025, 79% of Israeli Jews said they felt “little” or “nothing” when exposed to information about hunger and suffering among Palestinians in Gaza. The same survey showed that 70% of Israeli Jews trusted the army’s data on Palestinian civilian casualties. It is hard to imagine a harsher snapshot: a broad majority is barely moved by the hunger of the people their State bombs and, at the same time, delegates moral perception to the narrative of the institution carrying out that violence. (Survey link)
UNICEF reported that, between October 7, 2023 and February 3, 2026, 71,803 Palestinians had been reported killed in Gaza, including at least 21,289 children, with 171,230 injured. In other words, this moral anesthesia does not operate in front of uncertain or remote numbers, but in front of historically large-scale human devastation, widely documented by international bodies. When a majority still does not feel challenged by a massacre of this magnitude, this is no longer only disinformation: it is an ethical catastrophe. (UNICEF report)
It would be too convenient for that Israeli majority to take refuge in the argument that it “doesn’t know.” It is true that the Israeli media system has played a decisive role in filtering reality. The Guardian reported in August 2025 testimony from analyst Anat Saragusti, according to whom, with exceptions such as Haaretz, much of mainstream Israeli media ignored for months the Palestinian human cost and reproduced the government narrative on Gaza. But even there we must be severe: censorship, media bias, and information blockage explain part of the problem; they do not absolve it. People also choose to believe what exonerates them and makes them more comfortable. Propaganda works best when it finds a society willing to be deceived. (The Guardian article)
Proof that this is not only about looking away, but also about actively embracing horizons of domination, comes from Israeli polls themselves. In February 2025, INSS found that 31% of Israeli Jews supported “encouraging Palestinian emigration from Gaza,” 22% considered annexing Gaza and restoring Jewish settlements there necessary for victory; and that same month 31% of the Jewish population supported annexing the West Bank. A month later, another INSS survey showed that 24% of the total population – 29% among Jews – supported total annexation of the territories without granting civil rights to Palestinians. This is no longer mere indifference; it is social normalization of openly supremacist programs: expel, recolonize, or dominate without equal rights. (Survey link)
The perception of peace with equality has also collapsed. Pew Research Center found in June 2025 that only 16% of Israeli Jews believed peaceful coexistence with an independent Palestinian state was possible, while 42% preferred Israel to control Gaza after the war. Put differently: for broad sectors of the Israeli Jewish majority, the horizon is not coexistence but permanent administration of force. This is not just temporary fear; it is a political subjectivity shaped to view Palestinian subordination as normal and equality as threat. (Article link)
That is why the Sderot lookouts matter so much. Not because they are the core of the problem, but because they condense it into an unbearable image: a society that has managed to turn others’ destruction into everyday landscape and sunset conversation. Palestinian bodies remain out of frame, reduced to smoke on the horizon, background noise, suspect data, collateral damage, Hamas’s fault, or enemy propaganda. That emotional distance does not arise by itself; it is the result of years of physical separation, indoctrination, international impunity, and material privilege. What is terrible is not only that people can climb a hill to watch bombs and admire how their country destroys a people, but that they feel morally authorized to do so.
I will not claim that “all Israelis” think this way. That would be false, unfair, and politically clumsy. But I will say something harsher because it is more accurate: too many Israelis have accepted Palestinian dehumanization as a reasonable price for their peace of mind, national identity, or moral comfort. And when a society accepts that a hungry Palestinian child is worth less than its security narrative, that society is not only failing politically: it is entering a zone of moral bankruptcy that will take generations to leave.
There is something particularly obscene in this mechanism. The Israeli majority wants to keep seeing itself as the eternal victim of history and, at the same time, preserve the right not to look directly at the victims produced in the present. It wants memory for itself and amnesia for the other. It wants the world to feel its pain, but to treat Palestinian pain as exaggerated, doubtful, or suspicious. It wants to monopolize humanity and externalize barbarism. And that, plainly said, is not self-defense: it is moral degradation under a national flag.
The final lesson is uncomfortable but necessary. Occupation does not only destroy the occupied. It also corrupts the occupier. It degrades it, accustoms it to armed privilege, empties its moral language, and teaches it to live with others’ suffering without enough shame. What we see today in a majority sector of Israeli society is not an inexplicable pathology, but the logical product of a regime of separation, supremacy, and violence sustained for decades and shielded by international impunity. That is why the problem is not only Netanyahu, nor his fascist ministers, nor only the most fanatical settlers. The problem is also that majority which, being able to look, chose not to see; being able to know, chose not to feel; being able to break with barbarism, preferred to live with it.
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