‘You finally get to feel what you did to Gaza!’ |
“Now you know what the people of Gaza feel like.”
I’ve seen many, many variations on this claim online ever since we entered our new routine of zoom school – running to shelter – trying to make lunch – running to shelter – lunch burnt – running to shelter – trying to sleep – running to shelter. Written or recorded by outsiders with no personal stake in the conflict, they were usually accompanied by “you Jews/Israelis/Zionist had it coming” and other displays of ugly glee. “I hope more of you die to teach you a lesson” was implied and sometimes explicitly stated. And this cruelty, this jubilation at human suffering, never inspired me to do more than roll my eyes before going on with keeping calm and carrying on.
But after direct hits from Iranian rockets wrought terrible devastation in two Israeli cities on Saturday night, my feed lit up with so many versions of this message that I could no longer bring myself to scroll on. Not while Israeli children were struggling for their lives in the hospital. Not when the objects of this glee – elderly and children and babies – were literally bleeding in the street.
So: on the off chance that any of you, the international observers and commentators making this claim, mean it kindly and honestly, I would like you to consider what your words imply.
If you think this is what the people of Gaza felt/feel, you are both belittling what they went through, and completely misreading our reality.
Let’s start with the belittling part. If you think that our need to run to shelters that our state has built for us, with something between 90 seconds and ten minutes of warning that our state systems provide for us, while our state does its level best to shoot the rocket that would kill us out of the sky (and most of the time succeeds), is in any way comparable to what the people of Gaza felt for two years of war, than you have less compassion and understanding than me, an Israeli, the supposedly heartless killer of your imagination.
Because in Gaza, there are neither state built shelters nor state created warning systems nor state capacity to defend civilians properly.
In Gaza, people had to hope for the best and accept what warning they got – usually in the form of phone calls and leaflets from the IDF – in a war their government had started, in an environment that their government hadn’t bothered to make safe for them, and often knowing that they themselves were shielding their government and its murderous operatives from harm.
The tunnels that could have protected them? They were for Hamas operatives.
The hospitals that could have protected them? They turned wounded and sick Gazans into human shields for Hamas HQ instead.
All the civilians of Gaza could do was rely on our humanity and our interest in following the law. All they could do was hope against hope that Israel would choose to refrain from attacking or that its attacks would hit somewhere else.
This is nothing like what we are experiencing today, and frankly if I had been Gazan, I’d find the comparison deeply offensive — far more offensive than I find it as an Israeli.
And now to the distortion of reality part: a war isn’t only the immediate experience of danger. It’s also the context that surrounds it, the details that shape human life within it. And the context of my suffering and an innocent Gazan woman’s suffering are different, even if my fear for my children is the same as hers.
Israel wasn’t threatening Gaza before October 7th 2023. We kept a tight leash on Gaza, knowing its leaders were sworn to destroy us. But we had no intention of attacking until the murders, rapes, and torture of October 7th began. The war in Gaza, which, I acknowledge, devastated Gaza, didn’t have to happen at all. Hamas chose it. Hamas wanted it. Hamas turned civilians into shields instead of shielding them from harm.
Iran, by contrast, has been threatening Israel since the revolution of the seventies. Its nuclear plan came hand in hand with “death to Israel” threats, money to terrorists in Lebanon and Gaza, and state-sponsored terrorism elsewhere. It came hand in hand with enabling October 7th. We could not go on ignoring this threat. We could not keep waiting for Iran to choose to attack us at a time of its own choosing. But before going to war, and for many decades now, our state institutions did their best to supply us with shelters, warning systems, and protocols that would protect our civilians while our army fights for our future. They didn’t trust in the goodness of the IRGC’s heart or its need to follow international law (which is clearly not something it practices). They took responsibility for our lives themselves.
I wish Hamas hadn’t forced us to fight, thrusting its own civilians to the front line. I wish the IRGC wasn’t devoted to our destruction. But I am not sorry that my country takes our lives and defense seriously enough to both attack our enemies and invest in protecting us in the process.
This is what a state is supposed to do. This is how it carries out its most basic contract with its citizens. And this is what it means to live in a democracy.
I hope and pray that the Iranian people and the people of Gaza will have the same privilege in our lifetime.