How Israel Turned More Than 10,000 Children Into Collateral Damage
“I love post-apocalyptic horror cinema, especially zombie movies. I struggle to define exactly the particular pleasure that I take in scenes of big, empty cities, neglect, a civilization being destroyed and hordes of bloodthirsty zombies roaming the ruins, but I love it. The template is always the same: a deadly fungus or virus created in a laboratory that spreads from chimpanzees to human beings turns everyone into crazed zombies with an uncontrollable desire to transmit the disease and annihilate humanity.
As per the genre's rules, the heroes are always a small band of survivors, trying to reestablish society and civilization. In the best example of the genre, "28 Days Later," the pathogen is called the "Rage Virus." On October 7, 2023, murderous gangs of gunmen from Hamas' elite Nukhba Force infected Israeli society with a deadly virus.
None of what we are experiencing today would have happened if we hadn't been infected and turned into zombies with just one impulse: to take revenge. There is a clear moral correlation between the total indifference to in Gaza because of our handiwork and the abandonment of the hostages and indifference to their suffering.”
Prior to 7 October 2023 Israel was civilised democratic society, with equality among its citizens, treating Palestinians with respect and dignity since 1948. Prior to 7 October 2023 Israel never engaged in wars, assassinations and uphold ‘international law’; it was applauded by international human rights organisations for its historical record, unparalleled in a region of autocratic regimes. The use of the passive voice – ‘been infected’, ‘turned into’– is another way of portraying Israel as a victim.
“Fifteen months after he is infected by the virus, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu says, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, what everyone knows: that top priority is given to political maneuvering intended to preserve the government, rather than the hostages.
A country whose moral infrastructure allows Gazan babies to die of hypothermia can accommodate Israeli women being raped in the tunnels. Abandonment of hostages and war crimes draw on the same indiscriminate evil.”
Thus, according to Leal, a Palestinian virus has given rise to a new ‘moral infrastucture’ – a barbaric one as opposed to the real humanistic moral infrastructure that had existed since 1948, and probably even before that.
“I do not underestimate the threat posed to the public by Benjamin Netanyahu, but support for the prime minister is eroding and sympathy for him even more so. There is a limit to what people can bear, and the video he released shortly before the attorney general ordered the investigation of his wife in the wake of a report by the investigative TV program ‘Uvda’ crossed it.
The mechanism supporting him is resorting to desperate measures, but there are fewer and fewer takers for their rotting merchandise. Sara is loathed, Bibi is losing the oxygen that Benny Gantz had given him and a tsunami of rising prices and austerity measures is heading for shore, threatening to drown us. Even the TV panel show ‘The Patriots’ seems gloomy lately.
But the Rage Virus rages on. It was this virus that enabled, according to a New York Times investigation, mass,indiscriminate killing in Gaza. Officers described the mood in the military as ‘harbu darbu’, which the article called ‘an expression derived from Arabic and widely used in Hebrew to mean attacking an enemy without restraint’.
The starvation plan complemented an unprecedented bombing campaign that eradicated entire families. One could argue the credibility of the data, but there is an agreement on the modest number of over 10,000 children we turned into collateral damage.
This is what a bankrupt society looks like. A civilization that descended into barbarism. After the massacre, the prevailing moral principle, even among centrists, Zionist leftists and anti-Netanyahu liberals, was an explicit mercilessness toward Gazans for what they did. As if those people who slaughtered children in Gaza border communities gave us moral license to carry out the wholesale killing of children in Gaza.”
There was no Israeli barbarism before 7 October 2023. There was a civilisation surrounded by a sea of barbaris Arabs. Israeli ‘leftists’ and ‘liberals’ did not engage in maintaining a machine of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, occupation, discrimination, apartheid, etc.
“Bands of people who have not lost their human face, the most outcast people in the country, the radical left, human rights organizations and such righteous journalists as Nir Hasson, are trying to preserve an uncontaminated community, so that society can be reestablished after the zombies consume themselves.
But don't fool yourselves: there is, as mentioned before, a close, necessary correlation between the widespread lack of compassion for Palestinian babies who froze to death and the fact that the hostages are still there.
Both phenomena stem from the same moral aberration. Netanyahu's government will fall, eventually, but Israeli society will take generations to recover from the virus that caused it to ignore the death of children and babies on the other side of the fence.”
An external ‘virus’ is to blame. Ultimately, one might conclude that the ‘Palestinian virus’ that entered Israel on 7 October 2023 created a genocidal state.
Note that the writer has never mentioned the protest movement that was going on long before Hamas’ attack. A protest movement that ignored the Palestinian plight and Israel apartheid and barbarism although it had not been ‘infected by an external virus’.
There is no history; there is selective history – a history of a ‘moral state’ and a ‘moral society’ that suddenly became immoral after 7 October 2023.
It sufficient to compare Leal’s narrative with two comments on her article:
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