A Liberal Voice from Haaretz: ‘Hamas Infected Israel With a Virus’

How Israel Turned More Than 10,000 Children Into Collateral Damage

Haaretz, 30 December 2024

“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:

The Qarmatians (Al-Qaramita)

By Nadeem Mahjoub Documentary film-makers G. Troeller and M. C. Defarge once asked a cabinet minister in South Yemen, why socialistic ideas were so readily acceptable in that part of the Arab world. He replied: “Because we have been communists for a thousand years! My mother was Qarmatian.” Official Muslim scholars and clerics, and many so-called moderates (whether individuals or groups) oppose sedition ( fitna ). Tensions and contradictions in society should be solved peacefully and even if the ruler was unjust and impious, it is generally accepted he should still be obeyed, for any kind of order is better than anarchy and sedition. “The tyranny of a sultan for a hundred years causes less damage than one year’s tyranny exercised by the subjects against one another.” Revolt was justified only against a ruler who clearly went against the command of God and His prophet.” 1 Here we look at not what happened in the minds of people who call for calm, oppose dissent and preach the re...

Capitalism

Some of this reminds me of how five or six years ago in a class of seven students in a UK elite university three of them (two Germans and one British) were in favour of a "benevolent dictator" (in the Arab context). The bloody horrors of Pinochet showed how capitalism will react when it's threatened

Cairo C. 1900-1934 The accurate translation for Arabic meaning of Cairo is "the invincible".

"If you don't attack the economic power of the elite, soon or later it will attack you." That's what the Arab uprisings, for instance, were unable/failed to do. K for Karl – Revolution (episode 3)

"A second position argues against transition, which is transitology itself. It is well known—especially among economists—as the sudden mobilization of a considerable mass of experts who are generally foreigners,generally Western, who come to preach the good word and to propose ready-made models of democracy. The science of the transition has become a financial windfall, a market. And the word transition has of course become a reflex of language, a term of reference, a call for tenders ( appel d’offres ) to which the whole society was supposed to respond. Consequently, the reticence that one can express is the following: our history is framed, transition is a heteronomy. Every democratic revolution is henceforth supposed to take a unique, imposed path, which is, at the same time, indistinctly democratic and liberal (or neoliberal). A more or less non-“negotiable” package. It is necessary to highlight the imposed character (and imposed from the outside) of this coming to t...

"In the same way that Robinson [Crusoe] was able to obtain a sword, we can just as well suppose that [Man] Friday might appear one fine morning with a loaded revolver in his hand, and from then on the whole relationship of violence is reversed: Man Friday gives the orders and Crusoe is obliged to work. . . . Thus, the revolver triumphs over the sword, and even the most childish believer in axioms will doubtless form the conclusion that violence is not a simple act of will, but needs for its realization certain very concrete preliminary conditions, and in particular the implements of violence; and the more highly developed of these implements will carry the day against primitive ones. Moreover, the very fact of the ability to produce such weapons signifies that the producer of highly developed weapons, in everyday speech the arms manufacturer, triumphs over the producer of primitive weapons. To put it briefly, the triumph of violence depends upon the production of a...

Varoufakis "speaks of how great it was to have the support of Larry Summers, Norman Lamont, and other figures on the Right, but it was support for whom, for what, and in whose class interests? Class analysis is far from the foreground of the picture sketched out here. Closed rooms and class war

"Egypt is no longer the heart of the Arab world"

US

Written in June: The candidate who emerged from this jumble of discontent was the man who promised to do the least. His party is now preparing to give us a national election that will be little more than a referendum on the hated Donald Trump. Finally we have a climate in which the American public would unquestionably choose dramatic change were it offered to them, and the party of change has contrived to ensure that it will not be offered. Instead our choice is between two elderly and conservative white men, both with a history of stretching the truth, both with sexual harassment accusations hanging over them, and neither representing any possibility of energetic democratic reform. The old order has been miraculously rescued once again. Such is the climate of opinion in America that, with the right leader, remarkable things would be possible. Instead we are presented with Joe Biden, an affable DC veteran with a hand in many of the defining disasters of the last 30 years: worker-c...

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