Henwood and Scheindlin on Israelis’ concerns
Behind the News, 11/7/24 by Doug Henwood (Apple Podcasts) was an extremely dense podcast, starting with Henwood reading his excellent article It Was Always About Inflation (Jacobin) (from which I cited a few passages in Links and Notes for November 8th, 2024), before going in-depth on a survey of Israeli public opinion: politics, polls, and inclinations with the extremely lucid and quick Dahlia Scheindlin, who works for Ha’aretz, then moving on to James Foley and Vladimir Unkovski-Korica, who afford the war Ukraine the same treatment. It was just a devastatingly good podcast, packed into only 53 minutes. All meat; no fat.
Dahlia ScheindlinScheindlin’s statement that Israelis aren’t really thinking about Gaza, nor are they actively not thinking about it gibes with what I’ve heard anecdotally. This isf rom some notes I made from over the last several months:
Sometime in August
I spoke to my co-workers in Israel this week. At least one of them seems to be quite nervous. It seems that the war has finally hit home. I asked them a few months ago whether the Israeli economy had been affected and they’d responded that everything was fine, they hadn’t noticed anything. Prices were higher but had been rising for years anyway. They said that the war was basically “over”.
This week, though, he was worried about all of the other fronts that have been sold to him as inevitable. They said that maybe they have to go fight Hezbollah in Lebanon to eradicate them, no matter what the cost in Israeli lives. They say very clearly now that, instead of everything being Hamas’s fault, it’s now Iran’s fault. They have swallowed the new narrative. They, of course, don’t assign any agency to Israel or wonder how Israel could behave differently. They are besieged on all sides and can trust no-one—even if they were willing to make peace deals, which they are not.
They are worried that an attack will destroy Israel’s ability to produce electricity, which would affect water availability as well as air-conditioning. There has already been a massive lifestyle impact—especially an increase in psychic load amongst an already very anxious people. There is no recognition, though, that they could have done anything differently. Everything happens to the beleaguered chosen people. They have no agency.
Then I have these:
Sometime in October
Talking to my Israeli colleagues is wild. They don’t acknowledge what is going on at all, other than to say that it’s a shame that the poor hostages are stuck “out there” and have been suffering for so long, for almost 400 days now (give or take). It’s also really hard to get flights because everyone (including airline staff) is scared to come to Israel and also flights are expensive. So it’s hard to vacation in Sinai, where it’s always been cheap and easy. Now, you have to vacation in Israel, which is OK but considered to be a sacrifice.
They seem to have no idea what’s going on and we have to tiptoe around their sensibilities. But they’re the ones whose elected government is committing genocide and they seem to be largely unaware of it—or they pretend to be so no-one takes them to task for it. It’s wild how we have to be careful not to insult the citizens of the country that’s committing genocide by accidentally mentioning that they’re committing genocide. It’s like being around a crazy person.
This is not unlike how every in the West pretends that the U.S. doesn’t just invade 2-3 countries per decade. It’s just completely unacknowledged.
As Scheindlin said, Israelis’ overriding and only concern is the hostages. They have to focus only on that because it is the only potentially ennobling facet. They are well-aware that slaughtering two million people is not an appropriate response to having lost one thousand (or so, when you’ve subtracted the ones that the IDF killed).
It’s easier to convince themselves that, as long a single hostage remains, they can continue to smash at the Palestinians, who are just being bloody-minded about not releasing the hostages and therefore deserve whatever they get until they do release them. Israelis don’t know or care about the thousands of hostages that Israel has taken both before October 7th and in the past year. They don’t empathize and wonder what happens when the Palestinians say the same thing: we fight until we get our hostages back.
An unstoppable force versus immovable object.
Well, Palestinians are slipping closer and closer to becoming a theoretical people, but you understand what I mean, I hope.