Overton window Slip N' Slide

Or how we got from where we were to where we are

Before I get into it, let me say a couple of important things about myself and about this post. First, about myself. I am an Israeli-American academic living and working in Israel. I was born and partly raised in Israel, and while my spiritual center has drifted from, well honestly, nothing, to Jainism, I was raised in a secular Jewish family, I still occasionally celebrate some of the Jewish holidays with my family, and I’m part of the general Jewish cultural milieu in Israel (which also includes some Russian Christians and mixed families, but is largely centered around a Jewish identity). I also come from a family of holocaust survivors, many of whom were murdered for their Jewish identity by the Nazi regime. In an era when any criticism of the State of Israel, its government, or the actions of its military, is intentionally conflated with antisemitism, I think it’s important to keep this in mind.

Next, a warning. This post is going to be about Israel, both in the context of what is currently happening in Gaza, as well as going further back. I realize that to many Jewish Israelis and some Jews outside of Israel, any perceived attack on Israel’s actions feels like an attack on them, and even if I disagree with this interpretation, I can’t tell people how to feel. If this is you, if you will only come out of reading this feeling hurt and angry, I urge you not to read this post. Nothing will come of finding one more person to get angry at. This post is meant somewhat to sort out my own thoughts, to communicate these thoughts to like-minded people, and to a lesser extent to invite people who may be on the fence to appreciate my perspective. It is not my goal to make anyone who cannot be won over upset just because I am upset.

July 22nd, 2002

On this date, an Israeli F-16 jet airplane dropped a one-ton bomb in the middle of a densely populated neighborhood in Gaza. The target was Salah Shehade, a Palestinian militant who led the military wing of Hamas, an Islamist organization which a few years later would take control of the Gaza strip in a violent military coup. While Shehade was killed, the bombing also claimed the lives of fourteen civilians, among them seven children.

The history of Israeli-Palestinian and more generally Israeli-Arab relations is long and complicated. It is not my purpose to outline all of it or to take sides. But the backdrop to this bombing was as follows: The Second Intifada had been raging for nearly two years, incurring hundreds of intentional and unintentional civilian casualties on both sides. Israelis at the time were reeling from mass casualty attacks over the past year targeting nightclubs, busses, and hotel holiday parties. This is not to say Palestinians weren’t also suffering greatly at the hands of the Israeli military and settlers, but to paint a picture of the atmosphere of fear that pervaded on the Israeli side. I lived through it and remember it well.

That the international community responded to the July 22nd bombing in Gaza with widespread condemnation was not a surprise. However, even within Israel there was a significant backlash. The bombing was fiercely criticized in the press. Israeli president Shimon Peres apologized in an interview with an international news outlet. Israeli Air Force commander Dan Halutz was lambasted for his callous response (“all I feel [when dropping a one-ton bomb on a densely populated city block] is a light bump to the wing, from when the bomb is released,” he quipped). My mother called it our generation’s Sabra and Shatila. Even if the criticism came largely from the left, it was still considered a valid part of the political discourse. No one would have suggested that criticizing the bombing was tantamount to antisemitism.

Jump forward to 2008

By this point, there had been a significant hardening of Israeli public opinion. Israeli media followed its usual pattern of describing only Palestinian attacks on Israelis, and hiding or minimizing Israeli attacks on Palestinians. Even when attacks against Palestinians were mentioned, such mentions were perfunctory, and quoted verbatim from whitewashed accounts offered by the Israeli military spokesperson.

A ceasefire had gone into effect on June 19 of that year. While there was a great reduction in hostilities, the ceasefire wasn’t fully observed neither by the Israeli military, nor by all Palestinian factions in Gaza. However, Israeli media painted a one-sided picture in which Israelis held up their end of the bargain, looking the other way while Palestinians engaged in flagrant violation after flagrant violation, and there was a growing sense that “something simply must be done.” Almost no one in the Israeli Jewish public was aware, for example, that a total of 19 Gazans had been killed by the Israeli military over the course of the ceasefire.

There was even a sort of Mandela Effect where the claim “We dismantled the settlements and pulled out of the Gaza Strip, and in return we got rocket fire” was universally repeated by Israelis all across the political spectrum. In actual fact, while the disengagement from Gaza had taken place only three years earlier, in the summer of 2005, rocket fire from Gaza had been going on since the beginning of 2001. While each of these two facts was true in isolation, this Oceania-had-always-been-at-war-with-Eastasia framing was a trick of the mind, designed to further the popular perception that Israel had been stoically weathering indignity after indignity for years without retaliating, that the supposed policy of appeasement had failed, and that it was finally time for a response.

December, 2008

Predictably, the ceasefire deteriorated. And following a rapid escalation on both sides, Israel launched its so-called Operation Cast Lead in late December. This attack on Gaza was widely supported by Israelis, whose media-fed understanding was that Israel had been upholding the ceasefire when Hamas had unilaterally decided to attack.

By all estimates, including the Israeli military’s more conservative ones, well over a thousand Gazans were killed during Israel’s attack. And while there is a disparity between the Israeli military’s and (Israeli and international) human rights organizations’ estimates of the percentage of civilians and in particular children killed, it is a quibble over the statistics of the war, not over its essence. No one disputes the massive destruction of civilian infrastructure, the displacement of tens of thousands, or the killing of hundreds of civilians that took place in Gaza that winter. There was none of the public backlash that there had been following the killing of Salah Shehade along with fourteen civilians. The value of Palestinian lives in the eyes of the average Israeli had undoubtedly taken a massive hit since 2002.

[Edit: A friend helpfully reminded me of the 2014 campaign, which followed a similar trajectory and cost the lives of well over 2000 Gazans.]

October, 2023

In the early morning hours of October 7th, 2023, having recently returned to Israel from an extended sabbatical, I was awakened to what proved to be three hours of shelling and air-raid sirens. Having no shelter near my then home, I huddled under the stairs and cradled my dog who was absolutely petrified. Over the course of the day, I came to know that concurrently with Hamas’s shelling of cities across Israel, there had also been a land incursion into Israel from Gaza in which 1200 civilians on the Israeli side were killed, and a large number taken hostage. A few days later I packed my pets and moved in with my mother, where there were fewer rockets, and there was an in-home reinforced room we could go to in case of rocket fire.

As I was internalizing this new reality, I couldn’t help thinking back to the September 11th, 2001, attacks in the U.S., and George W. Bush’s subsequent wars and encroachment on civil liberties. I also thought of how little provocation was needed to incur the wrath of Israel’s military in 2008, with wide public support. I couldn’t shake a single nagging thought: there would be a genocide in Gaza.

The range of acceptable public discourse

The Overton window describes the often shifting, shrinking or expanding range of political and ethical opinions that a given public finds acceptable at any given time. My personal interpretation of this concept is that by and large people ground their beliefs in a sense of personal and shared identity that they have an emotional attachment to, rather than a pre-existing unalterable moral code. While we will often cite basic moral principles in explaining our stances, in reality these stances can vary wildly as the Overton window we subscribe to shifts around. I am no exception to this rule. I don’t pretend that my opinions are not fed by my ego, I just happen to align myself with a vanishing minority in the current local political climate.

I claim that the shift in attitudes from public outrage at the killing of fourteen civilians in 2002, to the acceptance and even fierce defense of the killing of tens of thousands today, has less to do with the objective circumstances than with this kind of shift in societal norms. After all, how could I claim to be less safe now that life in Israel is fairly quiet compared to back then when exploding busses and restaurants were a nearly daily affair?

In 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada, a friend of mine excitedly told me how horrified she was by the reports emerging from Slobodan Milošević’s trial for war crimes and genocide at The Hague. Being then a much younger and brasher version of my current self, I quickly retorted that Israel had also skirted the law as far as war crimes were concerned. Without blinking or thinking anything of it, she replied that the Israel Rabbi Israel Hess had explained eloquently in his article “Genocide: A Commandment of the Torah” that it is quite explicitly incumbent upon us to eradicate all Palestinians, from adults to babies, citing the biblical commandment to “obliterate the memory of Amalek”. While in her political circles, this may have been an acceptable opinion at the time, in general Israeli society this would have been well outside the bounds of acceptable political discourse.

In today’s Israel, this is no longer an unpopular opinion. Even if the phrasing is more nuanced, the intent is there. Only a few weeks into the war, in a clear dogwhistle meant to evoke these same sentiments, Israeli PM Netanyahu wrote to Israeli forces, citing the same biblical passage used by Rabbi Israel Hess in his call to genocide. Netanyahu is not alone in this. In a recent survey conducted mid-August, 76% of respondents in the Israeli Jewish population agreed with the sentiment “there are no innocents in Gaza.” Meaning, all are terrorists, all are deserving of death. One can only imagine how high that percentage must be among active duty soldiers. Without us even noticing it, the Overton window has shifted from a reasonably humane if somewhat hawkish range of opinions, all the way to fascism’s doorstep, if not beyond.

At the other end of the spectrum, colleagues of mine who have spoken out against the carnage have faced censure, threats to their lives and livelihoods, and social isolation. It is no longer acceptable to speak out against killing, it is no longer acceptable to criticize the military (except for very specific political criticism of the Netanyahu government, a kind of criticism in which Palestinians are invisible), and it is no longer acceptable to portray any Gazans as innocent victims. The Overton window has left my colleagues (and me) far behind.

Even well-meaning supporters of Israel abroad repeatedly point to the events of October 7th without engaging in the reality of what is happening in Gaza today. They will insist that Israel has a right to defend itself against such attacks, though there does not appear to be any symmetric notion that Gazans are similarly deserving of protection, or that they were deserving of such following their massacres in 2008 and 2014. Such supporters, while their intent is born of a sense of empathy and shared destiny, abandon in their discourse not only the people of Gaza, but also the small minority of moderate Israelis they seek to defend.

The outcome

This state of public opinion has had devastating consequences for the people of Gaza. In July of this year, the non-sectarian Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem joined other international organizations in calling the ongoing attack a genocide. In an 88 page report (74 in Hebrew, 80 in Arabic), they outline the systematic use of dehumanization and disinformation to blind most of the Israeli public and our international supporters to the killing of tens of thousands of Gazan civilians, the large-scale destruction of infrastructure, the destruction of the social fabric, the mass arrests and torture of Palestinians held without trial in Israeli prisons, and repeated mass forced displacement. Even by the Israeli military’s own estimates, according to leaked documents, 83% of those killed in Gaza are non-combatants.

As I write these words, reports of starvation continue to emerge from the Gaza Strip, and the Israeli military is engaging in a major incursion into Gaza City. Even I can’t say what else is taking place or how many are currently being killed, maimed, starved, or displaced. For the sake of my own sanity and to retain at least a measure of equanimity, I try to avoid the news as much as possible.

Final thoughts

By Western democratic standards, Israel has never been a great bastion of human rights or civil rights. In sharp contrast to the universal values instilled in me as an adolescent in a liberal American city, many Israelis sneer at rights organizations, and those who espouse such rights who are ironically derided as “beautiful of soul” (the local version of the “bleeding heart liberal”), and I often feel the pervading ethos could best be summed up by “morality is for freiers (suckers)”.

Yet despite this deep cynicism, and the many years of well-documented oppression, discrimination, and violence, I believe we Israelis have always held on to a persistent core of humanity, perhaps informed by our collective memory of the horrors of the holocaust; an inner guiding light, sometimes dimmer, sometimes brighter, allowing at least most of us to see the humanity of the other side. I fear that light has now been snuffed out.