Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CCXI: "beach party and booms"
written in response to The New Yorker, July 28, 2025: Israel’s Zones of Denial
Amid national euphoria over the bombing of Iran—and the largely ignored devastation in Gaza—a question lurks: What is the country becoming?
FYI: Tel Aviv ranks among world's top ten beach cities (and party cities) in new National Geographic poll
And here are relevant excerpts and remarks taken from The New Yorker, July 28, 2025: "Israel’s Zones of Denial:"
When we go to the beach, you can hear the booms from Gaza. When you eat a lollipop or an ice cream, you hear things being blown up... Not only is reality horrible, you also don’t know what the real story is.
Etgar Keret, Israeli writer and Tel Aviv liberal
What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians.
-- Ehud Olmert, former Israeli Prime Minister.
... the war in Gaza has produced a people “who have lost everything and feel only humiliation and abandonment—and despise hypocritical Western moralism. This will feed future militants, and how they behave will be shaped by old grievances and new technologies—which Israel masters today, but they could master, too.” In the familiar pattern, today’s resolution is tomorrow’s tinderbox.
-- Malley Agha, who was once a peace negotiator for the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Haaretz, July 31: The Victim Identity Israel Built Over Generations Now Fuels Its Denial of Genocide in Gaza
Genocide does not require a single, explicit directive; rather, it's the result of a process in which rhetoric, policy, political discourse, collective dehumanization and repeated patterns of action converge into mass acts of destruction.
But the saddest chapter in Israel's increasing tendency to deny the genocide in Gaza is reserved for Yad Vashem, The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. The historians who work there and devote days on end to investigating the events of the Holocaust are choosing to silence their mouths and pens when it comes to the horrors of Gaza. In light of the flood of statements at the beginning of the war by Israeli politicians calling for mass killings there, a group of local scholars turned to Yad Vashem chairman Dani Dayan and requested that the institution publish a public condemnation of the declarations, specifically those calling for genocide. But in January 2024 Dayan replied to Prof. Amos Goldberg, who initiated the move: "The six million Jews who were murdered in the Shoah are entitled to an institution that deals with them and with them alone. Therefore, Yad Vashem doesn't deal with genocide as such but only with its interface with the Shoah… Our area of activity is the Shoah, and only the Shoah."
The comments written by the Yad Vashem chairman are unsettling not only because of his silence, but also because his words are wrapped in a cloak of ostensible institutional integrity, while turning an arrogant back to the sense of historic responsibility that is supposed to inform the memorialization of the Holocaust. "Six million Jews are entitled to an institution that deals with them alone," writes Dayan – suggesting an exclusivity of the memory of murdered Jews as an excuse for hardheartedness, for closing one's eyes and maintaining silence in the face of ongoing war crimes and tens of thousands of slaughtered and starved people. All part of the terrible crime being perpetrated by the descendants of another genocide, the Shoah, among others.
Wasn't the murder of six million Jews also enabled due to many around the world washing away responsibility? Yad Vashem's entrenchment in the claim that their expertise are limited to the Holocaust is an act of moral bankruptcy, of disavowal of responsibility based on institutional convenience and the ideological adoption of a governmental policy responsible for horrific war crimes. It is a dire betrayal of the values of liberty, justice and the sanctity of human life, which the memory of the Holocaust is supposed to teach us.
For the past three generations Israel has been constructing an identity of victimhood, ranging from acts perpetrated during the Holocaust to those of Hamas on October 7. It denies its own crimes and is therefore living in a permanently distorted reality. Any attempt to speak about Israel's crimes against the Palestinians is seen as a threat not only to the image of the nation but to its very survival. The defensive narrative has become foundational to Israel's national identity, and any criticism of this narrative is met with the kind of institutional and public violence we are witnessing today
And Haaretz, July 31: Americans Should Ask Not Only What War Has Done to Gaza, but Also What It's Done to Israel
Israeli TV debates have shown just how far the local media is willing to go to look away from Gaza. Since the war began, Israeli audiences have largely been shielded from the reality of Gaza's devastation. It's not just censorship – it's that most Israelis would rather not know.
