An American pro-Palestinian scholar visits to speak at Ben Gurion University and  members of a right-wing organization aligned with Ben-Gvir’s attempt to disrupt the session through violent banging on doors, walls and bellowing, etc.

Rather than terminating and leaving the ground, the scholar Omer Bartov

offers a platform for dialogue to speak, among others, with young men and women who spent months in Gaza.

The discussion between the scholar and the right-wing members, which lasts for three hours, is summerized in the report, which also entails the Scholar’s views on the Israeli society.

Full report by The New Yorker.

Here is an excerpt of particular significance.

Israeli society is refusing to face up to what’s happening in Gaza.

At Ben-Gurion, I was talking with young men and women who spent months in Gaza, so they see exactly what’s going on and they have to filter it somehow. And they are looking at things through a particular prism. They want to think that they’re doing the right thing. They want to think that it’s not just revenge, and that they’re fighting a just war, but they’re also seeing things and they can’t admit to themselves that they’re seeing. They’re seeing the vast destruction, the suffering there, the lack of food, the numbers of innocents who were killed. They see that and they have to somehow rationalize it. Some of them were rationalizing it by saying, “But we’re actually taking care of them. We care about them. It’s not that we are there to do that. We are there only to kill the Hamas people.”

The Israeli media has been broadly very supportive of the war, and there has not been sufficient coverage of the situation in Gaza. I’ve heard lots of people say Israelis aren’t seeing the same war that everyone else is seeing. Did you sense that people you were talking to were having their views shaped by the Israeli media, or is it more that the Israeli media is just a reflection of how people feel?

Anybody who puts on a uniform or is killed or wounded—they’re a hero.

Now, there are, of course, a lot of people in Israel who are protesting. I went to a protest on a recent Saturday night. There are those who are protesting to change the government. There are those who want to stop the war. There are those who want to exchange the hostages. And so there are protests. I don’t think they’re going to make a difference, but there are protests by different groups—but they’re not really about what’s going on in Gaza. They are about the sense that this government is leading us nowhere (which is, of course, true), and that things can get much worse in a really big hurry in Lebanon. There’s a lot of fear in Israel about that. But there’s no talk about the situation in Gaza, specifically.

October 7th
Yes. They feel so traumatized and so confused that they have no way of speaking about it. They don’t actually want to speak in a reasonable, analytical manner about what happened on October 7th. They don’t even want to speak about it at all.

One of them said to me, “I’m going to be called up again and I really don’t want to go.” But they feel, first of all, that they’re doing the right thing, and it’s very important for them to stress that. My sense is that, underneath all of that, there was a lingering sense of guilt. These people had just stood outside and shouted that I was a traitor; but, at the same time, they actually wanted to come in and they wanted to talk. I think that they saw a whole lot [in Gaza] that they themselves have not processed. So I don’t think that they’re lying, but I think that, unfortunately, there is a distortion of reality.

They know what they’re seeing, but then they have to interpret it in a way that does not put them in a particularly bad light. And so they can say all kinds of things. They can say, “We took care of them.” They can also say, “But they’re animals.” And they can say, “They all support Hamas.” People who are in that state of mind will say a whole lot of things that are contradictory; I think they believe them, but there’s something underlying all of this, which is that they are in denial. They’re actually denying to themselves, and not just to me, some of what they saw and experienced.

The scholar talks about an Israeli woman stating that she believed was the complete denial of the rape of Jewish women on October 7th. She had no room whatsoever to really think about anything else but that. Of course, violence against women is something that she’d worked on and feels very strongly about, but it was also a kind of filter. If you say that thousands of kids were also killed since then, it doesn’t get through.