I do not know whether anyone has already written about this phenomenon. Immediately after the October 7th massacre I recognised the same rhetorical line in several speeches in solidarity with Israel, grieving the dead and the plight of the hostages, at demonstrations or other community events in Germany: Each time the orators were calling the audience to prepare for the emergence of pictures of horror from Gaza as the war would unfold such that they would not be dissuaded from their conviction of the necessity to dismantle Hamas by these pictures. Friends told me that they have heard the very same line on different occasions.
This line is not the product of a carefully crafted speech, it is a very spontaneous, emotional appeal. This is clear, since—notwithstanding its ethical implications—it does not serve the purpose of these speeches, it is utterly counterproductive: If we are talking about “horrible pictures” depicting crimes, then anyone who tries to convince the public that the IDF are about to wage a just war should certainly avoid announcing their willingness to turn a blind eye to pictures depicting war crimes even before these war crimes happened. If we are talking about “horrible pictures” depicting unavoidable civilian suffering due to cautious and proportionate military attacks or destructions of infrastructure, then anyone who tries to convince the public that the IDF are about to wage a war in accordance with proportionality requirements concerning the objectives of the war, air strikes, destruction of infrastructure or security restrictions on humanitarian relief should certainly avoid saying that one is going to neglect the very suffering against which the proportionality one claims to care about is to be measured. If you do not register the suffering, you cannot check proportionality. If we are talking about fake pictures or pictures not actually showing what their captions proclaim it goes without saying that these have to be debunked and can be ignored, no need for toughness.
After having heard this line multiple times, I was devastated, I had to cry. What makes it devastating is that it is precisely not a conscious call to commit war crimes, it is not a conscious expression of contempt towards the suffering of civilians in Gaza. It is a psychologically understandable reaction. It is a way to cope with one’s inability to endure feelings of ambivalence concerning the actions of the Israeli army and government. It is an attempt to provide an easy solution for dealing with the flood of disinformation spread by the “pro-Palestinian”, pro-Hamas propaganda. It is supposed to provide an easy way out of the moral dilemmata imposed on the IDF by Hamas’ use of human shields. It is an attempt to circumvene the difficult task of subjecting the IDF to public scrutiny given the intransparency of their procedures and their own regular misinformation. Not wanting one’s friends and relatives to be fighting for a just cause in an armed force which would commit war crimes as it did in the past (like other armed forces around the world), people justify ignorance towards crimes which they unconsciously anticipate. Even before the scale of disregard of the IDF for civilian casualties, the relaxed proportionality requirements for air strikes, and the lack of enforcement of rules of engagement became evident, people already started to suppress their empathy. People who have empathy for Palestinians felt obliged to suppress their empathy in advance. The experiences with these psychological effects maybe contribute to understand better why the Israeli public and media, while to a large extent being very critical of Netanyahu’s failures and the lack of future perspectives provided by his government (except the Gaza resettlement dystopia advanced by its even more right-wing elements), has at such a scale failed to critically investigate and question the IDF policies and tactics leading to such large civilian fatalities (more than 20.000…). Maybe they help to understand how the Israeli public could reach a point where so many people buy the lies that there would be no contradiction between the legitimate aims to dismantle Hamas’s military capabilities and to bring the hostages home, and where even the shooting of hostages carrying a white flag against all rules of engagement is excused as a “mistake”.
All of us have to be vigilant to fight against these psychological inclinations. Neither our analysis of military and political actions nor our ethical judgements, our empathy must ever be subdued to demands of maintaining the perceived integrity of one’s party and the consistency of one’s psychological identification with a party.
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