Jerusalem
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On a hot Friday morning in September, dozens of Israelis appeared at Gaza’s border fences as opponents rather than soldiers. Their demand: The end of the siege they say is what is being done in their name.
Activists, primarily Jewish Israelis, marched towards the fence, calling on the international community to sanction and segregate their country, “stop genocide and end decades of Zionist apartheid regime.”
“We are fully aware that government will not stop, so we are calling on the world to boycott us.
Almost two years after the war in Gaza, Slukar Amran is representing Israel’s minority, and she knows it.
“It’s a shame that we don’t have many more people today, but I think we need to continue to challenge our society. … They are denial. And I think the best way to get out of this denial is to continue to shock us until we face the horrifying truth that we are committing genocide.”
In September, an independent UN investigation first concluded that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
With only a few cars, the extreme distance between the views of the protesters and the views of most Israelis is revealed.
In the southern border city of Sederot, which was attacked on October 7, it is often the target of rocket fires, and a group of Israelis gather at a lookout overlooking Gaza to enjoy its ruin.
The Israelis are calling them online “Sderat Cinema” and see Israeli artillery fires become a popular entertainment. People turn to look at the viewers of the tower. It has popcorn and snacks, and echoes some snap selfies in the distance.
“It upsets me when I see Gaza from here and see the buildings still standing… I want it to continue until Israel is all flat,” onlooker Rafael Haemo told CNN.
Haemo says he doesn’t want Arabs to live next to Israel, and laments the world’s sympathy for Gaza after the incident on October 7th.
“After we go through it, they need to go away. There’s no more Gaza.”
Hamas-led extremists killed 1,200 Israelis on October 7, 2023 and took over 250 hostages. There are 48 remaining in Gaza, of which 20 are thought to be alive.
Many Israelis have struggled or refused to move past this moment, and consider it Israel’s 9/11. And until there is a sense of closure – the return of the hostages and the answer to how it happened – they don’t think there is very little reason to contemplate what is happening on the other side.
There is no more clear place than the demonstration.
Saturdays in Israel have changed to weekly rituals. Thousands of people gather weekly on the streets of Tel Aviv to express their anger at the government and ask for an end to the war.
But polls show that the majority of Israelis consistently support the ceasefire, but the main objective of the protest on Saturday was to return the remaining hostages. The murder of more than 66,000 Palestinians by Israel has rarely been mentioned by protesters or appeared on banners.
An August poll conducted by the Accord Centre at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem shows that the majority of Israeli citizens (62%) agreed to the allegation that “there are no innocent bystanders in Gaza.”
Israelis who do not share that view denies the country’s media for fueling its rhetoric.
Dr Ayala Panievsky, an Israeli author and researcher at St. George, University of London, told CNN that since the attack on October 7th, mainstream media has participated in a campaign to “dehumanize” Palestinians. It completely promotes the notion that there is no innocent life in Gaza.
Focusing on Channel 12, Israel’s most influential and popular channel, Panievsky said the Palestinian voice had been “erased.” When the channel aired footage from Gaza, it mainly showed Israeli soldiers in battle, and Palestinian humans would rarely suffer.
“Everything that plagued the imagination and nightmares of viewers all over the world, has just been separated from mainstream Israeli media and has been truly censored. …It created a huge gap between what Israel knows about this war and what everyone else is doing,” she said.
According to Molad Think Tank, entitled “Eyes Wide Shut: When The Media On the Media Fighted at Gaza,” the co-authors of the soon-to-be published report found through sampling and forensic analysis that only 3% of reports on war in the first six months showed human suffering in Gaza.
“The people who trusted their entire lives to tell them what was going on are saying, without words, that there’s nothing to worry about there,” she added.
Haaretz, Israel’s longest-running newspaper, is one of the few news websites that have extensively covered the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza since the start of the war.
Journalists have social costs.
Neil Hasson, the Jerusalem correspondent for the paper, says he receives death threats and dislikes emails every time he reports his story from Gaza. But the rage directed at him is because when he publishes testimony of Israeli soldiers admitting the atrocities of Gaza, it is something that people cannot “ignorant.”
He called it a “complete failure” to society to not view other people as humans.
“The trauma of October 7th is only half the answer,” adds Husson. “I think the other half is the dehumanization of Palestinians in Israeli discourse over the years. It’s decades of occupation and apartheid, and that’s what you’ll ultimately get,” he added.
Panievsky has a similar view. Before October 7, she said the Israeli government was putting political pressure on the media, urging journalists to omit certain words from broadcasts such as “professions” and replace them with government topics.
As a result, media coverage in the occupied West Bank and Gaza fell significantly before the war.
The idea of Israeli press in the face of unprecedented pressure found support for reporters without borders 2025 World Press Freedom Index. “Multiple media, media and editorial independence have been increasingly limited in Israel since the start of the war in Gaza,” he said.
Footage and photographs of the hungry Palestinians in Gaza have terrified audiences abroad, but within Israel it has been dismissed by many who are not manipulated or true.
One popular terminology used by Israelis to deny the image of suffering coming out of Gaza is “Parrywood,” a portemanteau that combines the acting home of Palestine and Hollywood. Online, Israelis often argue that images are staged. If not, they insist that Hamas is responsible.
Since the start of the war, more than 400 Palestinians have died of malnutrition, and the integrated food security stage classification (IPC) declared hunger in the territory’s Gaza province in August.
A poll conducted by the Israeli Institute of Democracy (IDI) in July before the IPC’s hunger declaration asked Israelis when aid agencies had already warned them about hunger in Gaza for weeks:
Of Jewish respondents, 79% reported that they were not particularly bothered or at all. The majority of Arab respondents (86%) say they are very troubled or somewhat troubled.
For Abraham Berg, author and former chairman of the Israeli Parliament who became a prominent critic, the thing behind this state of denial among many Jewish Israelis far exceeds the media’s influence.
After the launch of the Israeli state, its leaders “never recognized the very existence of the Palestinians” and acted to make the citizens think the same thing, he said.
“Think of the partition wall. You don’t exist because I don’t see you. In the eyes of many Israelis, the very existence of the Palestinians is not a daily felt or fiction, so denial is very easy.”
Berg says that even in his central left political era, he has always been a “peace nick.” There was discrimination against Palestinians in the Knesset Hall where he served, but he said the situation was more balanced than it was back then.
“Equilibrium doesn’t exist anymore today. The situation these days is so extreme that people like me have to take an extreme position to balance it.”
In many respects, the limbs became a measure of Israeli society almost two years after October 7th. Netanyahu later promised that the Israelis would “want to change the Middle East.”
Since then, he has pursued military attacks that have been drawn up, often against the advice of his own military, even across the Gaza border.
The Middle East has actually changed, but not entirely in the way Netanyahu intended. As Israel approaches normalisation with Saudi Arabia and potentially other Gulf countries, Israel is now more isolated than in the region, not just for many years. For Netanyahu, it was the price he chose to pay, and brought Israeli citizens with him, whether they approved his choice or not.
For activists on the border fence in Gaza, the call to make their country an international pariah may be extreme, but it is essential in the face of what is happening.
“I stand here as an Israelite who is reluctant to remain silent in the face of Gaza’s war crimes and genocide,” said M., one of the participants. “These crimes are committed in our name and it is our duty to resist them.”
