Politics

Underneath all this there is a menacing silence. The catastrophe in the Gaza Strip, if it is mentioned at all, appears to Israelis only as a “challenge”: a PR challenge in international media, a legal challenge in the Hague, a diplomatic challenge in meetings with foreign officials. For the Israeli public, there are merely appearances of suffering in Gaza. Just as Palestinian existence and experience have been erased over the decades from Israeli consciousness, so is the reality of current Palestinian death and loss being denied and concealed. There is no tolerance for the mention of the nearly 2 million internal refugees in Gaza, of widespread starvation, of disease, of the destruction of around 70 percent of the houses in the Gaza Strip, of the incredible proportion of civilian deaths, of whole families that have been wiped off the face of the earth. Any serious consideration of Palestinian loss is perceived as a distraction from the suffering of Israelis, as an affront and a failure of loyalty.