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WILL ISRAELIS ONE DAY SAY OF THEIR COUNTRY’S ATROCITIES IN GAZA,
‘I WAS ALWAYS AGAINST IT’?  
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Amira Hass
October 15, 2025
Haaretz
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_ People aren't born cruel; they become so. Palestinian cruelty
toward Israelis is widely covered, while our cruelty, that of Israeli
society, is getting ever more sophisticated to protect our spoils. _

Palestinians shop at a makeshift market in the Nuseirat refugee camp,
located in the central Gaza Strip, on October 15, 2025., Credit: Eyad
Baba / Agence France-Presse (AFP) // Haaretz

 

Optimists say that, ultimately, Israelis will grasp the scope of the
atrocity they committed in the Gaza Strip. The truth will seep into
their consciousness.

The old videos of infants who were blown to bits by our bombs will at
some point reach Israelis' hearts and pierce them. They will suddenly
see children coated in the dust of the crushed concrete beneath which
they were rescued, shaking uncontrollably and staring blankly with an
expression that is all a big question mark.

At some point, they will realize that the individual viciousness of
revenge demonstrated by so many soldiers – often accompanied by
bursts of laughter and smiles that streamed through TikTok, and the
cold, surgical, and anonymous lethal viciousness of those playing
video games from the cockpits and control rooms – are not a mark of
heroism but a serious illness. Social and personal.

Parents, the optimists believe, will be unable to sleep at night,
worried that the Xs on their sons' rifles mark women, old people, and
just youngsters gathering herbs for food. The day will come when
adolescents will ask their fathers, who were soldiers back then,
whether they too obeyed an order to shoot an old man who crossed an
unknown red line.

The daughters of decorated pilots will ask whether they dropped a
proportionate bomb that killed a hundred civilians
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one mid-level Hamas commander. Why didn't you refuse? The daughter
will sob.

 
Protesters holding photos of Palestinian children killed in Gaza by
Israel next to Tel Nof air force base, earlier this year. (Haaretz
photo)
The grandchildren of a retired prison guard will ask, did you
personally beat a shackled detainee until he fainted? Did you obey
a minister's order 
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deny prisoners food and showers? Did you crowd 30 detainees in a cell
meant for six? Where did they get skin diseases? Did you know any of
the dozens of detainees who died in an Israeli prison
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starvation or from beatings and torture? How could you, Grandpa? The
nephews of Supreme Court justices will read their rulings that
permitted all of that and they will stop visiting them on Shabbat.

At some point, the optimists believe, the Israeli media's obscuring
of reality
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cease to brainwash and numb hearts. The phrase, "the context," will
not be considered a profanity and the public will connect the dots:
Oppression. Expulsion. Humiliation. Deportation. Occupation. And all
the suffering between them. They are not parts of slogans that
self-hating Jews coined, but describe the life of an entire people,
for years, under our orders and our guns.

People are not born cruel; they become such. The cruelty of
Palestinians towards Israelis is covered extensively in our media,
articles and close-ups. It developed in response and resistance to our
foreign and hostile rule. Our cruelty, that of Israeli society, is
getting ever more sophisticated with the aim of protecting our spoils:
the land and the water and the freedoms from which we expelled the
Palestinians.

The optimists believe that there is a road back. How lucky they are,
the optimists.
 

_[AMIRA HASS [[link removed]] is a
reporter and columnist for Ha’aretz Daily, a newspaper based in Tel
Aviv, Israel. She has been a journalist for two decades._

_Hass, 53, has written critically about both Israeli and Palestinian
authorities. She has not allowed her gender, ethnicity or nationality
– all hindrances in the region she reports from – to obstruct her
from pursuing the truth in her reporting._

_In 1989, Hass quit her studies in history at Tel Aviv University and
began working as a copy editor for Ha’aretz Daily. At the same time,
she volunteered for Workers Hotline, a human rights group dedicated to
reaching out to vulnerable workers, many of whom were Palestinian. She
became acquainted with life in Gaza and grew frustrated about how
poorly Israel’s occupation of Gaza was represented in the Israeli
press._

_By 1991, Hass was writing weekly features for Ha’aretz Daily, and
in 1993, she became a full-time writer for the paper. She moved to
Gaza, which at the time was under direct and full Israeli occupation._

_Hass, now based in Ramallah, has lived in the Occupied Palestinian
territories for nearly 16 years. She has been reporting on the life of
Palestinians under the Israeli occupation and covering the major armed
clashes and Israeli military attacks. Her goal has been to provide her
readers with detailed information about Israeli policies, especially
restrictions on the freedom of movement._

_In the course of her work, Hass has been threatened, harassed and
detained. Most recently, in May 2009, she was detained by Israeli
police on her return from a four-month stay in Gaza “for violating a
military order” (which forbids entry into Gaza) and “for staying
illegally in an enemy state.” She had also been detained in December
2008 by Israeli police on her return to Ramallah for violating the
same military order.]_

* Israel
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* Palestine
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* Gaza
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* West Bank
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* Palestinians
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* Israel-Gaza War
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* IDF
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* Oct. 7
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* Israel settlements
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* Occupied Territories
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* Benjamin Netanyahu
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* Genocide
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* war crimes
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* zionism
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* Israel-Palestine
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