What happens to a society when violence no longer needs to hide, and starts being paraded as an achievement and proof of superiority?
The leader of a bloodthirsty state under unprecedented international pressure, and facing an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, steps up to the UN podium. He is booed, and plenty of those present pointedly jostle for the exit. A historic image. He smirks, almost fiendishly, and moments later brandishes a pager like a trophy, in an unprecedented display of gloating and swagger for such an occasion.
Let me simply point out that the pager, turned into a prop in a horror show before the UN General Assembly, was linked to the 2024 covert operation against Hezbollah, the kind of plot you’d expect from a film. You don’t have to agree with Hezbollah or its methods to be appalled by the sheer brazenness of that snapshot’s symbolism. It would have made little difference had he waved the scalp of one of the group’s top commanders instead.
Would it be in the national interest to ask how much in the national interest it really is for a grinning Mitsotakis to trade cosy banter and bear hugs with Netanyahu, or Christodoulides with Herzog, while Israel’s international standing and moral stature collapse a little more with every passing day? Greece and the Republic of Cyprus, which have never stopped behaving like client protectorates, keep investing politically in this unseemly strategic partnership and deepening ties in highly sensitive areas. To hell with it!
Plainly, this makes these leaders, their governments and their mouthpieces DENIERS of a genocide that even Israeli Holocaust historians recognise.
Can people of even basic intelligence, with decades of political and diplomatic experience, really fail to see how far their ally has sunk? Can they really not grasp the point at which power politics turned into moral derailment, and the derailment into state routine? I’d say not. And the problem is not only the second-hand shame felt by those of us who cannot stomach the horror. It is the firm conviction that this despicable strategy will, inevitably, come back to haunt us.
Yes, October 7 is a watershed. Let us not dissect everything that went before, over decades, and led to atrocities that do no credit to any human being. The shock is not to be dismissed, and Netanyahu has rightly, and repeatedly, likened it to the shock and trauma America suffered on 9/11, only several times over.
I am not saying Israel was a peaceful, placid state before. But the change over the past three years is obvious: in the scale of the violence, in the callousness, and in its very relationship with violence, which now looks almost erotic, almost existential. It is as if it found the “excuse” it had been looking for and slipped the leash. Now it no longer needs excuses at all, only to proclaim its power.
Watch the fifth season of Netflix’s Fauda and you can see every one of these traits. The series was always the product of a particular Israeli viewpoint. It was never politically neutral. Besides, in that part of the world, the very word “neutrality” is beyond even the crudest black humour. Yet the previous four seasons, however much their conviction dwindled, at least understood that for the drama to convince, the other side had to be something other than a cartoonish monster in human form.
Now and then, Palestinians appeared with families, fears, contradictions, personal stories and motives, even if, once they had been “exterminated”, the plot swallowed every trace of them. And even on the Israeli side, there were glimmers of doubt, of guilt, of questions about the limits and methods of state violence, or a flicker of the sense that violence breeds violence.
In the new season, that complexity has largely gone.
The reluctance to present any Palestinian opponent as a complex human being is glaring. The series itself seems angrier, more wounded, more hateful, and far less willing to see the other side as anything but a mortal enemy. The Palestinian is cast as a rapist, a butcher, a terrorist, a conspirator or, at best, a gullible dupe. Sometimes all of these at once, even when the traits contradict each other.
The good Palestinian is the one who dies, repents or turns out not to have been a real Palestinian after all. The only moral conflict is handed to the Israeli or Western characters. Even the “criticism” of the vague Israeli “system” (?) boils down mostly to some senior officials having recruited an out-of-control Palestinian criminal as a tool.
Even more telling is the French wife of the coldly executed Palestinian villain, played by award-winning actress, and environmental activist, no less, Mélanie Laurent. It is so blatant that the character was “planted” as a dramatic symbol of the “misguided” Western conscience that you can’t help but snort. She is someone who, out of ignorance, naivety and an almost romantic humanitarianism, fails to grasp “who they really are”, the “subhumans” she has sided with. The “duped” Westerner who feels for the Palestinian becomes, in a sense, just another gullible character in the script.
And if Fauda is the one-sided fiction of a society finding it ever harder to see the other side as human, the documentary NAZA is reality coming back to hammer on its door. Fat chance it will answer. Here, dozens of Israeli soldiers and members of elite security units give testimony that leaves no doubt: this is a regime in which civilian deaths can become a deliberately calculated variable. Its Israeli makers were given a standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival, while in their otherwise democratic country they are branded traitors and threatened with losing their citizenship.
Israel is, of course, not the only state in the world that can bear to look at itself only in a distorting mirror. But this is a derailment so flagrant that it no longer bothers with appearances. And some of those who represent us hug it and coddle it.
