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A short thread on this.
I knew a fair number of Israelis growing up at religious Jewish summer camp. We had madrichim from Israel, mostly folks relatively recently out of the army. I had Israeli staff as counselors, coworkers and supervisors.
One of the first things that pushed me towards an anti-Occupation perspective, away from right-wing Zionism and towards liberal Zionism, was their army stories.
Little boy and preteen me, nerdy and shy and awkward, thought the muscular, confident Israeli men were impressive. I thought they were cool for being soldiers. And some of them believed that too. Not all of them though.
One of my staff was a guy named Tal. He was a working-class dude who had served in an infantry unit. He was a wonderful guy, strong and kind and brave, with a bit of broken masculinity but a strong sense of justice and desire to protect vulnerable people.
Tal had lost multiple friends in combat operations. He used to scream in his sleep from night terrors. And he never glorified his work. It was the shit he had to do. And he'd done some fucking terrible shit.
It was from him that I first learned that Israeli soldiers were told to intentionally shoot people who got too close to the Gaza border fence in the leg, to cripple them. He'd been deployed there during one of Israel's many wars on Gaza.
He also wanted to be a doctor and go serve in international aid missions, because, as he said, he wanted to get the blood off of his hands.
I think about Tal a lot. He's doing well, as far as I can tell. Doesn't live in Israel anymore.
Anyway, I care a whole lot about regular Israelis. I want them to be free of being made into instruments of nightmarish oppression, of being converted into monsters to feed the bloodstained maw of ethno-nationalism.
But they aren't the primary concern. The oppressors can't be the primary concern. Whatever injury they incur enacting the Occupation is incidental to the injuries they are enacting.
I understand Israelis are frightened, of terrorism, of what equality or withdrawal or the return of refugees and a a true reckoning with the Nakba would mean.
But fear is not an excuse. It might be an explanation, but it's not an excuse. It was not an excuse when Pharaoh, fearing a Jewish "demographic threat," murdered our baby boys, and it's not an excuse now.
