Genocide with Relish

Settler-colonialism is, by its nature, genocidal – but no one was prepared for the apparent glee with which Israel’s citizen army set about destroying Gazan society after 7 October 2023.

Advocates of genocide have included lawyers, doctors, journalists, politicians, religious leaders, media celebrities – and, of course, government ministers. They range from the flippant (as on the popular podcast Two Nice Jewish Boys: ‘If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza … I would press it in a second, right now, and I think most Israelis would’) to the serious, like the Knesset member ‘Tally’ Gotliv, who has called on Israel to use nuclear weapons: ‘Bomb without distinction! Flatten Gaza! This time, there is no room for mercy.’

How do we account for this? Are there factors peculiar to Jewish/Israeli culture, history or psychology? In the West, we have always been told that Israel ‘shares our values’. Do the last 30 months give the lie to that – or could our own societies just as easily descend into the same moral abyss?

Avigail Abarbanel was born in Tel Aviv and grew up in ‘downtown’ Israel. She had a ‘very Zionist’ education and served in the IDF. By her own account, she emigrated to Australia in 1991 because she ‘was afraid of suffocating in Israel’s anxious pressure cooker’.

She renounced her Israeli citizenship 10 years later at the start of the Second Intifada, ‘motivated by a feeling of rebellion, indignation and anger mixed in with a lot of self-doubt’. Reading Avi Shlaim’s 1999 book The Iron Wall persuaded her ‘that everything I was taught and believed to be true was in fact a lie’.

She now lives in the Scottish Highlands, where she has a private practice as a psychotherapist. She blogs on Substack as Fully Human.

Her many books on mental health and personal growth include (2017). She also edited (2011).

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