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A Hebrew University poll shows an overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis agree with the genocidal idea that there are “no innocents in Gaza.”
A poll from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in early June provided a chilling statistic: An overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis agree with the idea of there being “no innocents in Gaza.”
64% of the Israeli public agree with this statement, almost two out of three people. But it is actually considerably higher among Jewish Israelis, because that number is weighted by Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. Palestinians make up roughly 17% of the Israeli population and 92% of them oppose the statement, so that leaves Jewish Israelis with overwhelming support.1
The poll also measured the percentage of Israelis who “highly agreed” with the sentiment across the political spectrum:
- 87% of supporters of the current government
- 73% of right-wingers who didn’t vote for coalition (like Avigdor Lieberman voters etc.)
- 63% of centrist voters
- Even 30% of “left” voters
This obvious support for patently genocidal calls against Palestinians calls for pause.2 But it is also important to recognize this support did not start yesterday, nor on October 7, 2023.
In 2018, then Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that “there are no innocent people in the Gaza Strip.”
In October 2023, the Israeli President Isaac Herzog paraphrased the same idea by saying that “an entire nation out there that is responsible. This rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved — it’s not true.” This statement was one of the many genocidal statements that became part of the case for genocide at the ICJ in South Africa vs. Israel.
Herzog later blasted the ICJ for “blood libel” and for “twisting his words,” but that’s just nonsense. Herzog is a notorious racist liar, and everyone understood him the first time.
Haaretz has been running articles like this one from late May, titled “‘There Are No Innocents in Gaza’: What to Do When Your Israeli Child Comes Home Radicalized”:
“Amid the war in Gaza and a deepening civil crisis in Israel, many parents are facing a painful challenge: their children are returning home with extreme views and expressions of hatred. These range from justifications for the killing of civilians in Gaza to racist remarks against the ultra-Orthodox, LGBTQ+ individuals and other communities. For many families, this clash between the values taught at home and the messages children absorb from the world around them is deeply troubling.”
But the poll indicates that this is entirely missing the point — all of Israeli society is radicalized and overwhelmingly supports genocide. The soldiers are not coming home to another universe — it is the same genocidal universe.
In 2014, during one of Israel’s “mowing the lawn” onslaughts on Gaza, which killed an estimated 2,200 Palestinians, including 551 children, Ayelet Shaked, then a Jewish Home lawmaker but not-yet minister, shared a social media post with the following text:
“Who is the enemy? The Palestinian people. Why? Ask them, they started [….] Behind every terrorist stand dozens of men and women, without whom he could not engage in terrorism. Actors in the war are those who incite in mosques, who write the murderous curricula for schools, who give shelter, who provide vehicles, and all those who honor and give them their moral support. They are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.”
The post caused some commotion and she took it down, but the idea was clearly one that she endorsed. The next year, she would become Justice Minister. Shaked voiced downright fascist statements, yet she had the temerity, or chutzpah, to mock the idea of her being a fascist, in a mock-ad where she advertises a perfume called “Fascism,” saying, “smells like democracy to me.”
The truth of the matter is that Israeli leaders have been pushing genocidal advocacy for many years. The genocidal thinking has always been a part of the Zionist project in one way or another, fueled by its settler-colonial logic of elimination. But these genocidal tendencies have often had to be balanced with a semblance of democracy, just like in the case of its apartheid.
But now, Israel seems to have unleashed itself from such constraints to a much greater degree. It appears that Israel no longer sees the need to put on the perfume of democracy.
Notes
- Correction: The original version of this article stated that “roughly 82% of Jewish Israelis” agreed with the idea of there being “no innocents in Gaza.” This statistic was based on a calculation using an incorrect percentage of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship and has been removed from the article.
A calculation using the correct percentage shows that roughly 75% of Jewish Israelis agree with the idea that “there are no innocents in Gaza,” which still demonstrates overwhelming support for this genocidal notion. (Thank you to Tamir Sorek, Liberal Arts Professor of Middle East History at Pennsylvania State University, for help in correcting this statistic.) ↩︎
- A similar percentage (also 64% overall) thinks that there is no need for a wider coverage of the situation of civilians in Gaza. Israeli media hardly covers any of that at all, so it is equivalent to saying that they just don’t want to know about those starving babies. Among coalition voters, it’s 89%. This is not very surprising, since if most of these people don’t see any Palestinians in Gaza as “innocent”, why would they even care to hear about their starvation and death by other means? ↩︎
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