The Jewish Society in Israel is Blind to the Crimes Against Humanity It’s Committing
By Dr. Yasmeen Abu Fraiha
Haaretz, May 25,2025
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in blowing me to pieces with a well-placed bomb, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving his country, which has the power to absolve him from evil.”
(From “The Lion and the Unicorn”, George Orwell, 1941)
In April 2016, I traveled with a delegation of doctors and medical students to the extermination camps in Poland. One morning we arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and before we entered, we sat down for a conversation near the house of the camp commander. The guide told us about Rudolf Hess, who lived there with his wife and five children, and asked us if we thought it was possible to be a good father and at the same time manage a death camp. Silence and tension hung in the air, until I finally said: “Yes, it is possible. We often live our lives ignoring injustices that occur outside the walls of our homes.” The guide looked at me, and replied in a slightly scolding tone: “That is very problematic, what you are saying. After all, there is absolute evil in the world, and it is implausible that a person educates his children with humanistic values while committing crimes against humanity.” In those days, as a young intern, I had no choice but to humbly accept what was told to me in an authoritative way by someone more senior than me.
Last Friday, a bomb fell on the home of Alaa Al-Najjar, a pediatrician who had just left for another shift at Nasser Hospital in Gaza. As soon as her shift began, she was forced to accept the burnt bodies of nine of her ten children who were killed in the bombing. Her husband and only surviving child were seriously injured and are now hospitalized in intensive care. And I think about the pilot who dropped the bomb. Does he know their names? Has he seen the horrific video of the bodies being removed from the destroyed and burned building? How did he sleep at night after returning from such a mission? He is probably also a kind-hearted law-abiding man who would never dream of committing murder in private life, but things become easier from a distance and when the decisions about whom and how to kill are made for you.
“Serving the country” has become the holiest of holies, purifying all crimes and absolving from evil. The past two years have taught me that it is absolutely possible to be a kind-hearted law-abiding person, educated with moral values, and still to act to encourage starvation, forced displacement, ethnic cleansing and genocide. After all, the Palestinians have no names, no faces, no feelings, and no dreams. They are only numbers, “incidental damage”, and as MK Zvi Sukkot once said: everyone has gotten used to the fact that you can kill 100 Gazans in one night in a war, and that doesn’t bother anyone in the world.”
On that same Friday, Haaretz published a poll that explored the perspectives of the Jewish public in Israel. 82% of those surveyed support forced expulsion of Gaza residents, 56% support forced deportation of Arab citizens of Israel, and 58% (those aged 40 and under) support the killing of all residents of an occupied enemy city. The Jewish society in Israel, which claims to be the “chosen people”, “a light to the nations”, “a model society” and have “the most moral army in the world”, is today committing one of the most horrific crimes against humanity and is completely incapable of seeing it. How many more children need to be burned to death before we will be able to see? How many more parents will weep over the bodies of their children?
In September I visited Estonia. In the center of Tallinn, the capital, stands a museum called Vabamu – “Free Mother” in Estonian – that chronicles Estonia’s journey to independence after a century of occupation by the Russian Empire, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. One of the highlights of the exhibition is a room with a giant Soviet star and a picture of Stalin on the ceiling. Upon entering the room, a narrator explains that “in Estonia, there is no ban on displaying the Soviet star, because freedom of speech is an essential right and because symbols don’t kill people, but people kill people. Stalin never killed anyone, never tortured prisoners, and never dropped bombs. Those who did this were tens of thousands of normal people, like you and me”.
This is a lesson of the utmost importance. The blindness in Israel has become unbearable, and even those who understand that these are crimes continue to cooperate with them because, as far as they are concerned, only the government is to blame. But it is important to understand: every person who obeys a clearly illegal order or indirectly supports it, from the most junior rookie to the most senior commander, is guilty of crimes against humanity. One day the war will end, and the argument of “just following orders” will not be acceptable. When the dust settles and the magnitude of the disaster becomes clear, when one day our grandchildren will ask us where were we and how did we sleep at night when the genocide in Gaza was committed, what will we tell them?