By Jeremy Salt

Israel’s latest actions in Gaza, from setting up a holiday village for soldiers to the destruction of hospitals, highlight a grotesque disconnection from human suffering.

The real news of the day is not that the Israeli army has set up a holiday village for tired soldiers on the coast of Gaza, not far from Jabaliya, which those same soldiers have been methodically destroying in the past three months.

The village is only a grotesque reminder of how far the state of Israel and most of its people have removed themselves from common humanity.

The real news is the killing of more Palestinians, the final destruction of the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia, the murder or abduction of staff and patients, and the removal of the severely wounded to other hospitals, which even the mainstream media admits are no longer functional.

The medical staff were led away to an unknown destination, possibly the Sde Teiman prison where another abducted doctor, Dr. Adnan al Bursh, an orthopedic surgeon and graduate of King’s College was murdered. According to Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, he was raped to death.

The heroism of the Palestinians is summed up in the person of Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya, the director of the Kamal Adwan Hospital, who was beaten with batons and sticks as he was being led away.

In October, Dr. Abu Safiya’s son Ibrahim was killed by the Israelis. Dr. Abu Safiya was wounded in a drone strike but stayed with his staff and patients until the very end. His whereabouts are not known but his life is obviously in danger of being ended in the same way as Adnan al Bursh’s.

Israel’s holiday village for stressed-out soldiers serves breakfasts of iced espresso coffee, toast, flavored drinks, and shakes. Breakfast is followed by a barbecue lunch and dinner, with Belgian waffles, fresh pretzels, and meringues served up with coffee in the cafe afterward.

There are massage rooms for tired bodies, and mobile medical and dental clinics for check-ups. There are showers, the internet, unlimited supplies of popcorn, candy, and fresh water, beanbags to lounge on, PlayStation consoles for entertainment, and fruit and ice cream “when the weather’s hot.”

The distance from Tel Aviv to Gaza is just short of 80 kilometers. The same pleasures are available in Tel Aviv day and night but the destruction cannot be seen and the cries of the wounded and dying cannot be heard in Tel Aviv.

The holiday village is close to Jabaliya, which the soldiers taking time out to recover from their onerous duties have spent the past three months destroying. Two days after Christmas they invaded the Kamal Adwan hospital, destroyed its specialist units, murdered five medical staff, frogmarched others away in their underwear and drove 350 people into the cold. Fifty people taking shelter were killed in an air attack on a building in the hospital grounds.

The journalist Gideon Levy has compared this holiday village to ‘The Zone of Interest,’ Jonathan Glazer’s film of the life led just over the Auschwitz wall by the camp commandant, Rudolf Hoss, his wife and children. Distant screams, gunshots and the arrival of trains can be heard as the children play in the garden and the wife tends to the plants and chats with visitors. The setting is idyllic, the children having the best time of their lives.

Not far from the Gaza holiday village for Israeli soldiers, not far from their hotel-quality breakfasts, barbecues and meringues served with their coffee, children are dying of cold and hunger, are being shot by snipers and torn to shreds by missiles and tank shells.

Gaza has long since been turned into a human game reserve, with Israeli soldiers bagging their prey and now going off to their village to recover from the stress with a massage or chilling out on a beanbag.

Israel is celebrating the year’s string of ‘victories’ as it calls the genocide in Gaza and the killing of thousands of civilians in Lebanon. It has exploited the crisis in Syria to steal more Syrian land, is launching missile strikes on Yemen, and is preparing for an attack on Iran.

Netanyahu is living out a fantasy, as a Jewish warrior to rank with the greatest of them, when history will remember him as a despicable war criminal, and the cowardly mass murderer of women and children.

There is the cause and there is the battle. Palestine is the cause and Israel will never destroy it. Gaza is the battle, yet for all its armed might Israel has failed to defeat Hamas even after 15 months. The other battle it has lost, comprehensively and decisively, is for global public opinion. This is ground it will never regain, however long it is able to maintain its grip on Palestine.

Even if Hamas is unable to fire another shot, the cause will continue through the coming generations. The young Palestinians who survived Gaza and their descendants will not produce another Arafat or the despised Mahmoud Abbas. No further time will be wasted on another ‘peace process’ that was set up as a deadly trap. The model of the coming generations will be Yahya Sinwar and their slogan is the return to an old one, ‘what has been taken by force can only be taken back by force.’

The world cannot afford a state like Israel any more than it could afford Nazi Germany, a lesson it learned only too late. Israel’s lawless rampage through history puts it in the same category and like the 1930s it seems the western world, at least, is only going to learn the lesson too late.

Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, once said Israel was the villa in the jungle. Of course, Israel is no villa but an apartheid genocidal state. The ‘jungle’ is one that it has created and the ‘law of the jungle, ’ not the laws of humankind, the law that Israel has chosen to live by.

The ‘villa’ is the holiday village set up in Gaza and the jungle is the apocalypse the Israeli soldiers have created just a short distance away. Children are starving and dying of cold while they eat Belgian waffles.

This current example of Hannah Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’ replays the storyline in ‘The Zone of Interest’, with Rudolf Hoss gazing out the window of his villa at the children playing in the garden and his wife picking flowers while just over the wall the inmates of the camp are being destroyed.

In the acceptance speech for the Academy Award, he won for the film, the director, Jonathan Glazer, said that in the making of ‘The Zone of Interest,’ “all our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say ‘look at what they did then’, rather ‘look at what we do now.’ It was Gaza he had in mind as a current example of showing ‘where dehumanization leads at worst.’

Rudolf Hoss was hanged for his crimes. Netanyahu has been indicted by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for war crimes and crimes against humanity yet when he spoke before the US Congress in July 2024, he was interrupted by applause almost every minute and given several standing ovations, which is surely how Hoss would have been received had he been speaking at a Nazi party rally.

Behind the fantasies of ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ and ‘the most moral army in the world’, the west has been humanizing the inhumane for decades. Never called to account for its crimes, Israel has been free to continue committing them, to the point of shoving genocide in the world’s face, as if it is confident it can get away even with this. Protected by the US, maybe it will. What is revealed behind a collapsed moral façade is the evidence of ‘where dehumanization leads at worst’.

As if they are reading the writing on the wall, an estimated half a million Israelis have left since October 7 2023. Many will probably never return as no ‘normal’ person would want to live in an environment of permanent conflict and risk to themselves and their families.

They are breaking away from a population that wants the enemy completely eradicated and its land taken over. The means – massacres, sniping, missile attacks, the bombing of hospitals, the burning alive of women and children and rape by soldiers in Israel’s prisons – don’t matter. Only the end does.

Such a society is ‘normal’ only in the sense of the same views being shared by almost everyone. This is the ‘normality’ of totally indoctrinated people who are continually egged on by the violent racist fanatics who sit in the Knesset and hold critical positions in the Israeli government.

Those who are not normal in this setting, who are revolted by the crimes being committed in their name, are concluding that they have no place and no future for themselves and their families in Israel.

As the emigration outflow increases, Israel, at war within and threatened from without, will shrink even further into a theocratic fascist redoubt – another Masada – reviled by the world and doomed to collapse.

This is what the future seems to hold unless there is some kind of dramatic internal turnaround in the direction Israel has been heading for decades, and right now that seems nowhere in sight.

The ‘successes’ of the past year have in fact convinced the ruling clique that total victory over all of Israel’s enemies is at hand.

It must be mentioned, though, that Israel’s partner in crime, the US, can change the outlook whenever it decides. It may eventually run out of patience with Israel, but that will happen when and if Israel no longer serves its strategic interests.