Opinion: Israel has lost its humanity as it celebrates its power to kill

The 7 October Hamas attack overwhelmed Israel and utterly changed its face. The country experienced a tactical defeat after a colossal failure by Israeli security forces, but it quickly recovered to launch a campaign of mass killings, population expulsions, territorial occupations, assassinations, and other terroristic operations, such as the pagers epic in Lebanon. 

Let’s not argue here over the value or cost of these violent actions, many of which were immoral and illegal. What cuts much deeper is the shift in morality and values that Israel has undergone since 7 October. 

The country’s ability to recover from this transformation is highly doubtful. No military victory can return Israel to what it was before 7 October.

Over the past year, Israel has united around several assumptions: firstly, that the massacre of 7 October had no context whatever, occurring solely because of what they percieved to be the innate bloodthirstiness and cruelty of Palestinians in Gaza. 

Secondly, all Palestinians bear the burden of guilt for Hamas’s massacre of Israeli civilians. And a third assumption relies on the first two: after this terrible massacre, Israel is allowed to do anything. No one anywhere has the right to try to stop it.

In the name of the right to self-defence, which from the perspective of Israeli values is a right reserved exclusively for Israelis but never for Palestinians, Israel may embark on unbridled campaigns of revenge and punishment for what Hamas did to it. 

In the name of its right to self-defence, Israel is allowed to expel hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in Gaza, perhaps never to return; wreak destruction indiscriminately across the territory; and kill more than 40,000 people, including many women and children. 

In the name of its right to self-defence, Israel is also permitted to eliminate the leaders of Hamas without any regard for “collateral damage” - which has not been “collateral” for a long time now - and to kill hundreds of people during assassination missions that Israel views as legitimate operations. 

Opinion: Israel has lost its humanity as it celebrates its power to kill by Gideon Levy