IF THERE IS ONE institution which failed most catastrophically one gruesome year ago, it is Unit 2800: the IDF’s secretive intelligence corps. Months before October 7, detailed assessments of Hamas planning were circulating the arteries of the spy system; no one paid any notice.
But back in the 1950s, one of the unit’s early officers was Saul Friedländer. He packed it in pretty quickly, later becoming one of the world’s most eminent scholars of the Holocaust. He helped, in other words, to build the history which Israel so callously abuses to cover over its crimes. Friedländer left Israel in part because he could not tolerate the use of the Shoah “as a pretext for harsh anti-Palestinian measures.” In Diary of a Crisis, his newly-published journal of the spanning the anti-government protests and the months after October 7, Friedländer identifies “the Palestinian issue” as the cause of the nation’s “overall conundrum…our political sickness, our long-term social malaise.” His ultimate fear, now: that “the vibrant country I lived and worked in for decades is dead; that something else, something unacceptable, has taken its place.”
For the New Republic, I’ve tried to reflect on the horror, to the degree that the horror allows:
If that day is to have any meaning, if the memory of the dead is to be used for a higher purpose than as license for more murder, it must be in service of a moral lesson: No state can live sanely in a condition of permanent siege. With that lesson, Israel’s leaders would have put the planes back in their hangars, reversed the tanks back to their depots, switched off the algorithm that allows them to coolly and clinically slaughter the blameless by the dozen, and on October 8 immediately restarted negotiations for a just peace.
Don’t waste time with counterfactuals, we historians are told. Counterfactuals are just fantasies, really, wishful dreams, and they become more deceitful the further they drift from reality. But to mourn the present and wish for something different is not a counterfactual. It is a warning of the kind that has been sounded at every critical juncture of the last eight decades and has always been ignored by those who have the power to behave differently.
Read the full article here: Israel Is Trapped by Its Own War Machine