Jen Gerson: The killing bowl
In her second piece from Israel, Jen Gerson on how journalists cover the war, on power and agency, and the most heartbreaking thing she saw near the frontlines.
"Are you going into Gaza?"
This is the question that I have most often heard from friends and family when I told them I was going to Israel. It was also an issue I dwelled on myself. Surely, an attempt to document the situation from an Israeli perspective obligates me to likewise consider the Palestinian perspective.
My answer: Of course I'm not going into Gaza. And, yes, I do feel conflicted about that choice. Politics was not the deciding factor for that decision. Rather, my own sense of fairness is at odds with my weak instinct for self preservation.
In addition to the fact that Gaza is still being shelled on a daily basis, I simply do not have the contacts on the ground to be confident that I can obtain safe passage in — and, more importantly, out — of the territory. Gaza is proving to be a particularly dangerous zone for journalists. Very few western media outlets, including those with vastly more resources and conflict experience, have reporters permanently stationed on the ground there.
I am a 40-year-old woman with a Substack and two young children. There are hard limits on the risks I can afford to take at present. Whether or not that disqualifies my observations in Israel is for the reader to decide.
In my first piece from Israel, I described some of what I saw — though I saved something for this second piece, where I’ll try and take a broader view of the conflict. I talked about the burned kibbutizm, where flags mark where people were murdered and abducted. I talked about how Israel had no exit strategy. Today, I want to talk about how this could end — or, more to the point, why I’m not sure it can. Hamas didn’t just kill Israelis. It may have killed the last real chance for an end to the fighting.
I share most of humanity's deep empathy and sorrow for the ordinary people, and especially children, trapped and killed in the Gaza Strip. I see the pictures, too. And as a mother, I feel the same things that everybody else feels. No child should be raised in conditions of privation and war. A baby born in Gaza should have access to the same opportunities as a child born within walking distance of the across the armistice line in Sderot. And the fact that the current state of the Gaza Strip has been permitted to continue in this state is a mark on Hamas, on Israel, and on the international community at large. It is an extraordinary failure.
This is a small parcel of land, now home to two million people, that has been passed around like an afterthought between Egypt and Israel after successive wars and mandates. The very legitimate political and economic grievances of the Palestinians have transformed the territory into a warm petri dish for terrorist ideology and indoctrination, leading at various points in history to sanction, neglect, occupation, and ultimately, blockade by both Egypt and Israel.
For almost 20 years, the strip has been a terrorist fiefdom, in which ordinary people have been made subject to Islamist warlords whose stated goals are to retake control of Israel at the expense of all the Jews living in it. These rulers, legitimized as freedom fighters in some quarters, have demonstrated no hesitation to sacrifice their own people to achieve those ends.
One of the most telling confessions to emerge after Oct. 7 came in a television interview with senior Hamas official Mousa Abu Marzouk, in which he admitted that the hundreds of kilometers of tunnels built under Gaza were intended for Hamas.
When asked why the group had not built a single bomb shelter for its civilian population, Marzouk said: "Everybody knows that 75 per cent of the people in the Gaza Strip are refugees, and it is the responsibility of the United Nations to protect them."
Hamas redirected untold sums of aid money to build sophisticated tunnel networks for its fighters, yet didn't build a single bomb shelter to protect the civilian population it knew it would be putting in harm's way after Oct. 7.
Meanwhile, the Internet is now rife with conspiracy theories and denial about what happened on Oct. 7: that the death tolls were inflated; mass rape was a hoax; that the IDF did all the killing under the Hannibal Directive; that Hamas are freedom fighters who came over the wall bearing AK-47s to hold picnics with Jewish civilians.
Reading this stuff — which often amounts to justification for both the tactics and the aims of Oct. 7 — I am constantly struck by this conflation of power and agency. The Palestinians, by any measure, have less power than Israelis — and the Israelis have a consummately greater degree of responsibility, not only to show restraint in war, but also to accept a duty for repairing the damage done as a result of war.
The Gaza Health Authority, which is controlled by Hamas, estimates more than 40,000 people have been killed by Israel in the past year. Roughly 70 per cent of Gaza is believed to have been destroyed in successive artillery and air strikes and during Israel’s ground campaign.
Many legitimate critics have criticized Israel for the counterattack, alleging that the ongoing bombing in Gaza is disproportionate and indiscriminate. A UN Commission has accused Israel of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Further, there are absolutely elements within Israeli society and political culture that are racist or expansionist.
I have no desire to whitewash any of this, nor to give it a pass.
But I don't conflate a lack of power with a lack of agency. The Palestinians may lack relative power, but Hamas does not lack agency. Oct. 7 was a choice. It was a strategic military decision made in full knowledge the most likely response. And it was a choice that made peaceful coexistence effectively impossible. That was its purpose.
Of all the places we toured in Israel, the place that hit me the most was the Nova Music Festival site, where 364 people who had gathered to dance to trance music and celebrate "friends, love and infinite freedom" were gunned down. Others were assaulted, raped, and taken hostage.
This site, too, has also become a place of pilgrimage. It is located on public land that is home to tree planting campaigns. A dry and arid section of the Negev desert, this land has been transformed and shaded by eucalyptus trees planted in tidy rows from powder dirt.
That tree is significant. One of the few hardy enough to survive the climate, the eucalyptus was transported from Australia, and was one of species used by early Israeli settlers to transform swamp into arable and livable land. Like the kibbutz, the eucalyptus was long regarded as one of the symbols of Israel — until it was more recently classified, controversially, as an invasive species.
I asked Joe Varner, a defence expert who also attended the tour, what he saw that I did not.
The trees were perfectly spaced, creating perfect lines of sight. The terrain was nearly flat; the lack of scrub and brush had left the ravers no place to hide or run as Hamas gunned them down in what Varner described as "killing bowl."
Each of the dead is now remembered with another tree newly planted in the desert, and with a placard bearing his or her name. Each one explaining who their child was, and what they loved.
These were exactly the sort of kids you'd expect to come to a trance party in the Negev. They were beautiful. Their shrines were decorated from quotes from their lives like: "Don't Hate," and "love a lot." These were Israel's most gentle children, the ones most likely to have advocated "infinite freedom" be extended to those on the other side of Gaza's border.
And I think any chance of that real and lasting peace in this generation died with them.
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It appears to me that you hit the emotional wall, when writing this piece, and just stopped. And that that "period" at the end, is not just an end point to the sentence, but a symbol of sadness and perhaps despair. But is hard not to feel that way; so I thank you for writing this piece nonetheless.
Jen, I would add just one phrase to the sentence "ordinary people have been made subject to Islamist warlords whose stated goals are to retake control of Israel at the expense of all the Jews living in it" to read "at the expense of all Jews living in Israel and all Palestinians living in the strip." Hamas cares not one whit for them.