How We Became a Society Indifferent to Death
Under Israeli criminal law, murder is defined as committing an act that causes another person’s death while showing indifference to the possibility that the act will cause such death. Indifference denotes a lack of concern for the possible consequences of one’s actions. This definition was adopted by the Knesset in 2019, when it amended the Penal Code. The amendment, passed with broad cross-party support, extended the label “murderer” beyond those who acted with clear intent to kill to include those whose conduct was marked by culpable indifference.
By that standard, members of the Israeli government, and above all the prime minister, could be accused of murder or, at the very least, attempted murder of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza. The government’s decision to continue the war despite explicit warnings from senior security officials that prolonged fighting posed a serious risk to the hostages’ lives was not mere neglect; it was a conscious choice that knowingly endangered them. As we enter the new Hebrew year, we must ask how our society shifted from cherishing life and solidarity to normalizing indifference to the deaths of others. Three interlocking processes brought us to this point.
First, the centers of power in Israel have been captured by religious zealots who now speak most loudly and authoritatively for Judaism. Politicians such as Bezalel Smotrich, Orit Struk, and Itamar Ben-Gvir have become the public face of a version of Judaism that is often violent, callous, and deaf to human suffering. This is religious fanaticism: it erases compassion and charity – the moral pillars of any faith – and cynically uses religion to justify aggression. Of course, other voices within religious Zionism try to remind us that Judaism is also, and perhaps above all, about the sanctity of life. But those voices are few and systematically silenced.
Second, the rise of this hardline, brutal interpretation of Judaism has fueled a wider social phenomenon: a growing indifference among many Israelis to the suffering of innocent Palestinians dying in large numbers in Gaza. The horrors of October 7, 2023, committed by Hamas and an incited, violent mob, provoked a searing hatred toward all Palestinians that was amplified by government encouragement. In that climate, many people lost the ability to distinguish between helpless infants and militants. That hatred conveniently serves the narrative of perpetual despair and endless war that Prime Minister Netanyahu has cultivated. It is also a crucial step in the broader brutalization of the public sphere: first you fill the public with blind rage against “the other,” and then it becomes all too easy to harden hearts against the unbearable suffering of Israelis themselves – those slowly dying in captivity in Gaza.
Finally, Israel’s present degradation also stems from a long-standing convergence of interests between Netanyahu and the rise of Hamas – an alignment that dates back to the 1990s after the Oslo Accords. Public memory is short, so few recall that one of the earliest post-Oslo massacres, when dozens were murdered, was carried out by a Jewish religious zealot, Baruch Goldstein, in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. At the same time, Islamist hardliners like Hamas joined efforts to sabotage Oslo, and suicide bombings soon followed. This was Netanyahu’s moment. Until then a relatively obscure figure, he surged from one attack site to another, presenting himself as an expert on terrorism while Hamas’s violence provided the stage.
From that point on, Netanyahu’s political trajectory became intertwined with Hamas’s empowerment. His political strength depended on blocking reconciliation with the Palestinians, and Hamas served as a convenient counterweight to more moderate Palestinian actors represented by the Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu understood that a stronger Hamas would weaken the Authority, and that was precisely Hamas’s aim: it has always sought the Authority’s collapse because of its willingness to pursue territorial compromises with Israel. For religious zealots on both sides, the vision is identical: a single state from river to sea, the annihilation of the enemy, the glorification of death over life, and the rejection of any possibility for compromise or reconciliation that might allow the two peoples to share the land and live together.
Israel now stands on the verge of losing the moral justification for its existence. It can be rescued and set back on a path of hope only if we remember what it truly means to be Jewish.
