The Blogs: In a Kibbutz there should be much corroboration: Galia Oz produces none & nobody

Galia Oz’s central moral obligation was to be scrupulously cautious and absolutely certain, if she was going to publish a book of grave and sober accusations. Temperate, truthful, and unexaggeratedly held to the strictest highest standard of honesty and truth –even to the most minute degree of it. This is anyone’s responsibility who chooses to publish a gravest attack.

In Galia Oz’s first chapter, which Haaretz published in English, she makes the sober and gravest of accusations that she was sadistically and serially — to the point of the trouble having been taken to having been actually “creatively”–beaten and cursed—and that this was also done to her family–without end–in one horrible incident after another without any end.

Examples from her own her words in her own first chapter that Haaretz published (emphases added)—that it was:

“Ongoing.”
“[A]s far back as I can remember that I knew what awaited me at home.”
“[It wasn’t [… just] passing [… or] here and there, but a routine of sadistic abuse.
[The t]hreat of violence [was] always …
[In our] family […] one horrible incident followed another…
[C]ontinuously hanging over our heads …
[P]unishment had no end …
[B]ruises] “kept constantly under my clothes so nobody would see …
[W]ore long sleeves even in the summer so no one would see [the bruises]….

These make it no wonder her family is astounded in its disbelief that she could ever write a book that said this. This includes her sister Fania and her mother Nili. They are women like Galia is. In this “me-too” world she has absolutely trashed and bashed these two women, and has stunned, shell-shocked, and devastated them.

And these devastated women counter with the deepest hurt and outrage a diametrically opposite story–with hurt and devastation, stupefaction, and outright astoundedness which seems to come from within their deepest bone marrow.

When Haaretz published the first chapter of Galia Oz’s attack-book, why didn’t they treat it as an accusation of violence and undertake — as investigative journalists — the same thorough factual investigation which they would so often ordinarily undertake?

Galia Oz’s accusations include that there — and even that their, the whole family’s — “beatings” were “ongoing,” that the “terror” and “abuse” and “punishment [was] without end” and it “hung over” her whole family and household; again, tellingly calling it– “our” family & household –– which experienced “one horrible incident after another.”

So that she even goes beyond herself also to inflated outward the idea of “my family” more expansively to entail the different and much larger word “our family.”

But then the question becomes: Why is nobody in “her” family anything but astounded?; and why don’t the rest of its members offer anything but a comprehensive and stupefied and astounded diametrical opposite narrative without even one ounce of corroboration?

Galia Oz lived in a kibbutz. In her first chapter that Haaretz publishes, she writes:

“My bed, my clothes – it was all at the children’s house […according to t]he norms of the communal sleeping quarters for kibbutz children at the time.”

In these communal sleeping quarters, where they got dressed and undressed, and used communal bathrooms and showers, can Haaretz find anyone – any friends, age-mates, peers, or adult supervisors from the time who spent their lives there anywhere around Galia Oz?

Nobody? At all? Anywhere?

Is there anyone who can corroborate those “ongoing” and “constant” and “without end” bruises – and bruises that were that were so bad and visible that when in public she always had to hide them under her clothes?

Nobody? At all? Anywhere?

And that she also had to wear long-sleeves throughout the hot summers including in swimming pools with bare limbs and backs?

Instead of a literary reviewer, why didn’t Haaretz use its crack-corps of on-the-road and on-the-ground and detective-oriented investigative journalists to seek even one particle of contemporary corroboration from witnesses – the age-mates and peers and all the adult supervisors around her that time?

Even since the book has come out, would not Galia Oz’s age-mates have wanted badly to corroborate anything at all if they had had even a particle of any corroboration to divulge?

And above all: Wouldn’t Galia Oz have wanted them to, asked them to– pled with them to?

Wouldn’t they have been happy to reach the catharsis of obliging her? With a sense of relief and justice better late than never?

Wouldn’t Haaretz itself try to seek any out these peers and adult supervisors? To find and interview them and take their statements?

I focus on this aspect of Galia Oz’s accusations because these offer the best opportunity for both Galia Oz and the rest of her family – her mother Nili, her brother Daniel, and her sister Fania – to either corroborate or refute her horrific accusations. A Haaretz investigation into witnesses and facts would achieve justice the same way if there were any truth in them.

So that if any were true, there ought to a plenitude of evidence, either produced by Galia Oz or uncovered by Haaretz journalists.

But so far it would seem that there is not a particle—nothing whatsoever.

Galia Oz writes she only saw her parents 3-4 hours a day and actually accuses them of unusually –even for a Kubbutz–comprehensive “neglect of her.”

But this is incoherent: It contradicts her own accusations of constant beatings and abuse and terror –including her whole family and what is what she writes she always “had to await.”

Her published accusations of comprehensive “neglect” profoundly contradicts her grave published accusations of hyperfocused, relentless, ceaseless, focused to the point of creative, beatings and abuse so highly-focused that Galia Oz says about it that “my crime was me myself, and so the punishment was endless. He had a need to be sure I would break.”

This is the oddest and most unlikely form of “neglect” and inattention. That would inattentively give her “creative sadistic bruises” in this highly and hyperfocused and ongoing attempt –again, non-negligently and outright to summon forth creativity–to “break her.”

And meanwhile when John Donne would write that “no man [or woman or child] is an island” and especially true in a cheek-by-jowl and fishbowl of a children’s communally quartered kibbutz with its children’s communal sleeping and under the unforgiving and unflattering bright lights of washrooms and bathrooms and showers.

And by daylight, swimming pools and their locker rooms, gyms and their locker rooms, and then—back to nighttime — after-lights-out a nightly children’s hushed tsunami of – and over the course of years –whispering and hinting and racing-around first- and second-hand stories and gossip and chatter and even dramatically horrified childish nighttime luridness.

How is it any wonder that Galia Oz’s mother Nili and her sister Fania and brother Daniel are so profoundly stunned and stupefied and astounded to inside their very bone marrow?

Haaretz seems to have forgotten its core mission of journalistic investigation to ferret out any corroboration or witnesses or else discover nothing at all except their profound lack and absence anywhere whatever.

And, also seen in only the first chapter Haaretz published, its incoherence in the self-contradictions, and exaggerations which she offers up in grave sober accusations which could occur in an isolated dwelling, but not a kibbutz–a sardine-packed tin of communal proximity and sociality–a cheek-by-jowl child’s fishbowl in which every individual there would be nothing less, herself and himself, than a “human fishbowl”–in the glare of the omnipresent and focused sight-line of every resident of the kibbutz–adult and child alike.

This certainly appears have started with a personality conflict. But then–judged by Galia Oz’s irresponsible published attacks —which grew into an internalized and disturbed narrative –or a combination– of either growing delusionality or a wildness of exaggeration so extreme as –relative to reality to anyone who had been there–to end up entirely unrecognizable.

Postscript

Since this book of grave and– as we have seen– self-contradictory, near-impossible, and incoherent accusations came out, Galia’s sister Fania Oz-Salzberger makes a point–which is devastating–and was published in our own Times of Israel, March 17:

“‘As proof that her sister had no fear of abuse from Oz, she noted that ‘Galia and her husband would leave her own children in the care of their grandparents, as babies, toddlers, and children [for] countless days and nights.‘”

Consider. Consider it well. And again.

So if anything important in her book was even remotely true, then she subjected her very own children countless times to the gravest child-endangerment. But she didn’t. And she didn’t because of the fact that we have seen that, at least as far as anything truly important goes, there had never been anything at all.

Since this book of the gravest accusations came out, Galia’s sister Fania makes a devastating disclosure published in The Times of Israel, March 17:

Galia and her husband would leave her own children in the care of their grandparents, as babies, toddlers, and children.… Countless days and nights.…’”

Fania Oz-Salzberger underscores her point with blistering and skewering irony: That if her book has even the remotest faintest semblance of truth, then Galia Oz plunged her very own young children, serially and sadistically, vulnerably and defenselessly…:

….To the highest risk. and for “[c]ountless days and nights in[to] the home of a psychopath and his collaborator.”

If her book has even the faintest, barest, most vanishingly small amount of truth then Galia Oz, would have been – herself, the accuser – a grievous and serial and “endless” collaborator in the constantly carried out risk-taking and grave endangerment of her own children.

This is the bottom line: If she really believes the horrific fuselage of reckless gruesome accusations against her father and mother and siblings in her book:

Would she have , in real life as a real-life nitty-gritty flesh-and-blood mother – continuously foisted her own children her own small children – and for “countless days and nights” on these evil chronic and “creative” beaters and inflictors of strikingly visible bruises all over her young body – which she says she had to cover with clothes to conceal them and even wear short-sleeve shirts in the summer to hide the bruises presumably all the way up and down her arms when she herself had been for years a little girl growing up there?

Not to mention again, as above, in the cheek-by-jowl packed-like-sardines segregated children’s quarters of the Kibbutz along with its dressing and undressing and bathrooms and locker rooms and showers – and in the hot summer wearing long-sleeves to conceal the grievous bruises but also swimming in the pools and also using their locker rooms?

And with no corroboration, from a single friend or age-mate or peer, now an elderly adult but by then even a single then-observant adult supervisor and chaperone? Of whose corroboration she would desperately want to solicit and even plea for and many of whom would presumably be more than righteously and vengefully satisfied and cathartically relieved see overdue justice done at long last?

The bottom line is that this does not even make the wildest and most recklessly flung-about reputation-destroying sense as devastating harmful and with no shred of corroboration accusations.

She cannot have both ways. She has painted herself into a devastatingly self-incriminatory corner. Her doubtless family-feud and personality-conflict filled hate-book paint herself into the most stringent and starkest of corners. Because either it is a book replete with complete hate, delusion, and untruth. Or: She has been a collaborator – and a constant and grave and grievous one in countless cases of it — in knowingly generating a monstrously high risk of the abuse of her own children.

So that either (1) none of it ever happened at all and then is either chock-full of the wildest and most recklessly intense and extreme and hateful exaggeratedness — or else her book’s charges contain the most recklessly intense and extreme pan-hallucinatory delusionality — or else she recklessly and intensely and sadistically – and serially and for countless times – and further, repeated them even to the point of “punishment without end” – or else:

Galia Oz for years chronically subjected her own children to the crime of the gravest risk of most grievous and continuous child-endangerment to which she was all the time a prime “collaborator.”

I would prefer to believe that her book is replete with untruths brutally damaging to other people what has grown out of personality conflict and resulting feud and further resulting wildest of hate-based exaggerations or filled with unceasing delusionality– or both. I would prefer to believe this–rather than that Galia Oz grew as a collaborator in never-ending subjection her own children countless times to the high risk of grievous child abuse by sending them over and over right straight back into her Parents’ same hell-hole that she says she had herself countless times agonized through as a child, as the family attempted –“creatively” — to –“break” her. I would like to think nothing—of importance–in the book actually happened.

Because it is either this–or that Galia Oz, in accordance with the massively relentless accusations in her book of a hellhole, also unleashed her very own children, knowingly and countless times, to the same grave risks of the horrendous beatings and bruises she says that she chronically suffered and agonized through, in “creative efforts to break her” and as a “punishment without end”–and “terror” and punishment to her whole family as well.

Again, even less likely could this have ever happened because of the seeming impossibility of hiding terrible bruises during bedtimes and in showers and locker rooms of the children’s quarters, and with Galia Oz’s inability to summon up a single corroborator– whether any fellow child at the time or any now-elderly adult–, and while at the same time her siblings and very own mother are strenuous counter-witnesses who obviously strenuously and horrifiedly are certain that her claims have grown systemically delusional or exaggeratedly unrecognizable–or toxic combination.

The only alternative I refuse to accept is that–on the same level as put in her own book— she herself knowingly exposed her own children by constantly surrendering them to parents who could have been remotely as described in her book–these hallucinatory extravagances of risks of beatings, bad bruises and other monstrous child abuse in which Galia Oz would have in some sense consciously collaborated. I don’t believe a word of it–and because I don’t believe she was a collaborator ; or the profound implausibility of all this remaining under wraps in a Kibbutz and its children’s sleeping quarters and gyms and showers and locker rooms ; along with Galia Oz’s failure to produce a single witness or corroborator or even one iota of corroboration from a single contemporary peer, age-mate or friend–or adult supervisor — ; and in this context as then a mother her unconditional entrusting of her own children to being completely by themselves alone–and for countless days and nights–with her parents are altogether–aside from some ordinary personality conflict that grew into a delusional feud–why I cannot bring myself to believe that there could be even one single– un-wildly-exaggerated non-feud- or non-personality-conflict-generated or non-delusory word– one un-hate-driven or non-colossally-over-embellished word–one word that is of surprising, major, extraordinary and overriding importance–in this book for even one moment.