The Sound of Silence: A Traumatized Nation, Gaza and the Collapse of Conscience

Doctors in Gaza are fainting due to hunger while trying to save their starving patients (CNN).

In recent months, I have found myself drawn back repeatedly to a disturbing parallel. With very few exceptions, Israeli society today bears a chilling resemblance to what we once called the “silent Germans”—those who, whether through fear, indifference, or nationalist fervor, looked away while their country committed atrocities. The analogy is not perfect, but it is morally instructive. It forces us to ask: What happens to a nation when its people, traumatized and misled, can no longer recognize the suffering of others—or worse, no longer care?

October 7, 2023, was a national trauma for Israel. The horrific Hamas attack shattered any illusion of security and reopened deep psychological wounds. The fear, rage, and grief that followed were real and profound. But trauma, while human, can also become a moral blinder. Rather than prompting a more profound reckoning with the cycles of violence that led to such horror, it has instead hardened public opinion and narrowed the nation’s moral imagination.

Polls consistently show overwhelming support among Jewish Israelis for the war in Gaza. According to a March 2025 survey by Penn State University published in Haaretz, a staggering 82 percent of Jewish Israelis support the forced expulsion of Gaza’s population, while nearly half endorse military action modeled on biblical conquest—namely, the total annihilation of enemy cities. Such figures are not a sign of moral clarity; they are the hallmark of groupthink. Beneath this consensus lies a more profound, more troubling sentiment: the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians. For decades, Palestinians have been rendered invisible in Israeli political discourse and public life—their voices erased, their grief discounted. But the current war has amplified this indifference to an alarming degree.

Compounding this moral erosion is the near-total absence of Gaza’s reality in Israeli media. Images of skeletal children, bombed hospitals, and mass graves are mostly absent from television screens and newspapers. The state has enacted laws to restrict foreign media coverage and censor dissenting voices, while mainstream outlets have internalized mainly the rules of self-censorship. In a society with a free press, the people are not being informed—they are being insulated. Most Israelis are not exposed to what the international media is showing: the unfolding humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, including widespread famine. That mass starvation, especially among children, is of little concern to most of Israeli society, not because it is hidden entirely, but because it does not register morally. The dominant narrative blames Hamas for stealing food, yet this claim has been thoroughly debunked, including by Israeli military sources cited recently in The New York Times. Still, most Israelis continue to hold this belief.

This denial is reinforced by a widespread conviction that growing global condemnation of Israeli actions is driven not by the reality in Gaza, but by antisemitism. Instead of self-reflection, many Israelis see themselves as the eternal victim—besieged, misunderstood, and unjustly maligned. This worldview leaves little room for empathy or accountability. As the world recoils from images of mass suffering, Israeli society insulates itself with grievance.

What unfolds is a form of collective moral apathy. The playwright Eugène Ionesco, in his play Rhinocéros, captured this terrifying dynamic: a society where people gradually turn into beasts—rhinoceroses—losing their capacity for reason, dissent, and compassion. Israeli society, consumed by trauma and bound by conformity, increasingly resembles a herd of rhinoceroses. The transformation is not sudden or monstrous, but banal and cumulative. People do not wake up one morning dehumanized; they drift into it, one moral compromise at a time.

This insulation enables denial. A society that does not see the dying cannot mourn the dead. And a society that cannot mourn becomes incapable of empathy. There are, of course, voices of dissent: Haaretz, B’Tselem, Breaking the Silence, individual journalists, and former officials who still dare to speak. But they are marginalized, vilified, and often branded as traitors.

The moral implications of this silence are profound. What we are witnessing is not just a military campaign but a collapse of ethical responsibility. The comparison to the “silent Germans” is not made lightly. Those citizens of the Third Reich were not all ideological Nazis. Many were ordinary people who normalized the abnormal, who chose not to look, who clung to myths of victimhood and righteousness while atrocities unfolded around them. Today, too many Israelis are doing the same.

There is no question that Hamas bears responsibility for heinous crimes. However, the response to those crimes must still be judged by the standards of international law and basic human decency. To justify mass starvation and wholesale killing in Gaza as necessary or collateral is to abandon the very values that Israel claims to uphold.

The more profound tragedy is this: by silencing itself, Israeli society is not protecting its soul but abandoning it. A nation that cannot see the humanity of those it occupies cannot remain morally whole. Peace, reconciliation, and justice require more than security operations or ceasefires. They require empathy. They require vision. And above all, they need the courage to look in the mirror.

A nation that once aspired to be a “light unto the nations” is now committing crimes against humanity—and becoming a global pariah.

If there is to be a future for both peoples, it must begin with the restoration of that moral compass—before it is lost entirely.