We Don’t Value Palestinian Lives
When I write “we,” I don’t mean all Israelis. Some Israelis care deeply about Palestinian lives, and some even dedicate their livelihoods and even lives for that cause. Many are heroes. I have had the privilege to meet some of these incredible souls myself, such as those at Roots-Shorashim-Judhur. But their actions have very little resonance in the mainstream Israeli discourse, in our media, in our consciousness. I’m not even talking about the policies of the Israeli government or the actions of the IDF—there is much to be said on those, but here I am focusing on something different. I am trying to draw attention to the things we demand as media consumers and what we discuss in our public debates.
If we valued Palestinian lives, why do so few of us know the name of a single Palestinian, apart from terrorists or the Chairman of the Palestinian Authority? In Hebrew, the slang for not caring about something is אני לא סופר אותו, “I don’t count him.” But when it comes to Palestinian lives, counting is all most of us really do. Reports will come: 100 Palestinians killed, 50 killed, 75 killed. But names, faces, stories? Rarely. Israeli media and social media is full, and rightly so, of the names and stories of Israeli victims and hostages, because we care about them. The reverse is true of Palestinians. There’s a quote, possibly apocryphal, widely attributed to Joseph Stalin: A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. At best, we know the statistics. We rarely talk about the tragedies.
Perhaps no name embodies this as profoundly as Hind Rajab. Rajab was a five-year-old Gazan girl, killed by a hail of bullets just three months after the start of the Gaza war, along with six family members and two paramedics who rushed to rescue her. While the IDF spokesperson initially claimed that its forces could not have caused these deaths, a Washington Post investigation found significant contradictions in the IDF’s version, yet there was no significant public demand for a thorough investigation. Rajab’s is one of the most recognizable names of Palestinian victims of the war, yet within Israel the name comes up almost exclusively in the context of the Hind Rajab Foundation, which works to prosecute Israelis it accuses of war crimes. Thus, in the Israeli context the name is devoid of its human value, indeed in a literal sense its face, and instead represents a problem of public relations and international complications. The title of the recent movie about the incident— “The Voice of Hind Rajab”– represents exactly what few Israelis will have heard: the humanizing recording of the girl just before she was killed.
If we valued Palestinian lives, would we not be outraged at some of our most popular singers, including Kobi Peretz and Eyal Golan, calling to “erase Gaza” and “not leave a single person there,” or singing “May your village burn down”? Why is it that most of us have heard of (and rightly denounced) the singer who sang “Death to the IDF” at Glastonbury, yet crowds chanting “Death to the Arabs!” on Jerusalem Day are a matter of course?
If we valued Palestinian lives, would it not be a major news story that a Brigadier General, Yehuda Vach, blew up a hospital in Gaza without authorization or military necessity, alongside a string of other offenses and reportedly saying that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza—and after all this, continues to operate in the Gaza Strip? I listen to both Israeli and American news sources intensively and the first I heard of this was an offhand comment on a podcast by the INSS, months after an investigation had begun.
If we valued Palestinian lives, would we not hold to account politicians who called for killing all adult men in Gaza, or who said that perhaps the moral thing to do would be to starve to death all 2 million people in Gaza? Why did a journalist get a prestigious job offer at a mainstream news outlet after calling for “Many more rivers of Gazans’ blood” and writing “Every woman is a monster. Every youth wants to be a martyr. Every baby will grow up to be a terrorist. Erase, kill, destroy, exterminate”?
The sad fact is that Palestinian lives are rarely valued in our mainstream discourse. When incidents like the above are reported, they are almost invariably discussed in mainstream media as problems of public relations or international standing, to the extent they are discussed at all. Israeli parties on the so-called “Center-Left” rarely talk about Palestinians as human beings with any value. Now that Yair Golan, who said of Gazans “as far as I’m concerned you can all starve to death” if the hostages weren’t released, has taken over the Labor and Meretz parties, the Knesset has perhaps fewer voices than ever who value Palestinian human rights. Discussion of Palestinian human rights or Palestinian victims is immediately coded as left-wing, even “radical left-wing,” and tends to exist only on the margins of publications like Haaretz and Times of Israel. In fact, many of the above quotes were hard to find because they were barely reported on in Israeli news sources.
We don’t value Palestinian lives, not in our mainstream public discourse. The implications are many and terrible. This is not inevitable: We can, and we must, change course. But recognizing the problem is the essential first step.
