Palestinians walk on a dirt road lined with rubble from destroyed buildings in Gaza City on October 7, 2024, on the first anniversary of the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas.Credit: AFP/OMAR AL-QATTAA

We’re both from the same generation and the same city, but until a few days ago we had never met. A few days ago he came to my house. It was his last day in Israel, yesterday he left. Before we parted he told me that this time he feels suffocated. He really wanted to leave already. He didn’t understand how it’s still possible to live here. In his contacts during the past year with university heads in Israel, he felt a sharp change in the direction of moral corruption. The wife of his childhood friend, a former Supreme Court justice, told him this week that it’s hard for her to accept his opinions. She has never said that to him before. Her husband was one of the liberal mainstays in the Supreme Court.

He’s convinced that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza – he’s knowledgeable about the subject due to his profession – and he explains why: There’s no definition for ethnic cleansing in international law, but it’s a stage on the way to genocide. When a population is evicted by force, and not to a safe haven, but towards a place where they continuing to kill them, that’s genocide. There’s no longer any doubt that Israel is carrying out ethnic cleansing in the northern Gaza Strip. Israel is declaring that, and its acts are clear evidence of that. In addition, the IDF’s systematic destruction of the entire northern Strip, leaving nothing but ruins in its path, testifies to the intention not to enable a return.

The visitor is convinced that when the International Court of Justice comes to decide whether Israel committed genocide, it will focus on the northern Gaza Strip, as it did at the time in Srebrenica. There “only” about 8,000 Bosnians were slaughtered, most of them men, despite the fact that the city had been declared a “safe area.” The Hague and the entire world determined in perpetuity that it was genocide, and the guilty parties were tried and sentenced.

When you mercilessly bomb a displaced population in its new location, as the Israel Defense Forces is doing, that’s genocide. If it looks like genocide and acts like genocide, it’s genocide. In Israel it’s impossible to say that, not even to liberals. In the prestigious universities in the United States, whose donors are Jews, it’s also hard to say it. Israeli and Jewish ears aren’t willing to hear it, and never mind what reality demonstrates.

My visitor discovered that even his best friends, the Israeli liberals, intellectuals and people of peace and conscience, are unwilling to accept it. The differences of opinion have turned into hostility. That never happened before. There was always a supportive camp here even for radical opinions. There were exhibitions of hatred, sometimes even violence, but on the other side there stood a camp that was smaller but just as determined. That’s over.

The occasional visitor sensed that clearly. It may still be possible to find a few radicals on the margins, but not a radical camp – in this, the most radical situation in the country’s history.

Israel has become mired in its bereavement and its disaster and has become totally blinded. Nobody is paying attention to the far more horrifying disaster of Gaza. A great deal has already been written here about the despicable role of the media in creating this situation, but responsibility for this total “sobering up” lies on the conscience of every Israeli who has come to his senses. It may haunt him yet one of these days.

The guest left. He’ll surely return, but all he has left here is a very few interlocutors, a child could count them.

Gideon Levy