Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and now ex-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, earlier this year.Credit: Ariel Hermony / Defense Ministry

All Israelis who are insulted, shocked or in turmoil over the issuing of arrest warrants against Prime Minister Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Gallant are disqualified from testifying.

All Israelis who besmirch the International Criminal Court in The Hague are disqualified from giving testimony. All the Israelis who cry “antisemitism” are banned from testifying. In fact, almost all Israelis are precluded from bearing witness.

After all, what did they see of Gaza over the last year? What clue do they have of what is being done there in their name? How much destruction have they been exposed to and how many shattered bodies of children have they seen? How many times have they seen the leveled hospitals and the demolished schools that became shelters, only to be bombed in their turn?

Did they see the face of a hungry child, the transfer convoys, the wheelchairs and amputees plodding across the sand? What notion do they have of the crimes taking place there?

One cannot adopt a shocked pose without seeing what Israel has done to Gaza. Israelis have seen nothing and didn’t want to. That’s why they have no right to pass judgment on the arrest warrants. In its most pathetic hour ever, the Israeli media helped them not to see a thing, not to know or feel, which is why Israelis cannot give testimony. What they know of Gaza is akin to what they knew about Rwanda at the time, which is why they cannot pass any moral judgment.

After so many years of brainwashing and dehumanization of the Palestinians, one cannot rely on the judiciousness of Israelis. This should be left to the judges in The Hague, who know more than Israelis do what is permitted and what is forbidden, even for Israel, even for Jews after the Holocaust, even for Israelis after October 7. People who doubt the justice of the court and call for its undermining are like the people trying to perpetrate a judicial coup in Israel while trying to subvert its judicial system.

The judge is not a SOB. Neither is the prosecutor. They are merely fulfilling their roles. When Israel unanimously condemns the court’s ruling, across the board, from Itamar Ben-Gvir to Yair Golan, including opposition leader Yair Lapid, it proves yet again how brainwashed Israelis are and how disqualified from testifying.

Palestinians search for casualties at the site of an Israeli strike on a house in Gaza City November 22, 2024.Credit: Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters

The only ones who know what happened in Gaza are the soldiers. They are definitely disqualified. Most of them are proud of what they did, as witnessed in the revolting video clips they post. The others are convinced that there was no choice but to embark on this barbaric punitive campaign. They witness the ethnic cleansing and live in peace with it, convinced that the destruction is heaven-ordained, that the Palestinians are to blame, that all of Gaza is October 7.

Read the words of a reservist, published in Haaretz on Nov. 22: “The only ones getting excited over anything here are the animals,” he writes. Almost no soldier refused to obey any order. Not the pilots who bombed mercilessly and indiscriminately, not the artillery forces, not the infantry or the tank units. They quickly became inured to what they were doing, to what they saw, and then normalized and justified it. They surely can’t be witnesses serving the cause of justice.

The prime minister and former defense minister are being tried by the world, because the world saw and could not hold its silence. If it had, the court in The Hague would have been derelict in its duty. What was it supposed to do in view of such a scope of ethnic cleansing, starvation and mass killing of children? Not issue arrest warrants? The facts cry out from the blood-stained soil of the ruined Gaza Strip, and someone must be held to account. The prime minister and former defense minister are a good start.

These things are hard for Israelis to digest, since they live in a specious reality. This was well-defined by Prof. Rashid Khalidi in an interview he gave to Haaretz’s Hebrew-language weekend supplement last Friday, which every Israeli must read. “For God’s sake, do you think we can’t read Hebrew?” asked one who knows the mendacious Israeli mentality better than most Israelis do. And anyone who lives in a mendacious reality is disqualified from giving testimony. The heart wells with shame and sadness. Not over the arrest warrants, but over what we have done.

Gideon Levy