Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine) 28.01.2026
During the 1948 war, many soldiers and civilians looted Palestinian property. There is no media coverage of this, even though Ben-Gurion said, “It’s a nation of thieves.” Not that Ben-Gurion was innocent of the theft, but he justified himself by plundering an entire nation for the benefit of the treasury of the Zionist state. In 1967, I was a combat medic, and after Israel occupied East Jerusalem, I was given a job guarding Palestinian property against looting by Israelis. I was the only one who got such a job. I saw an entire family carrying a lot of property and shouted at them to stop. Without intending to do so, my Uzi spewed a bundle in the air. They lay flat on the floor, “Have mercy on us,” they begged. I took them to the military police headquarters. I told them to wait in the yard, and went into the building, and what do I see? The officers and soldiers are packing looted property for themselves. I went out to the family and told them to get out of here. The robbery continued in the war of extermination in Gaza. This is what Assaf Bondi and Adam Raz write about in the Haaretz newspaper. Assaf is a sociologist and a historian.
“On the morning of October 8, 2023, five young people set off. Not to rescue and to help – to plunder. They stole wallets and jewelry from the victims of the massacre at the Nova party, whose blood had not yet dried. The victims were Jews, and the looters were caught and convicted. The judge who sentenced them ruled that they were “deeply moral fractures” and “theft of memory” and “trampling over the sanctity of death” and sent them to about three years in prison. Many Israelis see their sentences as evidence of the law enforcement system’s functioning.
But in the two years and three months that have passed since then, the story of the five looters has become the story of many others who did not make headlines: thousands of soldiers who looted homes, shops, warehouses and more in the Gaza Strip, and returned home with wristwatches, cash, jewelry, carpets and kitchen utensils, without anyone stopping them. Some of them sold the loot on social media for all to see, burned property they did not want, and destroyed homes after emptying them of property. Looting has become such a widespread and normalized phenomenon that in the Israeli media, soldiers presented the loot and joked about the “Gaza style,” without the interviewers raising basic questions: where did the property come from, why was it taken, and why it was it allowed.
Yesh Din’s data on looting until April 2025 shows that out of the thousands of soldiers documented looting in Gaza – some of whom documented themselves – only one was prosecuted: a soldier who stole 6,000 shekels from the home of a Gaza family, and was caught because after depositing the money, it was discovered that most of it was counterfeit. It can be assumed that the figures have not changed substantially in the months since then, based on the assumption that even in the years before the war in Gaza, the rate of indictments filed in complaints of offenses against Palestinians and their property was less than 1 percent.
In her article “The Five Despicables” last week, Orly Vilnai rightly denounced the Nova looters. It also points out, rightly, that if they had been Arabs, their punishment would have been immeasurably heavy. But the article commits a sin typical of Israeli discourse: it sees one plunder and ignores another, many times greater than it. The one that doesn’t make it to court or to the headlines, even though there’s no attempt to hide it. Why doesn’t the looting in Gaza reach the courts? The answer lies not in systemic failure or a lack of resources, but in a deeper logic: soldiers are not prosecuted for crimes committed during operational activity, no matter how horrific the acts may be. On the few occasions when they were prosecuted because there was no choice, as in the case of Elor Azaria, who was filmed shooting a Palestinian to death, they managed to go with the people and feel without punishment.
Many criminal acts of combatants were exposed during the war. The ignorance and turning a blind eye in Israel indicate a clear and clear message from the government toward the perpetrators and Israeli society: Combatants have complete immunity. Warriors are beyond the realm of judgment, above the realm of basic social morality and the norms, rules, and laws that flow from them. Failure to enforce is not a failure; it is policy.
When looting becomes a mass phenomenon, when “everyone takes, and the commanders know,” a community of criminals is created. Not in the narrow criminal sense, but in the social sense: a network of people who are all involved, everyone is a partner. The state allows soldiers to commit acts prohibited by law and morality – looting, destruction, killing – and allows them to enjoy the fruits of their crime. In this way, the masses of soldiers become partners in criminal policy but are also exposed to the risk if the system decides to enforce it. It is a mafia tactic that creates loyalty through shared guilt.
The more people involved in crime, the more impossible enforcement becomes – not only technically, but mainly socially. If the judicial system prosecutes all those who committed offenses in Gaza, it will discover that they are not rotten apples in “the most moral army in the world”; It will expose the involvement of soldiers and officers along the entire military avenue. It will quickly become clear that there is a public that knowingly bought stolen property, watched videos, shared the information, and laughed. The looting of Gaza has become a reality show broadcast on TikTok and Instagram for masses of Israelis who are bitter with pleasure, convinced that they are right, that “there are no uninvolved people in Gaza.” The fighters do not steal from Palestinian civilians, but only loot the loot left by the cruel enemy. Every property is no-man’s-land, every house is worthy of destruction, and every object can be taken.
This is not a new issue. The total looting of Palestinian property in 1948, the one perpetrated by the state as well as by individuals, also operated according to a similar logic. What began as a “spontaneous” phenomenon of soldiers and civilians taking property from abandoned homes quickly turned into a policy that received social legitimacy in cunning ways. The looting of Palestinian cities and villages created a large-scale community of Jewish looters, in which many had an interest in preventing the return of property owners to their homes, which crystallized into an official national policy. What happened in 1948 was repeated in Gaza, only this time it was documented and broadcast in real time.
The “theft of memory” in which the Nuba looters were accused is relevant only to Israeli victims. When the moral crisis is revealed, a trial is held, the criminals are punished, and articles are written against the convicted. But when the victims are Palestinians, the crime is silenced and, in many cases, even justified. The five looters from Nova deserve condemnation – but it is easy for Israelis to condemn them. Dealing with the deep moral crisis in Israeli society requires saying openly that the crisis is not the domain of five criminals. It is a fragment of an entire system, which has turned crime into the norm, and the norm into silence”.[i]
Down with the Zionist state!
For Palestine, red and free from the river to the sea!
Endnotes:
[i] https://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/2026-01-27/ty-article-opinion/.premium/0000019b-ff82-d39f-a5bf-ffa65d200000