Yossi Schwartz ISL (RCIT section in Israel/Occupied Palestine) 23.08.2025
I have known Amira Hess and her father, Abraham Hess, for many years. The honesty of a family of Holocaust survivors who refuse to take part in the Palestinian Holocaust is noteworthy, and her articles in the Haaretz newspaper, which she once wrote extensively, are also notable. Today, she wrote an article in Haaretz newspaper from the perspective of Gazans, some of whom she knows personally. Despite the truth of her article, she unfortunately belongs to the desperate liberals, since she remains a prisoner of the narrative that justifies the existence of the Zionist monster, and she is unable to see beyond that.
She wrote:
“My friends and colleagues in Gaza will probably be ordered very soon to “evacuate” from their makeshift residences and “absorb” in the southern Gaza Strip, just as my parents “evacuated and were absorbed”: my mother in Bergen-Belsen, my father in the ghetto in Transnistria. The army’s shallow language of lies pollutes every report and discussion. This is not the problem of my exhausted and hungry friends and colleagues, but of us, the Israelis. As well as the cry of the willingly blind and the heartless that “there is no comparison.”
The Minister of War, Yisrael Katz, has promised and is keeping his promise: The task of moving and transporting, concentrating and crowding and shrinking, compressing and squeezing and crushing hundreds of thousands more people in a tiny piece of land in the southern Gaza Strip will be carried out despite all the protests, condemnations and parallels. No one is saving the Palestinians, the abductees and us from our disgusting selves. I write, and I still hope for a miracle. For example, Europe and the Arab countries will come to their senses and use the real levers they have.
The bombing of our pilots and the bombing of our armored children will ensure that Gaza City will be emptied of its inhabitants and crushed by the jaws of the bulldozers who are cheerful and trust in God.
Even those who demonstrate with their parents and families of the abductees against the government do not refuse the conscription orders and orders. As soon as the head of the Southern Command, Yaniv Asor, declares the area of Gaza City “criminalized” — that is, without civilians — any soldier will be authorized to shoot at anything that moves. Basha is also 78 years old and her 12-year-old grandson. I can already hear those who refuse to be shocked say: It’s their fault. We gave them time to move south.
The Kaplan camp is left with only one lever to thwart the decisive plans of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich, which are combined with a Putinist coup: a mass refusal to participate in the extermination and expulsion operations. But they don’t use it. For them, the flag is never black enough.
My limited imagination does not allow me to see my friends and their families, emaciated and sick and grieving, expelled for at least the eighth time, rocking into the new unknown, in a smaller, cramped space than its predecessors. Cart? 20 kilometers on foot? In an airless run, with the shells tailing them and emitting blackening smoke and dust? My terrified imagination refuses to see them stay in half-houses, despite Avichai Edrei’s nightmare advice, and wish that death in the bombing would be quick.
Their apartments in and outside the refugee camps, built and purchased with years of salaries, became walls of smoke and falling. Of the few things that my friends and I have managed to acquire or improvise since the last expulsion – mattresses, pots and spoons, boards, blankets, and perhaps a solar panel – what will they have to leave behind? They certainly won’t give up the sack of flour they bought for 1,000 shekels, not the jerrycan filled with 20 liters of semi-purified water and the diapers for the 90-year-old mother. My meager imagination does not perceive where, among all the tents that kiss each other, they will set up their tent. In it they will be drenched in sweat until winter comes, and in it they will be wet, to the breast of their trembling bones, the rainwater and the rising sea. between one shell and another. And the buzzing birds above are buzzing day and night.
Horror. Longing. Hunger. Thirst. Itching of the skin. Pain. Fury. Fatigue. The crying of a sick child. The letters are the same, but in Gaza they are loaded with content, weight, and volume that are beyond our absorption. The words fell off the pages of my dictionary. Except for the values “helplessness”, “paralysis” and “against our will”, “accomplices in crime”.