As Israel prepares to mark three years since the October 7 attacks and with less than a month to go to parliamentary elections, one topic is dominating the electoral agenda. Media reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was warned by the United Arab Emirates before the attacks have put his alleged responsibility back in the spotlight. Listening to the accusatory choir, one might think that Israeli society finally is acknowledging the real meaning of October 7.
Yet the opposite is true. Instead of giving a platform to a reckoning, the elections function to scapegoat Netanyahu for his alleged role in facilitating Hamas’s attack while absolving Israeli society and the Zionist movement of its collective responsibility for the preceding violence and ensuing genocidal aggression. For example, it does not insist on investigating whether the “Hannibal Directive” was deployed as part of the Israeli military response on October 7 and whether it killed Israeli citizens and how many.
It does not scrutinise subsequent Israeli military operations or whether they put the Israeli hostages in danger or how many were killed by Israeli bombs. There is no questioning of why key Palestinian negotiators were attacked during ceasefire and hostage negotiations, including Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s chief negotiator, in July 2024 in Tehran and Hamas’s negotiating delegation in September 2025 in Doha. There is no debate about why the Israeli government repeatedly rejected ceasefire proposals that could have brought the hostages back much earlier.
There is little attention paid to the fact that Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant face arrest warrants from the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity. The answer lies in the psychological state of Israeli society. For many Israelis, October 7 became a psychological rupture, making it difficult to reconcile their sense of humanity with their complicity in the criminal reality that followed.
The problem, then, is not that Israelis are in denial or misinformed. It is that a large portion of the society is complicit in criminality and actively avoids reckoning with it. The absence of Gaza and Palestinians more broadly from Israeli political discourse is because of their complete dehumanisation by Israeli society.
How else could one explain the absence from the election rhetoric of questions about, and subsequent accountability for, actions against the Palestinian people? Why has the Israeli military killed at least 74,000 Palestinians, the vast majority of them civilians? Why has it carried out mass and arbitrary detentions, torture and enforced disappearances of Palestinians?
Extract — continue reading at the source.
