The Architecture of Moral Amnesia: Israelis Can't Forget What They Never Knew

Israeli soldiers in Gaza. Credit: IDF Spokesperson's Unit

Since October 7, the Israeli government has been conducting an ongoing campaign of making Israelis forget the failure and its responsibility for it: Netanyahu's "accidental" mistakes regarding the date, the attempt to remove the word "massacre" from the draft bill to commemorate its victims (which incidentally wasn't approved by the conclusion of the current Knesset session because a bill to weaken the attorney general is more important), the attempt to rebrand the war under the name "The Tekuma War" (Revival or Rebirth), and the stubborn refusal to establish a state commission of inquiry – and in any case, there's no need to investigate what never happened.

All of this at least receives proper attention. Few people speak about making us forget what Israel has done in Gaza since the massacre. Recently, Hebrew University historian Lee Mordechai wrote here that the media and academia "assist the forgetting" of the genocide in Gaza, but to forget, you first have to know, and Israelis have trained themselves not to know.

More than half of Israelis living today were born after the 1995 assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and for them, 1948, the First Intifada, and the Oslo Accords are ancient history.

Ignorance is not only a self-inflicted mutilation by Israelis, but also a deliberate action by the state. For several months, information hasn't been available on the website of the Israel Defense Forces and Defense Establishment Archives. It's impossible to search for historical documentation on various topics in Israel's largest archive, or to conduct research.

In the case of the non-military State Archives, its website only returned to operation this past year, after about two years of being disabled following a "cyberattack." Even then, there were problems, and who cares about historical research anyway, right? Israel prides itself on its ability to plant bombs in pagers, but not on making sure its archives serve the public.

As of early 2026, out of about 17 million files stored in the State Archives and the IDF Archives, only about 4 percent are accessible to the public. In the IDF Archives, less than 1 percent of the files are open. There's no need to get into the intricacies of the Archives Law and viewing regulations, but put simply, government archives are violating the law and aren't hiding the fact.

Israel's State Archives. Credit: David Bachar

Millions of files remain effectively closed even after reaching declassification age, which is in itself exaggerated – ranging from 15 to 90 years depending on the document type.

According to law, 36 percent of the files in the State Archives and 29 percent of the files in the IDF Archives should be open to the public, yet they're effectively closed. In case you've forgotten, those files belong to us, the public.

There are other means at work to sustain this lack of knowledge, such as censorship that prevents Israelis from knowing about their country's exploits both past and present, the Security of the Defense Establishment (Malmab) department in the Defense Ministry – which collects historical documents from archives in a legally questionable process, and an education system that works to keep the next generation ignorant.

Palestinian refugees during the Nakba. Credit: Jim Pringle/AP

The archives of the Shin Bet security service, the Mossad, and the Atomic Energy Commission are closed to the public. Illegal concealment practices are in practice being legitimized by the government.

Most of the Jewish public living today hasn't actually forgotten anything, because they never knew. They didn't know about the theft of Palestinian property, about massacres committed throughout Israel's history, about the expulsion of entire communities, about the robbery of resources and lands, about the fact that Palestinian lives are expendable, about crimes against humanity.

If the public isn't given access to information about the state's actions, we shouldn't be surprised that it doesn't know what the state has done. It's not a matter of forgetting – it's one of deliberate concealment.

Palestinians inspect the damage at the site of an Israeli strike on a house, in Deir Al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, on Sunday. Credit: Ramadan Abed/Reuters

One of the clearest outcomes of this policy of concealment is that many Israelis are incapable of believing what foreign media and Haaretz are saying about their country. Denial has become a sort of collective Pavlovian conditioning, crying "antisemitism" in response to any criticism of Israel, thereby cheapening the concept and directly harming Jews living abroad.

No one had told those deniers that the Israeli military committed crimes when the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant against their prime minister. They refuse to accept the claims because they were trained to do so. They have been turned into moral cripples, and even if they wanted to leave Plato's cave, they're prevented from doing so.

Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli strike on a house in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza Strip, Sunday. Credit: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa

This concealment isn't only related to violence against Palestinians. After all, even 100 years from now the IDF Archives won't open all the material on the Gur Kehati affair (IDF Sgt. Kehati was killed by Hezbollah during a controversial security escort of a civilian in southern Lebanon), or on the decision-making processes leading up to operations in Iran, or on the decisions that led to the deaths of hostages in captivity. And we shouldn't be surprised if the government's attempts to make people forget the failures of October 7 are successful.

Time will take its own course. The expellers, beaters, and looters of '48, '67, and the intifadas "forgot" what happened, and most Israelis don't even know the things they were supposed to forget.

This is one of the defining characteristics of the Israeli collective: denying the results of state-sponsored violence even as it takes place, causing it to be forgotten as soon as possible, and repeating the cycle anew in every subsequent generation.

The fact that most Israelis were born and raised into occupation and apartheid, and have become used to high levels of violence, helps in preserving that ignorance.

It's based on the shared interest of everyone served by it – both the state and the ignorant public itself. After all, who wants to know what grandma and grandpa did to the Arabs, or what the children are doing to them today?