Israel’s collective amnesia

Palestinians walk amid the rubble of destroyed buildings in Gaza City, 5 November 2025.

On October 13th, three days after the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas took effect, the current head of the Israeli opposition, centrist liberal Yair Lapid, gave a speech in which he declared that “all those who demonstrated against Israel these past two years . . . were deceived.” Before his fellow Knesset members and visiting US President Donald Trump, he announced: “There was no genocide, no intentional starvation.” The well-documented facts—that Israel pursued a relentless policy of starvation, including entirely blocking aid from entering Gaza for 11 weeks straight—were thus rewritten on live TV. This revision of reality laid the groundwork for what was soon to come: a quiet, collective act of forgetting, which aims to make the decimation of Palestinian life in Gaza simply disappear from Israeli memory.

Even as Israel continues killing Gazans, this willful amnesia has begun taking shape in a variety of ways across liberal Israeli society, the very spheres from which one would hope to see an honest reckoning.

Proponents of brutality have been uncritically embraced. Yair Golan, rising star of the Zionist left, invited retired general Giora Eiland—who conceived the notorious Generals’ Plan, which proposed starving Gazans who would not leave their homes, and advocated for the utility of epidemics in killing Palestinians—to speak at his party’s event honoring Yitzhak Rabin.

Meanwhile, institutions and public figures have moved to assert the boundaries of acceptable memory by rendering certain narratives about the past two years unspeakable.

Haaretz, Israel’s leading left-leaning newspaper, published an op-ed by a psychiatrist who works in the public health services system dismissing accusations of genocide from Jews in Israel and elsewhere as a deluded “fantasy of morality,” a pathological form of self-harm that amounted to “moral masochism.”

This logic of denial has also found expression in the routines of public life, under the pretext of a return to normalcy.

As the Israeli academic year commenced, the country’s two leading universities put out joyful messages, noting with relief the return of the Israeli captives and reiterating their support for students who have been serving as reservists in the military, but saying nothing about the losses of Palestinian students with families in Gaza.

This consolidation of forgetting builds upon widespread Israeli indifference to Palestinian suffering over the past two years. Many Israeli liberals have spent this time trying to look anywhere other than at the devastating consequences of Israel’s actions: A June 2025 poll found that two thirds of Israelis—including 44% of opposition voters—thought that Israeli media did not need to cover the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

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