MICHAEL SFARD

The criminal, felonious, unforgivable project of Gaza’s destruction is an all-Israeli project. It could not have happened without the cooperation – whether through active contribution or silence – of all parts of Jewish Israeli society.

“That’s my family, Kay. It’s not me.”

When Michael Corleone (played flawlessly by Al Pacino) brings Kay Adams (Diane Keaton) to meet his family at his sister’s wedding in the first part of The Godfather trilogy, she is exposed to a very disturbing story about the family she is marrying into. It appears that the family solves problems through a combination of violence and corruption. When Michael notices that Kay is shocked, he tries to reassure her: “That’s my family, Kay, it’s not me.”

Israel is destroying Gaza. Call it ethnic cleansing, call it erasure, call it genocide, call it whatever you want. I have no doubt that Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish-Polish jurist who coined the term “genocide,” would declare with tears of shame that the Jewish state is committing genocide in Gaza. It is destroying the place and annihilating the human group living there.

The physical destruction of Gaza’s built environment is systematic – house after house, public building after public building, infrastructure after infrastructure. Think about your own neighborhood – the kids’ school, the local clinic, the shopping center, the playground, the park, the office buildings and the residential blocks. Imagine all of it, absolutely everything, erased. No home, no neighborhood, no community. That is the situation in Gaza.

A place that was home to over two million people has become one vast ground zero. Schools, clinics, shops, water, electricity and sewage infrastructure, roads and sidewalks – all reduced to ash and dust. According to satellite-image analysis, 70 percent of the structures in the Strip have been completely destroyed or damaged beyond use – and that’s even before the next phases of the campaign, before the defense minister’s promise to rabbis of the religious Zionist movement that “Gaza will look like Beit Hanoun” is realized.

The mass killing of Gazans is more chaotic than the destruction of the physical space: indiscriminate shelling, disproportionate bombing, the devastation of the healthcare system and – horrifically – starvation. The deliberate creation of man-made famine.

The intentional, willful prevention of food and humanitarian aid from entering Gaza; the dismantling of the international relief system that had distributed supplies at hundreds of points across the Strip and replacing it with only four distribution points – three in the south and one in the center, none in the north – all to force Gazans into displacement. Like dogs led from the house to the yard with a bowl of food. The numbers of those starving are unfathomable. The images are blood-chilling. They stop one’s pulse. Israel is destroying Gaza.

So how can one go on living as part of a collective that is carrying out annihilation? How do you wake up in the morning and look in the eyes of the grocer just back from reserve duty, the soldier at the café, or the neighbor hanging up a “Together We Will Win” sign?

It’s easiest to look at Ben-Gvir or Smotrich and feel it has nothing to do with us. It’s most comforting to think about these two petty fascists, who – unlike their Italian or German counterparts – have neither class nor aesthetics, only raw racism and sadistic cruelty, and feel relieved. It’s easiest to scoff at Smotrich waxing poetic about how moral it is to starve two million Gazans and how acceptable it is to sacrifice the hostages. It’s easiest to sneer at Ben-Gvir relishing the idea of ethnic cleansing (which he calls “encouraging migration”) and tell ourselves this doesn’t represent us, it’s not us.

But the criminal, felonious, unforgivable project of Gaza’s destruction is an all-Israeli project. It could not have happened without the cooperation – whether through active contribution or silence – of all parts of Jewish Israeli society. The government secured loyalty to this crime in the war’s very first days, when the nature of Israel’s attack on Gaza was formed: a total assault on everything Gazan, with no pretense of focusing only on military targets. Back then, when voices warning of war crimes were drowned out by war drums, all segments of society were chained into complicity in the crime.

Like recruits to the mafia, who at the boss’s command must shoot a shopkeeper who didn’t pay protection money, thereby sealing a blood pact – with someone else’s blood – with “the family,” so too did hundreds of thousands of Israelis rally to the calls to bomb, crush, erase and starve. Hundreds of thousands on whom the responsibility for the annihilation rests directly, and millions indirectly, bound by the criminal pact, bound to its denial, and – when denial is no longer possible – to its justification.

Today, there is no doubt, and there cannot be any doubt, about what is happening in Gaza. Israel is committing crimes against humanity on a spine-chilling scale. It is wiping out all infrastructure that enables life in the Strip and starving its people. It officially declares its intent to ethnically cleanse Gaza, or, as Netanyahu – the Israeli Darth Vader, who has surrendered completely to the dark side of the force – calls it, to implement “Trump’s vision.”

And even now, when everything is already clear, when the claim that we are committing genocide has become very difficult to reject, Israelis as a whole draw the curtain and continue with daily life. Note this: not a single Israeli professional association dares to cry out morally against the annihilation of Gaza.

Not the Israeli Medical Association, which is sickeningly silent in the face of both the systematic destruction of Gaza’s health system and the killing of more than 1,500 medical workers, nor the teachers’ organizations, whose muteness at the total destruction of Gaza’s education system (primary, secondary and higher) teaches Israeli students that not all humans are born in God’s image.

Neither does the Israeli Bar Association, whose leader can demand the justice minister’s arrest over replacing the locks on his office to humiliate the attorney general, but sees no reason to utter a word about the population transfer and starvation plans of the Israeli government, about the bombing of Gaza’s courthouses, about the starvation and abuse of Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails turned into torture camps, or about the Supreme Court’s disgusting collaboration with all this.

What shame it is to belong to a legal association that fights to preserve the “reasonableness clause,” but says nothing about the duty to allow humanitarian aid for starving civilians or Red Cross visits for enemy prisoners.

As for the Israeli mainstream media, it’s a waste of time to speak about them: on those calling themselves “journalists” who conspired not to report the suffering we are causing Gaza’s residents, a conspiration that is a professional crime; who for months fanned the flames of war and enabled incitement to commit crimes; who still block truly critical voices from being heard; and who have remained silent about the systematic killing of journalists in Gaza and the refusal to allow journalists in, except when embedded with the IDF to serve the army spokesperson’s lies. The Israeli media is the tribal bonfire in whose flames Gaza is burning.

One does not choose his or her family, and Israel is my family. And it is a crime family. So how does one go on living with such a family? Everything is contaminated. Rot has consumed all. On the very evening when Haaretz magazine published dozens of photos of skeletal children – our handiwork – Channel 13 News aired a PR segment about Israeli fine dining and the Michelin stars our top chefs are about to receive.

Michael Corleone thought he could remain part of the family while avoiding a life of crime. In the end, he inherited his father’s role and became the don of the family crime organization. There are two ways to avoid a similar fate. One is to cut off the family altogether. Many have done so in the past two years – left the country and planted their lives in other societies. But there is another option: to fight the family. Truly fight it. To understand that, at this stage, the family is the adversary.

The problem, I remind you, is not Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Evil emerges from many of the strongholds of so-called “liberalism” in our distorted Israeli reality. But – and this is crucial – there are also rebellious family members. Teachers, artists, lawyers, journalists, doctors, social workers, academics and many political activists who have dared to raise their voices against Gaza’s destruction in petitions, videos and demonstrations. We are few, but not insignificant.

Together we must fight our family by every non-violent means. Follow the path of Abraham, who, according to midrash, smashed the idols his father worshiped; of Moses, who rebelled against his adoptive Egyptian family to lead a people of slaves to freedom; and of all the prophets who rebuked the sinful people and the criminal kings. In today’s terms: support refusers, encourage international investigations and call for sanctions and political isolation. To push in through the feet what will not go in through the mind and heart, to preserve an island of human values, and above all – to stop the annihilation of Gaza.

This article was first published in Haaretz on 31 August 2025. Re-published in herri with kind permission of the author.