The vast majority of Israelis say they are not troubled by reports of famine and suffering in Gaza, a new poll released by the Israel Democracy Institute shows.
The survey shows that 79 percent of Jews in Israel were not troubled, or troubled at all, whereas 86 percent of “Arab” respondents were somewhat or very troubled by the reports about the war on Gaza.
The survey was conducted between 27-31 July.
You’ve never heard of intergenerational trauma?
And, there’s literally no shortage of Holocaust survivors in the country. Like, sure, most modern Israelis aren’t, but there’s a definite connection.
Intergenerational trauma literally requires people to be descendants of those who suffered the trauma, and is not in any way form or shape about trauma being transmitted through race or religion and it works less the further away from the generation that suffered the trauma one is, all of which I covered in my post.
As for the rest, in 2023 there were 110,100 Holocaust Survivors in Israel, whist the population in total is about 9.5 million people, making Holocaust Survivors in Israel 1.1% of the population, so that leaves 98.9% of the Israel population who never suffered direct trauma from the Holocaust.
Even if one tries to account for direct descendants living in Israel (a very hard to estimate number), it would still be pretty hard for them to exceed the number of Israelis against what’s going on in Gaza which is about 2 million.
Or coming at it from another side, most present day Israelis come from Russia or are descendants of those who came from Russia (a large fraction are Orthodox Jews, who have very large families), most of which was not impacted by the Holocaust.
Holocaust survivors and their descendants are a minority in Israel so I don’t think they can be relied upon to make the broader people of Israel empathise with the plight of Genocide victims, especially if indeed as I have heard, Holocaust Survivors in Israel are seen as weak.
So, start with that 1.1%, add on all the ones dead of old age, and then multiply by the number of kids and grandkids the average one has. That’s a low estimate, because cultural transmission of the anxiety is pretty strong here - great grandchildren and close friends should arguably be counted as well.
The Shephardis and various other diasporas wouldn’t have been as much affected, although the fear of violence coming their way was heavily used to drive emigration to Israel back in the early days. The Ashkenazi population, however, is lousy with experience.
I think what’s really going on is that going through trauma doesn’t necessarily teach empathy. It can, or it can teach nothing (like Henry Kissinger said about his own survivorship), or it can straight-up make you mean. In Israel the dominant lesson that’s been taken out of it is that everyone’s always against the Jews no matter what, which conveniently removes any responsibility to look in the mirror.
Well, the thing is that the “anxiety” isn’t something that would make a person being against Genociding others as it’s all about self-protection and it might even make genocidal violence more likely: it’s far easier to spread the Fear that “they are against us” and convince people about how “we have to get them before they get us” in a climate of high anxiety (which seems to be something policians of all colors have for decades continuously cultivated in Israel and even amongst the Jewish Communities abroad), which makes extreme mass violence against the “others” deemed “the enemy” under the cover of “self-defence” be more likely rather than less likely.
The thing that would make being against Genocide more likely is Empathy with the hurt of the victims, and not all of those who went through the trauma of the Holocaust will have come out of it with that (for example, trauma also can create Sociopaths, the very opposite of people with high empathy with the suffering of others), plus empathy is a lot harder to transmit to both friends and descendants than anxiety, plus one of the things Racism does is close down empathy towards specific “others” based on their ethnicity (hence the relentless “they are <insert evil thing>” prejudiced messaging against Palestinians and Arabs in Israel, as well as the “human animals” and “vermin” dehumnization of Palestinians, all of which is obvious propaganda to breed Racism).
Mind you, plenty of Holocaust Survivors do have that Empathy and even fight to stop the violence (and even get called anti-semites for it, as the Press did to a Jewish Holocaust Survivor in the UK some years ago because in a Conference For Palestine he compared some of the actions of the government of Israel to those of the Nazis), and I suspect that due to that experience they’re a lot more likely than the average person to be deeply against such extreme violence as a Genocide, it’s just that I don’t think they add up to enough people compared to the population of Israel as a whole, the transmission of the kind of emotional relation to others that makes one be against it down the generations and laterally to people like friends is nowhere as strong as the transmission of the fear and anxiety which can be easilly weaponized to make the violence more likely and what politicians in Israel have from the very start been doing is cultivating the transmission of anxiety and fear, not of empathy.
IN SUMMARY: Holocaust Survivors in Israel were always a small minority and their experience has been very purposefully weaponized by local politicians to spread amongst the majority the irrational fear and anxiety that make Israelis more likely to commit extreme violence against others whilst genuinelly believing it to be “self-defense”, whilst the positive things like “empathy with the pain of victims” had their transmission suppressed or at the very least only spread naturally (and against relentless society-wide Racist messaging meant to reduce empathy) at a rate which is much slower than the rate of spread of fear and anxiety, hence the impact of the existence and presence of Holocaust Survivors on Israeli society probably made this Genocide more likely, not less likely (and I suspect it’s the very opposite of what most Holocaust Survivors would’ve wanted).
PS: Judging by things like Holocaust Survivors who too openly and strongly critize the actions of the government of Israel being called anti-semites, it seems logical to think that the Israeli politicians activelly try to suppress the transmission of empathy, making it even slower than the natural rate of transmission would be.