The tour guide directed his group towards the binoculars, which cost five shekels (€1.27) to look through for 2½ minutes and could be paid for with a contactless card.
“You’ll be able to see ruined territories, but it’s important to remember it’s a result of their aggression towards us and our need to secure ourselves,” he said.
He was standing at a viewing point in Sderot, western Israel, last week.
Behind him were the ruins of Gaza, its blockade starting just over one kilometre away. Even with a naked eye, it is possible to see something of the scale of destruction and the constantly rising smoke, but through the binoculars the lengthy expanse of toppled buildings and decimated neighbourhoods is staggering.
RM Block
Earlier, the same guide had warned his group – one of whom said they had individually opted to come on this day tour led by a “licensed tour guide” – that they may hear “a lot of booms today”.
“We can only pray that Nazis are being killed and our soldiers are safe,” the guide said. He pointed towards the destruction.
“We see some dust rising up, that’s a territory called Jabalia.”
He was referencing what was once Palestine’s largest refugee camp and a home for more than 110,000 people – largely descendants of those displaced in what is known as the 1948 Nakba, or “catastrophe”.
By November last year, Haaretz reported that Jabalia “no longer has a single habitable residential area”.
Gaza City was behind Jabalia, the guide said. He added that he hoped his group would have the chance to see the city from another perspective later in the day, but the view may be blocked as “there’s always an opportunity of dust because it’s very active over there”.
Through the binoculars, he also told them that they would be able to spot a few high-rise buildings inside Gaza City still standing: this was proof, the guide said, that Israeli forces are not destroying “everything” but are only going after “terrorists” and acting to bolster “security”.
The blockaded enclave of Gaza is just 365sq km in total, making it smaller than any Irish county. The smallest Irish county, Louth, is 2.25 times its size, with about one fifteenth of its population.
Gaza’s more than two million residents have been trapped in the enclave for nearly two years now. In that period, nearly 60,000 have been killed by Israeli forces, according to Gazan health authorities. This includes more than 17,000 children – the equivalent of 28, or a “classroom”, every day, the United Nations children’s agency, Unicef, notes. Over 33,000 more children have been injured, with Unicef saying that the Gaza Strip has the highest number of child amputees per capita anywhere in the world.
[ The Irish Times view on starvation in Gaza: the world cannot look awayOpens in new window ]
Mass starvation is spreading fast. Eight months after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and former minister of defence Yoav Gallant, who are accused of using starvation as a method of warfare, the United Nations says one in three Gazans are going multiple days without food.
More than 100 NGOs last week called for urgent action, including a permanent ceasefire, an end to weapons transfers, for the opening of borders and for the restoration of effective humanitarian aid systems. “States can and must save lives before there are none left to save.”
Israeli government officials have openly called for the destruction or displacement of Gazans, as have others inside Israel. This month, hanging from a building in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City was a sign reading “Make Gaza Jewish Again”. Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, who spoke to The Irish Times this month and last year, said they think Gaza should be settled by Israelis.
Yet, unlike populations in most of the rest of the world, who can only see what is happening in Gaza through online postings and the news reports of Palestinian journalists, in Israel the destruction of Gaza is taking place in full view.
Kilometres away from the bombardment and starvation are supermarkets, shopping centres and people with access to unlimited food. At the viewing point in Sderot there is a vending machine dispensing water and fizzy drinks. In a cafe a short drive away, civilians and off-duty uniformed and armed soldiers alike chat over coffees, or eat salads and sandwiches.
“Most Israeli citizens – living in abundance half an hour’s drive away – are reacting to the disaster on their doorstep with indifference or gaslighting,” tweeted Amjad Iraqi, senior Israel and Palestine analyst for the International Crisis Group, on Wednesday. “Few care for Gaza’s parallels to the ghettos, starving and awaiting death. The dehumanisation is too deep, empathy is absent.”
[ A conversation begins: How Israelis view Gaza’s unfolding hunger crisisOpens in new window ]
Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies at Brown University in Rhode Island, is among an ever-increasing number of experts who call what is happening in Gaza a genocide. On July 15th he wrote in The New York Times: “Having grown up in a Zionist home, lived the first half of my life in Israel, served in the IDF as a soldier and officer and spent most of my career researching and writing on war crimes and the Holocaust, this was a painful conclusion to reach, and one that I resisted as long as I could. But I have been teaching classes on genocide for a quarter of a century. I can recognise one when I see one.”
When he heard what The Irish Times saw and heard in Sderot, Prof Bartov said it reminded him “of what the Germans called in World War II ‘execution tourism’, ie touring and photographing (as souvenirs) one’s own atrocities”.
Multiple tours came and went in the hour or so that The Irish Times was at the main Sderot viewing point.
One, among a big group of young people, said they were Americans who travelled to Israel with an organisation “like Birthright”. They listened to their tour guide describe how Israel first “conquered” Gaza, and then engaged in other efforts, including “pass[ing]a lot of luggages filled with cash to maintain the status quo” because it was “good for Israel and our ideology”.
The guide was seemingly referring to widespread reports that Netanyahu allowed Qatar to send billions of dollars to Hamas, with the Israeli prime minister accused of strengthening the militant group on purpose to break ties between Gaza and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and destroy dreams of a Palestinian state, a reasoning Netanyahu denies.
Everything Israel did up to the current bombardment of Gaza was a “Band Aid” when it came to halting attacks and guaranteeing the security of Israeli citizens, the guide said, “the wall, the fence, the Iron Dome”. He then moved the students away, out of the hot sun, into a shaded area.
Dozens of soldiers arrived next, following a guide whose T-shirt declared him to be from the “Sderot tourism team”. A fellow Israeli and former soldier identified them as reservists, because some had long hair and they carried small guns. There were stickers with pictures of other soldiers, who had been killed in Gaza, on the glass nearby.
The Israeli military controls access to Gaza.
Another high point with a wider panoramic view, a little outside Sderot, has been declared a closed military zone – but soldiers gave The Irish Times permission to stay for a few minutes.
There, it was possible to see smoke rising from at least four sites inside Gaza, while there were multiple bombings in those few minutes, and heavy gunfire and at least one drone were also audible.
The main viewing point in Sderot is called Givat Kobi, with online descriptions saying it was built as a memorial to four soldiers killed during the 2014 Gaza war. It is listed on Google Maps, where visitors leave reviews.
Any recent online complaints tend to be about access.
One recent poster complained about potholes on the path to the viewing point.
