Arwa Mahdawi
The Guardian / September 6, 2024
It would be unfair to say these guys represent everyone in Israel, so I’m not going to say that. They said it themselves
For a while I used to play a little game called What Would It Take? What would it take for the Biden administration to do something meaningful in order to put an end to the carnage in Gaza? What would it take for the Biden administration to stop the ethnic cleansing currently taking place in the West Bank? What would it take for the anchors of popular US cable news outlets to show any real empathy towards Palestinians?
Would video evidence of a Palestinian being raped by Israeli soldiers at Sde Teiman, a military prison that resembles a torture camp, make any difference? Nah. Judging by the US state department’s response, that’s no biggie. The US, we’ve been told, has asked Israel to investigate itself and we can trust them to do a great job of it.
How about reports from US doctors that Israeli snipers are shooting Palestinian children in the head while they play in the street? This isn’t something that highly trained snipers can accidentally do – it is seemingly deliberate. But again: not a big deal. These reports aren’t serious enough for the Biden administration to stop giving Israel carte blanche to destroy Gaza and annex the West Bank.
How about the videos on social media of Palestinian children with their heads blown to bits by US-made weapons? Or the recent video of a little girl killed by shrapnel while rollerblading in northern Gaza, still wearing her pink rollerblades when pronounced dead? The videos of Israeli soldiers burning copies of the Qur’an and desecrating mosques? Again: nothing here so disturbing that it stops the members of the Biden administration from sleeping at night.
I could go on, but what’s the point? I’ve stopped playing What Would It Take? because the answer is excruciatingly clear: absolutely nothing will prompt the Biden administration to rein Israel in. (And any illusions that Kamala Harris might be any better than Joe Biden on this issue have been shattered by now.) You can see that by the furious response from the US after the UK decided to suspend a tiny portion of arms sales to Israel because of a “clear risk” they could be used in violation of international humanitarian law. This is where we are now: the Biden administration has made it clear that Israel will face no accountability whatsoever. In this regard the Democrats are now way to the right of Ronald Reagan, who restricted military assistance to Israel when appropriate.
Israel enjoys so much impunity that its soldiers regularly share disturbing video content of what look a hell of a lot like war crimes on social media, knowing they will face zero repercussions. Last week MSNBC host Chris Hayes mused on Twitter/X about why Israel allows its soldiers to post this content – which includes numerous videos in which IDF soldiers dress up in the lingerie of displaced Palestinian women.
“To me the thing I continue to not understand, truly deeply, is why the IDF hasn’t cracked down on the absolutely insane sh*t posting of its soldiers, when it is very obviously a PR disaster,” Hayes wrote. “Do they not care? Has command discipline just totally broken down?”
Hayes is one of the best journalists on US cable news and seems like a very decent person. So it isn’t a personal attack when I say … seriously? You’re a journalist and you’re seriously asking this question? Let me spell it out: the reason the IDF doesn’t care about these videos is because they know that they very obviously aren’t a PR disaster. For them to be a PR disaster the likes of the New York Times and MSNBC would have to properly cover them. And they’re far too busy covering pro-Palestinian protesters and smearing them as violent agents of Iran to do that. The reason these videos aren’t PR disasters is because they’ve been very sparingly covered by the western media.
You know what else should be far more of a PR disaster than it is? The fact that two Israelis who run an English-language podcast called Two Nice Jewish Boys recently put out an episode in which they fantasize about genocide. I’m not exaggerating here. I’d urge you to go and listen to it yourself but it seems that the video has been made private after backlash online. So, a few of the highlights from hosts Naor Meningher and Eytan Weinstein:
“If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would press it in a second.”
“No one actually gives a shit [about the genocide in Gaza]. Zero people in Israel … Do you care if this baby in Gaza gets polio? They’ll be like, ‘I don’t’ [indistinguishable]. There will be like 20 people who care … Fuck them.”
“You can’t help but think that it’s nice to know that you are dancing in a concert while hundreds of thousands of Gazans are homeless … It makes it even better … more enjoyable concert … ”
Now it would be unfair to say that these guys represent everyone in Israel, so I’m not going to say that. They said it themselves. In the podcast they note that: “This is how Israelis feel … People enjoy knowing that [Palestinians] are suffering.” (After this article was published the hosts of the Two Nice Jewish Boys reached out to request a link to their Twitter statement about the video. So here you go! If anything it’s even worse than the original video.)
In an attempt to curb online criticism of the podcast, pro-Israel voices have dismissed Meningher and Weinstein as a couple of losers nobody has ever heard of. But that’s not entirely true. Meningher’s website boasts that he “worked with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on both his 2019 campaigns, as well as on his 2020, 2021 and 2022 campaigns, doing chatbots, digital data projects and viral video creation. I was also responsible of managing all the digital channels of the Prime Minister.”
The podcast is also apparently prominent enough to have had some famous guests including Avi Issacharoff, co-creator of the Netflix series Fauda, and Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the US.
Perhaps more importantly, what Meningher and Weinstein say on their podcast is not materially different from what the politicians in Israel’s far-right government are saying themselves. There is a database containing hundreds of statements from state leaders, politicians, and public figures salivating about genocidal destruction. “Genocidal utterances are therefore not out in the fringes,” lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi said for South Africa in remarks before the international court of justice in January. “They are embodied in state policy.” And the Biden administration has made it very clear that it is embodied in state policy that the US will do whatever it takes to allow these utterances to become reality.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian US columnist
