The Domestic Pain behind October 7

Against War on Terror

The break of October 7 appeared for many weeks as a paradigmatic shift in Israeli perception. The compact and high-tech Israeli army of recent years had shown its weakness: one form of “collateral damage” resulting from oppressing innocent Palestinian civilians was also becoming the modus vivendi in regard to the lives of Jewish civilians. This is especially true in the periphery of the so-called “settlements of the envelop,” meaning those engulfing the Gaza Strip. Not at all new, this marginalization of some Jews has imbued the Zionist war ethos from the start.

How do these marginalizations and racializations work together? And how is gender involved?

The ethos from Moshe Dayan to Benjamin Netanyahu, an ethos of the honor of and in death, pertains in states of emergency also in regard to some Jewish Israelis. The logic is that once the enemy gains advantages, especially in captivity, it is better to die (suicide in the case of soldiers) than live under the constant suspicion of having negotiations with the enemy.

In a rare moment of honesty in 2018, the then minister and now head of the National Security Council, Tzachi Hanegbi, admitted that the daily lives in the Mizrahi town Sderot (in the “envelop”) were of less value than those in Tel Aviv. Periphery then, even if Jewish, can sometimes succumb to “collateral damage” for the entirety of the Zionist Project (Tel Aviv).

Periphery is of course not only geographical, and Jewish women and Mizrahim are inflicted with marginalization during times of war even more so than in the previous days of “sanity.”

During the initial horrific weeks after October 7, Israeli public dealt with at length with women, womanhood, and feminism: the sexual assaults conducted by Hamas troops on Israeli women were soon to be weaponized as a proof of Arab inferiority as humans. It also served the historic denial of documented sexual assaults of Israeli soldiers on Palestinian women during the years.

Leading women in Israel, rightfully protesting against the lack of any involvement on the part of international women associations with the horrors carried out against those who were labeled only as occupiers, were at the same time entirely complicit with the numbers of children and women killed in the Israeli bombardments, the scale of which was unprecedented already in October 2023. 

The evolving protest to make the return of the civilians held by Hamas the first among the Israeli objectives of the war, became with time also female-oriented, focusing on motherhood and sexual victimhood. No one today seems to remember that for many previous weeks it had been only priority number four, in accordance with the Zionist ethos of death in captivity. Back then, there was almost not a single Israeli protesting the cabinet’s latent decision to enhance the death of Israeli civilians in captivity, by unleashing a carnage based on the lie that “military pressure is the only mean to bring them back home.” Was it the desire for revenge? Was it just a traumatized cabinet leading a traumatized society?  

The greatest coverage in the media went to the young female soldiers who occupied the gender-oriented role of “lookouts” on the Gaza wall, those who saw the constant movement on the border, as Hamas troops did not even try to hide their preparations for the onslaught. The female soldiers delivered that information to the long dismissive male chain of command, who were assured about their conception of Hamas’ deterrence.

Many critical articles, and even poems, were published in Hebrew on these young female soldiers, whose sole job – unlike their blind society – was to look. But none of the feminist poets or academic activists had a stance on the desecration of civilian lives just a few kilometers away. Just like the case of the trauma of the perpetrator, what normally referred to critically as “shooting and crying,” these women replaced one role (that of vulnerability) for another (victimhood).

To talk about racial differentiation among Jews is a great taboo in Israel, although it was the undertone of the near civil war that had been unleashed since the judicial reform was announced in January 2023. Shaul Mofaz, the second among five Mizrahi chiefs of staff the IDF has ever had, claimed already in October that Israel should release all the Palestinian political prisoners in exchange for the abducted civilians. Like the young female lookouts, Mofaz’s suggestion was too easily dismissed and no feminist protest backed it.

(Just to remind the reader: although Mizrahim are the biggest Jewish community in the country, since Israel’s independence 76 years ago there has not been a single Mizrahi Prime Minister, let alone president of the Supreme Court, and there was only one Mizrahi Attorney General.)

Months after the shock, the legendary journalist and Liberal-Zionist darling Thomas Friedman, gave a revealing talk of more than an hour in a New York Times podcast and uttered almost every aspect of Israeli society without once mentioning the word Mizrahim. It was just a symptom of the world’s polar coverage of Israel-Palestine, while the English version of Haaretz isn’t any different. Shockingly, Mizrahim were completely ignored just two months ago from the entire conversation held in the same podcast with Ta-Nehisi Coates. It is as if Arab-Jews never existed.

Mizrahim, like woman, are here to stay. Sometimes they even converge together, as they did in the cases of “Rakhel Meofakim” (Rachel from the town of Ofakim), a somewhat generic name for the good Mizrahi mammy who feeds so many generations of Israelis and normally only deserve the first name without mentioning her last (Edri). Ofakim is a known “development” town in the Israeli periphery, one of those attacked in October, after decades of enduring the many rockets shot from Gaza.

On October 7, Rachel was able to deal cunningly with several commando warriors who infiltrated her house, just because she acted like a mother: she told the Israeli press that she understood the young men are hungry, and that in appeasing their appetite they will be more tamed and approachable for negotiations. Just by acting like a mother, vis-à-vis the reckless children from Gaza, thus seeing them under the backdrop of intimacy and family, not just as humans but as approachable ones, she was able to save her life by gaining time to manipulate them until the Israeli security forces arrived.

Rachel was not the only victim of October 7 whom the Israeli media did not know how to handle because of her inability to dehumanize the other side. The frail 85 years old Yokheved Lifshitz was the first abductee Hamas released, and upon her return she said her captivators, “the shabab (young fellows in Arabic) ate the same food we ate,” the familiar Mediterranean zaatar and pita bread.

Both Edri and Lifshitz expressed something that was lost in the globalized discourse of war: they conceive of food as something approachable, something which represents proximity and access as Hamas fighters are not terrorists but rather “boys”—hungry and angry (the English is mesmerizing here, in the alliteration between the two words).

Unlike the geopolitical globalized discourse of famine, blockage, and humanitarian aid (itself a spectacular humanitarian theater of tracks, parachutes from the air, and the Gaza Floating Pier), the two relatively elderly women expressed a conflict of much more moderate dimensions, of Arabic within the Hebrew and even a form of contiguity and hospitality.  

Leveraging the vocabulary and grammar of “counterterrorism” remains Benjamin’s Netanyahu’s greatest endeavor in global politics. It has been so since the seventies, after he and his father lunched an U.S.-Israeli think-tank enterprise after the loss of Yoni Netanyahu.

But contrary to Netanyahu’s glorious vocabulary of Jews verses Nazis and Hamas, of global terrorism as a reflection of global antisemitism, women and mizrahim are here to remind us of a pain of entire different scale: something much more conceivable in the relation between humans, misconduct and vice. Unlike Netanyahu, Rachel and Yokheved were negotiating with Hamas.

Gaza as Israeli Periphery

Mizrahim are a notable reminder for what I call “Gaza as an Israeli Periphery,” the first implication of which is that Hamas is not ISIS. For Netanyahu and the entire Israeli ethos, at least since 2006, Gaza is alien to the historical borders of Palestine-Eretz Yisrael, and in my historiography, following especially the work of pioneering journalist Amira Hass and UN envoy to the Palestinian Territories Francesca Albanese, Gaza is very much here.

It remains the basic fact that even after the blockade Gazans were paying with Israeli Shekel and using Israeli phone and electric infrastructures, even after years of Israeli investment and disinvestment (which Sarah Roy dubs a policy of “de-development”).  

The creation of Hamas in the end of the eighties was supported by the state (the only sovereign in Gaza since 1967 until these very days of 2025) for its opposition to Fatah. Almost all its leaders are decedents of the many refugees who flooded and created the Gaza Refugee Strip (this is not just “a strip”) in 1948, which Mizrahim, new immigrants to the country who were forced to its periphery, were the first to notice.

The testimony of Na’im Gilady, an Iraqi-Jew who was waiting for housing in one of the Ma’abarot (transit camps) in the south, draws a line between the discrimination of Iraqis over Jewish immigrants from Romania, and the Palestinian Refugee problem in the south of the country.

The Israeli authorities tried to appease the angry Iraqis by telling them that they are more accustomed to the Mesopotamian climate of the region, and that soon the Arabs of Majdal, today Ashkelon, will be evacuated so that they, the Iraqis, could take over their property.

“We were shocked,” tells Giladi, “we didn’t know anything about the residents of Majdal. One night we passed through the wire fence that surrounded Majdal to talk with its residents and we discovered peaceful people who welcomed us with pleasant eyes and were willing to become loyal citizens to the state that was just established.”

The 1956 War, which was the first occupation, albeit very short, of Gaza and Sinai, is another major fact that the racializing Israeli ethos tends to overlook. It proved that Zionism is not just a progressive movement for the deprived Jews, but also a colonial enterprise that is based on strong alliance with Western military.

‘56 shatters the nostalgia about the sane 20 years Israel had before the “real” occupation of 1967 began. It was the first movement of the young and secular society towards the broad landscape of Islam, poverty and the many refugees in the aftermath of the Nakba (that took place 8 years before). Israeli soldiers’ testimonies of ‘56 associated Palestinian refugee camps with what they knew from home: the same temporary Ma’abarot for Mizrahi immigrants.

The relation of Mizrahi-Palestinian periphery was encapsulated also in Shoshana Sherira’s 1960 novel Gates of Gaza. The novel deals with the aftermath of the 1956 War and depicts the very same feeling that many Israelis felt in the long hours and days after the Hamas massacre, namely, that they were abandoned by the state and the army. Astonishingly, it captures the very same scene Giladi was referring to in his testimony. Here too, Mizrahi residents of the Ma’abarot are throwing stones at the windows of the new houses that were giving to Jewish immigrants of Romanian descent.    

Like in the case of “Rakhel Meofakim,” and like Mizrahi-Palestinian encounters in the periphery of the fifties, the horrors of October 7 show one thing: that Gaza is here, part of the same body of Israel-Palestine, and that its fence is there to be trespassed by foot. On Israel’s first military operation after the disengagement of 2005, leaflets in Arabic were sent in the air by the Israeli army to warn Gazans of being near targeted terrorists. They were swept with the wind and landed in the nearby Israeli town of Sderot, another very much Mizrahi so-called “development” town, to the confusion of its residents, deprived from any knowledge of what became with Zionism the language of the enemy.  

The Domestic Pain as a Demon 

Eight months after October 7, 2023, a glimpse to the repressed of the Israeli liberal mind was seen in a remarkable cartoon in Haaretz, in which minister of transportation Miri Regev and her CEO are depicted as Hamas Nuhba fighters driving a motorcycle right before entering the famous yellow barrier of a kibbutz, with the purpose of “taking revenge on Be’eri,” as it is written in the supertitle. It was the outcome of the publication of Regev’s private WhatsApp correspondence, where one of her employees expressed such revenge after Kibbutz Be’eri refused to open the yellow barrier and receive the minister and her entourage during the difficult days after the attack.

The yellow barrier was of course very much present also in October 2023, in the many video footages of Hamas troops entering Kibbutzim, but the story of Regev that was denied access was something a society that tries to immerse in a feeling of unitedness of course could not but overlook.

Just prior to October 7, the barrier became a symbol for a very domestic political debate. The right for access and movement to natural sources in Israel-Palestine was debated between a kibbutz (Nir David) and a former “development” town (Beit She’an), like in the “envelope,” but this time in the northern part of the country. Whether Israelis were able to conceive the true irony of the cartoon, embedded in a revenge which relates to Israel’s long demons – of fences, barriers, wires and high-tech surveillance over Palestinians and Mizrahim – is very doubtful. For me, it was just another manifestation of a return, of that which should probably be repressed yet again.      

Regev is both a woman and Mizrahi, a predicted candidate to share the Israeli demons alongside Hamas. Now, after the war became a routine, Gaza eradicated, and the Jewish ethos of war implicated in mass murder or even genocidal violence (I avoid the noun Genocide for its part in the spectacle of globalism and international law, and stick to the more modest adjective), voices of dissent are being heard in Israel, alongside domestic political upheavals. After the unison of the joint cabinet that repressed the hostages alongside any talk about race among Jews themselves (2024 marks also the year in which Ha’oketz, the only magazine devoted to Mizrahi intellectualism, was shut down), now it is again Netanyahu alone that faces an ardent opposition. But just like before October 7 race is there only latently. A true reckoning with Israeli ethos is very much doubtful because the history of Israel-Palestine always proves that escalation is there behind the corner to silence Israeli and Jewish domestic pain.