The Military Advocate General as a Parable

"I think I don't really understand what's the big story there," I wrote in my friends' group on Friday, after it was reported that the Military Advocate General had resigned. "They're angry that she released a video of prison guards abusing inmates? Is that what all the fuss is about?"

"Yes," E replied to me. "The abuse itself doesn't interest them – it's not considered, it's not an event. What interests them is that it was brought out into the open”.

So, I now understood, the story here is that the Military Advocate General, the woman responsible for the law in the IDF, sought to address illegal events occurring in Israeli prisons holding Palestinian inmates, and the entire system came crashing down on her because of it, as if she were the criminal. That's the story here. And there's no mention at all of the real crime, the fact that guards are abusing inmates. It's unbelievable, and yet—clear to every person in Israel.

---

Now, two things before I continue:

First – Brigadier General Yifat Tomer-Yerushalmi, the Military Advocate General, is a military woman of thirty years and has been serving in this current role since September 2021. This means she served her masters well over the years by authorizing the crimes of settlers in the West Bank and, in the last two years, the war crimes that Israel committed in Gaza. That has to be said.

Second – the development in this story, meaning everything that happened on Sunday, which was reported as Tomer-Yerushalmi's attempted suicide, is a horrific story in its own right, but it's a different story, not connected to what I want to say here.

Silence, Ignoring

So what do I actually want to say here? I want to shine a spotlight on a phenomenon that characterizes the current regime – the phenomenon of ignoring reality.

In March 2016, the "Elor Azaria affair" took place, in which Azaria shot Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, a Palestinian who arrived at an IDF position in Tel Rumeida in Hebron, stabbed a soldier, was shot, wounded, and lay bleeding on the ground. Azaria shot him in the head, mafia-style, and murdered him, even though he had already been neutralized. It seems to me that since then, the word "neutralized," which means "taken out of action," has become a euphemism for the killing of Palestinians who are described as attacking Israeli-Jews.

The public debate raged over whether Azaria was a hero (from the right) or a murderer (from the left).

Naturally, there's no absolute and unequivocal answer to this question. It's a matter of opinion, and opinion rests on beliefs, worldviews, and a lot of personal and societal history. So I want to imagine reality for a moment through the eyes of an alien. If an alien arrived at the scene, unfamiliar with the history, with no opinions one way or the other, and no agenda, what would their eyes see? They would see two people with knives approaching a group of other people, whose members are dressed in uniform green, wearing vests and holding weapons, and stabbing one of them. They would see the green group shooting the two, both falling to the ground bleeding, one stops moving, the other hasn't yet. They would see one of the greens approaching the bleeding wounded man on the ground and shooting him in the head at point-blank range, and the wounded man who was shot stop moving. That's what happened in reality – an individual shooting and killing another person, a wounded man lying on the ground. All the rest of the discussion is opinions, beliefs, and justifications one way or the other.

Policy of Ignoring

One could argue that the policy of ignoring has been around for a long time. After all, an entire nation here has been ignoring for decades the fact that we are occupying another people, and the ways in which we do it. But something in that affair brought the ignoring of reality to a new peak, turning it into an organizing principle of the regime and its supporters, and thus, of all of our public agenda as well. Here are three areas of ignoring that deeply impact our lives in the past, present, and future:

‣ The ignoring of what Israel is doing in Gaza is one of the harshest. The data exists: For your convenience, here it is, reported by Adi Argov on the Daily File – including killed, displaced, wounded, damage to infrastructure and life-support systems. And yet, in Israel, the regime ignores the destruction, and following it, so does most of the public. Our alien, if looking at the picture of reality over the last two years, would see a horrific and shocking attack that went on for a whole day on October 7, 2023, and a horrific and shocking attack lasting 730 days since. That's the reality.

‣ The ignoring of what Israel is perpetrating in the West Bank is also among the most shocking. Settler violence has existed for a long time. But the escalation occurring since the start of the fighting in Gaza too closely resembles the processes that Yair Golan spoke about. Settlers enter residents' villages, steal, destroy, threaten, beat, burn, ravage, and even murder. And the state? In practice, it supports them – support expressed in distributing favors to the pogromists, orders to the army to protect them, and mainly the fact that none of the attacking settlers is ever arrested, brought to trial, or receives any sanction for the violent crimes they committed; and in what it conveys to the public, the government ignores, thus creating complete public ignorance of the violent reality of the settlers. And the alien? In his postcard home, he would describe one group, holding all the power in its hands, abusing and oppressing another group, devoid of any power, almost daily, with no restraining response. He would describe it as the norm. (And while writing these lines, activists from "Rabbinical Voice for Human Rights" report that while helping with the olive harvest in the village of Deir Istiya, they were attacked by an IDF attack drone, and a soldier aimed his rifle at them and then fired into the air). That's the reality.

Colonists attack in Mukhmas, north-east of Jerusalem

‣ Another massive ignoring is the media's ignoring of Israel's aggressive actions. The media, any media, cannot bring the full reality to the public. It's impossible by definition. In other words, there's a basic element of choice in the media – what to bring to the public's knowledge and what not. And the Israeli media, in itself subject to threats from the regime, has been choosing for many years not to bring to the public's knowledge what is happening in the occupied territories, and in the last two years, also not what is happening in Gaza. This means that those who consume only mainstream Israeli media get a distorted picture of reality. Our alien, who does read international media, certainly asks himself questions about this gap between the distorted picture of reality presented by mainstream Israeli media and that presented by the media in the rest of the world.

I won't continue, due to length. These are three points that cover vast parts of the reality that most of the public, led by the regime and with its support, ignores, and they are not the only ones. Bottom line, in Israel, ignoring reality has become a way of life.

Caution, Danger!

Netanyahu builds his conduct and his rule on a combination of lies, distortions of facts, and systematically ignoring reality, and it's not accidental – it's methodical. The political motives are clear: Such distortions and lies (like, for example, ignoring warnings from experts about the dangers of Hamas or the risks of annexation) allow him to stay in power, reduce public pressure, and create a distorted, false reality that serves him.

Of course, there are the classics that represent the whole, the ones we've all loved to chuckle about – his remembering the soldiers of the British Mandate, even though he was born after the Mandate ended; or his claim that it was the Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini who convinced Hitler to murder Jews in 1941. And there are less funny distortions of reality – like denying the famine in Gaza, or blaming the current situation on the 2005 disengagement, or the transferring funds to Hamas. There's no shortage of lies, thank God. He lies and distorts reality as naturally as he breathes. This isn't a big discovery; it's more or less the working assumption for anyone who deals with him. What needs to be emphasized is that when he lies, it's not like the occasional lie that any of us probably tells sometimes. Because when he lies, he sets in motion a massive machine that includes spokespeople who amplify his words, media that polishes them, a huge army of bots on social media that recites them, and thus he creates an "alternative reality" that influences the public. It starts with his "base" – those who believe anything that comes out of his mouth, who repeat it, spread it, influence others, and in the end, we all end up living his imagined reality, which isn't really connected to actual reality. And that's a very dangerous place to live in. When there's no connection between reality as it is and our perception of reality, everything unravels, everything gets twisted. Because when you invent reality, anything is possible, and nothing and no one is safe. Because if he says "everything's fine, you can go there, the ground is stable," when in fact there's a deep abyss there, he endangers all our lives. And that's exactly what he and his government are doing – turning Israel into an isolated bubble, disconnected from the reality that the whole world sees and acts upon, ignoring real risks and operating in ways that by definition are unrelated to reality. They produce an imagined reality and endanger all our lives.

Back to the Military Advocate General

The Military Advocate General, they say, "leaked" a video to the press showing what's happening in Israel's security prisons. "Leaked." And I wonder—where's the leak here? The Military Advocate General passed a video to the press showing serious violations of the law, as required by her role. She didn't lie, steal, or invent anything – the evidence exists. So how is it that the public discourse focuses on the "leak" and completely ignores the fact that soldiers are systematically and ongoingly abusing people who are entirely under their control and authority? It is led by the regime and its agents, of course. Ignoring has become a way of life among the Israeli public as well, and the Military Advocate General nearly paid for it with her life. (In the subsequent developments, she may have broken the law. I'm referring here only to the matter of passing the video.) The preoccupation with her actions instead of the reality in which inmates in Israel are being serially tortured is a classic example of creating a distorted reality by the regime's mouthpieces and spokespeople, and how its endangers democracy itself and each and every one of us.

Are you familiar with that recurring scene in cartoons, where there's a character walking or running and reaches a cliff and keeps walking or running forward in the air without a care, until suddenly they look down, realize they're over a chasm, and then plummet?

That's the situation that ignoring reality creates, and that’s where we are. We're operating within an imagined reality that has no strong connection to what's actually happening. The implications of this, in no way or form, can be positive. We, as a society, must start filling in the gaps, stabilizing the ground under our feet, and acting from the contexts of the reality that is actually occurring, not the one provided by the leadership and its amplifiers.

And until then – don't look down!

---

Ayala Shalev is the editor of That's About Us.