[This is the fifth and final artcle in a five-part article series on “Israel’s Zombie Economy,” based on the breakthrough series of broadcasts on Israel’s political economy with Shir Hever. Click here to watch the interviews for this series and see below for links to the remaining parts of the article series]
This analysis carries a profound moral danger that must be addressed directly. Can Israelis simply claim ignorance of the genocide which Israel perpetrates in Gaza? If I argue that Israelis are aware of atrocities, and that the denial of the genocide is just “Hasbara” or propaganda, it is a deep misunderstanding of how consent and justification is generated on a large scale, a political economy of genocide. But portraying Israeli society as victim of an unprecedented disinformation campaign absolves them of moral responsibility, and is unethical.
A path through this moral dilemma can be found in Stanley Cohen's writings on the colonial gaze (Cohen, 2000), which always operates as a dual gaze. Israelis simultaneously know and do not know. They recognize that Israeli media provides reality versions they can live with, and therefore carefully avoid exposing themselves to international media (although it is readily available online). To avoid knowing about horrors inflicted on Gaza's population, Israelis must know something of what they must avoid.
Israelis have always denied the Nakba while simultaneously lamenting that Ben-Gurion "didn't finish the job," and threatening Palestinians that freedom demands will face "a second Nakba." This contradictory worldview proves necessary for establishing effective colonial regimes, but eventually, even the most expert dual gaze wielders face crisis when reality becomes undeniable (Jamal, 2021).
Cohen's liminal analysis offers a tool for recognizing the power of denial, disinformation and delusion without giving Israeli society the alibi of "we didn't know." Cohen wrote about various examples of collective denial, including Israel, offering a separate analysis for denial of different kind of atrocities and different kinds of positionality (perpetrators, bystanders and even victims). His comment on the Mauthhausen concentration camp in Austria is especially pertinent, an unwritten contract between the authorities and the public: the authorities will hide the atrocities from the public and in exchange, the public will make no effort to find out (Cohen, 2000).
Ronen Steinberg made this concrete in his article "From the Russian Compound to Sde Teiman," arguing that mechanisms of denial and self-delusion were developed and improved over decades of occupation (Steinberg, 2025). Ron Dudai wrote a similar article, highlighting the contradictions which denial requires: “it’s all fake – and they deserve it” (Dudai, 2025). Both articles reference Stanley Cohen, and both express surprise and horror on how Israel’s denial mechanism has reached previously unknown levels. I argue that the genocide in Gaza stretched this mechanism beyond its breaking point.
The wave of suicides and suicide attempts among Israeli soldiers (Levinson, 2025), military psychiatrists warning about "moral injuries" in the army (Shani, 2025), and the slow reckoning Israelis must face with growing global outrage demonstrate that the dual gaze is beginning to fail. It constitutes the most powerful tool enabling genocide's political economy, but the truth comes out eventually. Without it, Israeli society disintegrates.
Roger Owen defined "willed ignorance" as a deliberate governmental strategy of collecting faulty, outdated, and unreliable information to construct ostensibly rational action plans that have no possibility of achieving their stated objectives (Owen, 2007). In Israel's case, willed ignorance operates with far greater entrenchment and psychological complexity. Knowledge has become genuinely perilous.
Haaretz journalist Nir Hasson, after discussing the horrifying baiting of hungry Gazans at the GHF aid stations and the Israeli soldiers gunning them down, and after debunking the lie about “Hamas having stolen the food,” could not answer the simple question: “so is this genocide?”. He merely said “I am afraid to answer because I have to raise children here" (Kodner, 2025b).
The prevalence of suicide among Israeli soldiers reveals how deadly awareness can be. The suicides have proliferated at a later stage in the genocide, when soldiers have started to realize that they have lied to themselves. The disinformation, however, started from the very beginning. On October 16, 2023, when Knesset member Aida Touma-Sliman cried out "Why are you killing the children?" Merav Ben-Ari from the opposition party Yesh Atid responded: "The children brought it upon themselves" (Knesset, 2023). Another aspect of the willed ignorance is the deliberate mispronunciation of "Hamas." In English, Hamas uses "H" as the agreed transliteration for the Arabic letter "ح." However, Israelis consistently pronounce it as "Khamas," substituting the Arabic letter "خ." This mispronunciation constitutes deliberate refusal to acknowledge what the movement is actually called. Hamas is an acronym meaning "Islamic Resistance Movement" in Arabic. Israeli officials, media and celebrities transform it into a meaningless name.
Disinformation is a component, but in itself is not enough to prove genocidal intent. The next stage in manufacturing consent for genocide are the actual statements calling Palestinians “Amalek,” calling for “flattening” or “burning” Gaza and dehumanizing Palestinians as “human animals” or “monsters.” These calls have been thoroughly documented (Law for Palestine, 2024).
The mechanisms of denial employed by Israelis are complex and varied. They even create a snowball effect, because the fear of the truth coming out fuels the fantasies of completing the genocide and eliminating all the witnesses. The terror of accountability contributes to the genocidal intent. As Israelis begin to realize that survivors will remain to testify, they pivot the strategy to seek an alibi, by blaming social media or by blaming AI. Threats of antisemitism are invented and inflated in order to deter Jewish Israelis from leaving. Finally, Israelis developed an efficient method to avoid reflecting on their crimes: blaming the victims.
An example is senior journalist Guy Rolnik, who produced a hastily assembled documentary series blaming social media for worldwide consciousness manipulation that convinced the world to adopt "the Hamas narrative." Rolnik conspicuously failed to explain how Hamas acquired resources to manipulate giant social media corporations such as Meta and X, which were later proven to have a strong pro-Israeli bias (Bassoumi, 2025). When Haaretz reports Israeli military atrocities, comment sections immediately accuse authors of being "Iranian bots." When Israelis face questions like "How can your brother kill civilians in Gaza?" they respond that he genuinely believes he only fights Hamas because social media manipulation has deceived him.
The second tool Israel has weaponized is artificial intelligence. Israel is the first state to use AI as a weapon of war, not just to assist in the navigation of drones or sorting through raw intelligence data, but in actually generating targets to bomb. The various AI tools: Lavender, The Gospel, The Alchemist, and Where's Daddy facilitated Israel’s processing of surveillance footage and rapidly generated targets for deadlier strikes. Yuval Avraham exposed these tools by speaking with Israeli intelligence officers (Avraham, 2023) but the question which his report did not answer is, what made the Israeli officers open up to Avraham? The main point which the officers tried to get across, is how easy the AI makes it for the soldiers to accept a target uncritically and squeeze the trigger, how the AI “convinces” them to eschew their doubts and drop a bomb in the honest belief that they are targeting a deserving enemy. Prof. Sebastian Ben-Daniel, who like Guy Rolnik is considered a “lefty” and “critical” Israeli, was even more convincing because of his alleged anti-establishment reputation when he claimed that the destruction of Gaza is, in fact, the fault of AI and not of the soldiers. The AI therefore offered a perfect alibi, and made it possible for Israelis to deny responsibility for the crimes they committed (Kodner, 2025a).
In order to stanch the hemorrhaging elite through emigration (see the fourth essay “the Israeli economy on the brink of collapse”), Israeli newspapers and officials spread fear of the growing wave of antisemitism in the world, up to the point that many Israelis are afraid to consider emigration. When Israeli hooligans rioted in Amsterdam in November 2024, Israeli media spun the incident as a "pogrom" orchestrated by antisemites (Abouh Shhadeh, 2-24). In his UN speech, Netanyahu referred to a Holocaust survivor “burnt to death in Colorado” in an antisemitic incident (Netanyahu, 2025), but the survivor, Barbara Steinmetz, is still alive (Hampton, 2025). In fact, the number of Jews killed in antisemitic incidents worldwide in 2023-2025 is less than 1 percent of the number of Jews killed in Palestine.
Finally, the phenomenon which has become known in social media as “every accusation is an admission,” Israeli propaganda has become doubly efficient by accusing Palestinians of the very crimes which Israel is committing against them. By switching the roles of perpetrator and victim, Israeli propaganda can simultaneously justify additional violence against Palestinians while denying responsibility for the crime. A strong example of this was the bombing of the Al-Ahli Hospital on October 17, 2023. Israel accused Palestinian Islamic Jihad of the attack, releasing an Arabic conversation allegedly intercepted from fighters' phones. The conversation was later exposed as fabricated—the speakers' accents were Lebanese, not Gazan (McAlpin & Ambri, 2023).
The term "hostages" used by Israel to refer only to the Israeli hostages held in Gaza is another example. While Hamas did take Israeli civilians hostage for negotiating their release, it also captured Israeli soldiers, and capturing combatants during warfare remains permissible under international law. Israel's systematic reference to all Israeli captives as "hostages" deliberately blurs the distinction between soldiers and civilians. Simultaneously, Israel has captured thousands of Palestinians, holding them without trial under horrific conditions, explicitly for negotiating their release—yet these Palestinians have never been designated "hostages."
When Israeli hostages were killed during captivity, they were reported as "murdered in captivity" even if the cause of death was hunger, disease or a bomb dropped by the Israeli air force. Conversely, at least 98 Palestinians were killed in Israeli prisons, suffering torture, starvation and denial of medical treatment, and the Israeli media never referred to those deaths as murders (Salman, 2025).
More from the Israe’s Zombie Economy Series
Part 2: The Counterrevolution of the Israeli Arms Industry
Part 3: Israel’s Breakdown into Tribes
Part 4: Is Israel’s Economy on the Verge of Collapse?
Part 5: The Disinformation Bubble
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