Gaza's 'luxury spa': How Israel creates a fantasy retreat to distract from genocide
“The only thing still forbidden to the soldiers here is to go wading in the surf at Gaza,” explained Ynet reporter Yoav Zitun, in an article on the leisure village Israel has set up for soldiers in Gaza.
Apart from the prohibited wading, it offers all the amenities: a physiotherapist to massage their legs and backs; popcorn and candy floss machines “like at the cinema and fairs”; a lounge room with a fixed menu that includes Belgian waffles and fresh pretzels; a spiritual corner with religious books and prayer accessories provided “in a positive spirit, without coercion”; indulgent breakfasts “like in a hotel”, and lunches and dinners of barbecued meats with “non-stop service”.
Annihilation, it turns out, is a tiring business.
After almost 15 months of a war of annihilation, with no end in sight, feelings of hatred and revenge apparently no longer provide sufficient adrenaline to counter the exhaustion and hardship of the long separation from home - the high financial cost, the distance from family.
So, the army devised the ingenious idea of remodelling wartime service in Gaza as a kind of luxurious vacation at an elite hotel.
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It's not a bad incentive for soldiers who seriously doubt that they could afford a comparable vacation in civilian life.
Ghost space
What do the soldiers see from the deluxe spa complex in the heart of the "killing valley"? In a place where children, thirsty for any drop of water, scavenge for the least bit of meat that survived the latest bombing? In a place where shattered parents search for their children under the rubble?
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In a place where mothers gather weeds and animal feed to assuage their children's hunger? In a place where abandoned dogs eat human body parts scattered about? What do the soldiers see while the sweet cotton candy melts on their lips?
In Gaza, it has long been impossible to be satisfied with simply erasing the Palestinians from sight; in Gaza, Israel must invent an entire alternate reality
I don't know what their actual eyes see, but I know that Zionism has always had an extraordinary talent for training its faithful to see only what serves its purposes while erasing everything else from sight.
Only in this way can “a people without a land” settle a “land without a people”.
But in Gaza, it has long been impossible to be satisfied with simply erasing the Palestinians from sight; in Gaza, Israel must invent an entire alternate reality.
For so many years, Israel has been steadily removing Gaza from the realm of human existence as we understand it.
Long before 7 October 2023, Gaza had become a kind of ghost space from the darkest corners of the collective Israeli psyche. A place whose very existence testifies to something so terrible about us that we must disguise this thing altogether, just so we don't have to look directly at it.
Action theme park
Dealing with it must always be beyond reality, because the reality we have created there is completely unfathomable.
We install binoculars on the hills overlooking Gaza so that children can insert a five-shekel coin and see columns of smoke billowing over the land.
We watch broadcast series, such as Fauda, that present Gaza to us as a kind of action theme park (while continuing to open the gates of hell onto its territory, almost annually), until reality morphs into the complete destruction of the civilisation that once existed there.
Then we are forced to establish a new pseudo-civilisation, with a popcorn machine and cotton candy and massages - and the more the reality itself darkens, the more colourful, carnival-like and fantastical the alternative reality must be made to seem.
And so soldiers sit in that killing valley, roasting and eating meat in their armed positions where the work never stops.
And they cannot identify what kind of charred meat they are smelling - whether the flesh of the barbecued animals brought there for their enjoyment, or the flesh of the bodies of the people at whose beaches the soldiers are forbidden to wade.
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