“The only thing that is still forbidden for soldiers here is to go swimming in the waves of Gaza,” Ynet reporter Yoav Zitun wrote in an article about the leisure village that Israel has established for soldiers in Gaza. explained in.
There are all kinds of amenities aside from water play, which is prohibited. A physical therapist will massage your legs and back. The popcorn and cotton candy machines are “like a movie theater or a fair.” A lounge room with a fixed menu of Belgian waffles and freshly baked pretzels. A spiritual corner with religious books and prayer accessories will be provided “in a non-coercive and positive spirit”. Luxurious “hotel-like” breakfast, and “non-stop service” featuring barbecued meat lunches and dinners.
After all, annihilation is hard work.
After almost 15 months of an endless war of annihilation, feelings of hatred and revenge are not enough to counter the fatigue and hardship of a long separation from home, the high financial costs and distance from family. It’s like they can’t supply adrenaline anymore.
So the military devised an ingenious idea to transform wartime service in Gaza into a kind of luxury vacation at an elite hotel.
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This is not a bad incentive for soldiers who seriously doubt they can afford equivalent vacation time in civilian life.
ghost space
What do the soldiers see from the luxurious spa complex in the heart of “Killing Valley”? A place where children, thirsty for even a drop of water, scavenge for the little bit of meat that survived the recent bombings? A place where devastated parents search for their children under the rubble?
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Is it a place where mothers gather weeds and animal food to appease their children’s hunger? Where abandoned dogs are eating human body parts? What will the soldiers see as the sweet cotton candy melts on their lips?
For a long time, Gaza has not been content to simply remove Palestinians from view. In Gaza, Israel has to invent a completely different reality
We don’t know what they actually see, but Zionism has always had an uncanny ability to train its followers to see only what serves its purpose, and to erase everything else from view. I know that there was.
Only in this way can “landless peoples” settle in “land without peoples.”
But in Gaza, it has long been no longer content to simply remove Palestinians from view. In Gaza, Israel has to invent an entirely different reality.
As we understand, Israel has been steadily eliminating Gaza from the realm of human presence for many years.
Long before October 7, 2023, Gaza had become a kind of ghost space from the darkest corners of the Israeli collective psyche. This place, by its very existence, proves something terrible to us, so we must hide this thing completely so that we don’t have to see it directly.
action theme park
Dealing with it must always be beyond reality. Because the reality we have created there is absolutely unfathomable.
As we approach 2025, the greatest celebration we can hope for is to end the Israeli genocide.
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We set up binoculars on a hill overlooking Gaza so that when children put in a five-shekel coin, they could see a plume of smoke rising across the earth.
We watch broadcast series like Fauda, which shows Gaza as some kind of action theme park (while continuing to open the gates of hell to the territory almost every year), only to see reality descend into complete destruction of its former civilization. I watched it until it changed shape. It existed there.
And we are forced to establish a new pseudo-civilization, complete with popcorn machines and cotton candy and massages – and the darker reality itself becomes, the more colorful, carnival-like, and fantastical the alternate reality becomes. must be visible.
And while the soldiers sit in that valley of murder, grilling and eating meat in their armed positions, the work never stops there.
And they wonder what kind of burnt meat they’re smelling, whether it’s the meat of an animal roasted on a barbecue brought in to enjoy, or whether it’s the smell of an animal the soldiers were forbidden to walk on. People on the beach are unable to identify the flesh of their bodies.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Middle East Eye’s editorial policy.
