As a former IDF soldier and genocide historian, I was deeply troubled by my recent visit to Israel.

This summer, one of my lectures was challenged by far-right students. Their rhetoric recalled some of the darkest moments in 20th-century history and shockingly overlapped with mainstream Israeli views.

On June 19, 2024, I was scheduled to give a lecture at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) in Beersheba, Israel. My lecture was part of an event focusing on the anti-Israel protests on campuses around the world. I had planned to address the war in Gaza and, more broadly, the question of whether these protests were sincere expressions of outrage or motivated by anti-Semitism, as some had claimed. But things did not go as planned.

As I arrived at the entrance to the lecture hall, I saw a group of students gathering. It soon became clear that they were not there to attend the event but to protest against it. The students had apparently been summoned by a WhatsApp message sent the day before, which announced the conference and called for action: “We will not allow this! How much longer are we going to betray ourselves?!?!?!?!!”

Offer says that to him, every child is a child, whether in Gaza or here. I don’t feel the same way. Our children here are more important to me. There is a shocking humanitarian catastrophe there, I understand that, but my heart is blocked and filled with our children and our hostages… There is no room in my heart for the children of Gaza, as shocking and terrifying as it is and even though I know that war is not the solution.

I listen to Maoz Inon, who lost both his parents (assassinated by Hamas on October 7)… and who speaks so beautifully and so convincingly about the need to look to the future, the need to bring hope and want peace, because wars will lead to nothing, and I agree with him. I agree with him, but I can’t find the strength in my heart, with all my leftist inclinations and love for humanity, I can’t… It’s not just Hamas, it’s all Gazans who agree that it’s okay to kill Jewish children, that it’s a worthy cause… With Germany, there was a reconciliation, but they apologized and paid reparations, and what’s going to happen here? We too have done terrible things, but nothing that comes close to what happened here on October 7. We will have to reconcile, but we need some distance.

Yesterday morning, Ro’i was murdered. Dazzled by the calm of the morning, he did not see those who were waiting for him in ambush at the edge of the furrow. Let us not today make accusations against the murderers. Why should we blame them for their burning hatred towards us? For eight years, they have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza, while before their eyes, we have transformed the land and the villages where they and their ancestors had lived into our property.

We must not seek the blood of the King from the Arabs of Gaza, but from ourselves. How did we close our eyes and not face our fate, did we not face the mission of our generation in all its cruelty? Have we forgotten that this group of young people, who live in Nahal Oz, carry on their shoulders the heavy gates of Gaza, on the other side of which crowd hundreds of thousands of eyes and hands that pray for our moment of weakness, so that they can tear us apart – have we forgotten?…