My paternal grandmother was born in Poland and died in 2009, at the age of 94. My maternal grandfather was born in Baghdad and died in 2021, at 95. Despite the distance between their worlds, they shared something essential: both grew up Jewish in places where they were marked as outsiders. They lived as persecuted minorities, always under the shadow of death, always aware of what it meant to face annihilation. And in the end, both died in Israel, carrying deep disappointment in their hearts for what their country had become.
My grandmother’s entire family was murdered by the Nazis during World War II. Many of my grandfather’s relatives and friends were killed in the Farhud pogrom of 1941, when mobs—civilians and policemen among them—slaughtered Baghdad’s Jewish community. For what reason? Simply for being Jewish.
Both of my grandparents carried one conviction: only a Jewish state, capable of defending Jewish lives, could promise a future.
They were both atheists and did not observe religious laws or attend synagogue. They viewed religious institutions as corrupt, hungry for power and control. My grandfather, in fact, had been a Marxist communist in his youth in Iraq.
Still, they remained profoundly Jewish—perhaps because of the violence they endured for that identity, perhaps because of the traditions and customs they cherished.
Both immigrated to Israel out of hope for the revival of the Jewish people. Their Zionism was not born of hatred for others, nor of any wish to expel the Palestinians from the land. It sprang instead from a deep need for belonging and safety.
After two thousand years of exile, they built a family in Israel—the land generations had prayed to return to. And yet both died bitterly disappointed in the very state they had longed for, fought for, and prayed for.
My grandmother was a young nurse during the 1948 war, experiencing its full force as the Arab states refused to recognise Israel, called for its destruction, and condemned both Palestinians and Israelis to endless conflict. My grandfather fought in the brutal Six-Day War. My mother still remembers Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president, threatening to throw all the Jewish people into the sea.
And what was my grandparents’ disappointment? It was the violence, the occupation, and the profound failure of the Jewish people to recognise a basic truth: the horrors of the world, however cruel, do not justify unleashing violence on other people—the Palestinians. They do not justify the occupation, the domination of another nation, or, above all, the inability of Israelis—the Jewish State—to see Palestinians, Muslims, and Christians alike, as equal human beings in every sense of the word.
Their disillusionment deepened with Israel’s inability to produce a truly enlightened leader who could guide the country toward peace. They wept when former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the peace process were assassinated in 1995 by a Right-wing Israeli extremist. It cleared the path for a violent, racist, extremist Right-wing to seize power in Israel.
My grandfather railed against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—the man who incited against peace and Rabin, and who, despite facing trial since 2020 on charges of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust, still clings to power.
More than anything, my grandparents saw how the vision of Israel—a State founded to provide security for the Jewish people—was failing to do so. They saw how violence, from within and outside, repeatedly shook the country, fueled by arrogance and religious messianism.
Now they are both gone. At times, I feel it is for the better. What would they have said about these past two years—the relentless violence, the hardening of hearts, the shame, the failure?
I no longer live in Israel. I am an Associate Professor of India Studies at O.P. Jindal Global University, living in Sonipat near Delhi with my Indian husband and our two daughters.
Perhaps the vision—still recent in historical terms—the dream of a safe haven for the Jewish people, a flourishing place of justice and wisdom, of learning and spirit, is already collapsing in my own lifetime, just three generations on.
Israelis fight for democracy
On 7 October 2023, we were living in my mother’s house in Tel Aviv’s Holon—a city like Noida. I was eight months pregnant, after more than two long years of fertility treatments. My eldest daughter, just five years old, was asleep beside me. It was a Saturday.
For the past year, Saturday nights in Israel had been devoted to mass protests against the government’s judicial “reform,” widely seen as an attempt to weaken the courts and concentrate power in the hands of Netanyahu. It was a battle over the democratic identity of Israel.
We marched in hundreds of thousands. We blocked highways and airports, disrupting the economy itself, warning the government: we are here, and we will not let you remake the country. Reservists and fighter pilots threatened to refuse service if the reform passed, drawing a clear line— we will not serve under a State that is no longer democratic.
Many were arrested on those Saturdays. Mounted police charged into crowds. Water cannons blasted demonstrators. Police violence became routine.
My entire family—siblings, uncles, cousins—joined the protests. My brother’s partner was arrested twice, violently, on trumped-up charges. Yet the movement was organised and resilient, with volunteer lawyers arriving every week to secure the release of detainees.
It was a year of proud resistance—one of the largest and most significant protest movements Israel had ever seen. And it worked. We frightened the government, forcing it to retreat and scale down its plans.
Alongside those protests, a new voice began to rise: a few thousand people marching for Palestinian rights—the anti-occupation bloc. Arab and Jewish people together were demanding justice for all. There was a sense of awakening.
On 7 October, yet another Saturday, I knew what I would do. I would join the protest—against the government, against the judicial coup, against the occupation.
But everything changed that day.
Day 1 of horror
At 6:30 am, we woke to the sound of sirens. In Israel, such warnings of incoming rockets are nothing unusual. We are used to them, live alongside them, and our children are trained to run to shelters. So even though I was heavily pregnant, and the shelter was in the basement while we lived on the fourth floor of an old building without an elevator, we grabbed our five-year-old daughter and rushed downstairs.
For hours, we had no idea what was happening—only that we were under attack. The alarms didn’t stop, and the news was slow to arrive.
Later that day, the scale began to emerge: 1,163 people murdered—civilians, children, women, infants—in their own homes. Women and men were raped, and 251 people, including babies, the elderly, foreign nationals, Muslim citizens of Israel, and soldiers, were abducted and taken into Gaza. Some were killed after capture, others eventually released, and many remain in captivity even two years later. Dozens of towns and villages were destroyed or left in ruins. At the Nova music festival, unspeakable brutality unfolded. Messages poured in from friends and acquaintances, desperate for news of their loved ones.
We were deeply, viscerally afraid. In a world so thoroughly documented, the horrors surrounded us; reports of the violence were more visual, more immediate than ever before. It was unbearable. Everyone understood at once: Israel was heading into another war with Hamas—not the first, but one that would go to the bitter end.
Seven months after 7 October, we left Israel.
Netanyahu’s agenda
In the first weeks of the war, many believed it was just. Even Israel’s Left faltered in the face of the global Left’s silence, its inability to condemn such brutal violence against civilians. We kept asking: why couldn’t the world simply say, “We support a Palestinian state, but we condemn murderous violence against civilians, women, and children”?
For a brief moment, Israelis seemed united by a shared sense of mortal danger. Those who had spent a year protesting the judicial overhaul now mobilised overnight—donating time, money, and resources to survivors of the massacres, to shelter the displaced, to keep Israel’s fragile home front standing. For a moment, there was solidarity. In the face of a catastrophic government failure and paralysed leadership, Israelis stood together.
I was still pregnant, fearful for the tiny baby inside me and for the little girl by my side. And I kept thinking: what about another pregnant mother in Gaza? What about her children? She had no shelter. No defense system to protect her from Israeli bombs. How did she manage to breathe, to endure? I remember the physical ache that came with those thoughts, as I climbed and descended four flights of stairs, in and out of the shelter, again and again.
After the birth of my second daughter, when we came back from the hospital, we had barely reached my mother’s front door before another siren sent us back down. It was in the shelter, not at home, that our neighbours first congratulated us on the baby’s arrival.
The near-total support among Israeli citizens for the war in Gaza began to crack only a few weeks later. First came the familiar voices of the Left—those who had spent decades warning about the crimes Israel was committing in the occupied territories: B’Tselem, Combatants for Peace, Yesh Din, Breaking the Silence, and others. Their calls were met with hostility by the broader public.
By the summer of 2024, though, everything had changed. The families of the hostages realised that rescuing their loved ones was not on the Israeli government’s agenda. It became clear that the war served the government. A government that should have resigned in disgrace after the failures of 7 October—and at the very least apologised—was still clinging to power, waging a war without goals, without a political horizon, with no will to end it.
The motives for the ongoing war were no longer clear. Was it the Prime Minister’s desire to escape his corruption trial? Or the far Right’s dream of conquering Gaza and rebuilding the settlements evacuated in 2005?
So we went back to the streets. Alongside the families of hostages, we shouted, marched, demanded: end the war, bring them home now. Once again, Saturday nights filled Tel Aviv. We marched to Jerusalem, blocked roads, and stood outside Netanyahu’s residence.
In the past two years, some of the largest protests in Israel drew nearly half a million people to the streets.
But the war dragged on. The death toll in Gaza climbed higher. And many hostages were never freed.
Context behind Israel’s war
A Buddhist story tells of a man attacked by a tiger in the forest. He fights back and kills the tiger with a gun. At first, the blame seems obvious—the tiger, the dangerous aggressor. But then other questions arise: what was the man doing in the forest? And why was he armed in the first place?
Israel has argued that in the face of such brutal violence, there can be no talk of context. But of course, there can.
There are the failed policies of the Israeli State: the settlements, and the inevitable violence that comes with military rule over civilians. The system of separation and control in the West Bank, which many see as apartheid. The deliberate weakening of the Palestinian Authority while simultaneously maintaining—and even channeling—funds to Hamas, cultivating it for decades, all alongside the long-standing blockade of Gaza. And Israel’s repeated choice of nationalist Right-wing governments. All of these form the context.
But so do the choices of others. Arab states, the Palestinian people, and Hamas also bear responsibility for the ongoing violence. That is part of the context as well.
And then there is the silence in the Israeli media about the occupied territories; Israeli indifference to the fate of Palestinians; the political preference for “managing the conflict” rather than making the difficult choices required for peace. All of these, too, are context.
Double silence in Israel
Living in India, I found myself a bystander to the ongoing war — living in a bubble, teaching Indian philosophy and lived religion, mounting exhibitions, writing, and watching from afar.
When I try to name what I feel, three words come up: anger, shame, and pain.
My Israeli colleagues from Black Flag in Academia wrote on 31 August 2025:
“There is no end in sight to the killing, starvation, and destruction Israel has imposed on Gaza; to the ethnic cleansing and terrible violence of the army and settlers in the West Bank; to the abuse of Palestinian prisoners; and to the unprecedented silencing of Palestinians—and increasingly also of Jews—in Israel. Fragile moments of hope that the war and the destruction will end, that everyone will return home, shatter again and again.”
More than 67,000 have died in Gaza, including 20,000 children. One hundred and seventy thousand wounded. Thousands missing. And these are the cautious estimates.
And me? I sit stunned in front of Israeli television. There, genocide is not happening. In Gaza, only empty buildings fall. There is no transfer of populations—only faceless masses reduced to numbers, moving endlessly from place to place. The people of Gaza long ago stopped being seen as “human.” They are portrayed only as an existential enemy in Netanyahu’s State.
Meanwhile, life in Israel goes on. People celebrate holidays, go out to cafés, attend weddings, and shop in malls. And yet it is not the same. Everyone feels it: the heaviness, the grief.
Dead soldiers, and wounded bodies, and minds are there in every family. By some estimates, 50,000 soldiers now suffer from psychological trauma, 20,000 are physically wounded, and more than 50 have taken their own lives—though official figures remain unclear. Israel is a small country, scarred and broken.
Eighteen-year-olds who have spent two years raining fire on a civilian population—how do they return home from that? And reservist fathers: how do you aim a weapon at children, women, the elderly, the hungry, and then go back to your own kids, to work, to ordinary life?
You cannot open the gates of hell just two hours from Tel Aviv, an hour and a half from Jerusalem, and expect the whole country not to be swallowed up.
Above all, Israeli society is gripped by a collective denial of what is happening in Gaza. As Dr. Amnon Yuval, senior lecturer at the Kibbutzim College of Education, Israel, has written, it is a “double silence”: silence about the deeds themselves, and silence about the silence.
Many of my close friends and family, who oppose the regime and the occupation, speak of a kind of learned helplessness — the sense that every effort is futile. And yet, they also feel like unwilling collaborators in the crimes of the state, bound to the very system they can no longer defend.
Even the protest has become complicated. What do you march for? The release of the Israeli hostages—and with it, an end to the war? Or an end to the war and the genocide in Gaza—and with it, the release of the hostages? In today’s Israel, there will not be mass demonstrations for the starving and dying children of Gaza.
Yes, there is still a small core who persist—holding up pictures of Palestinian children, calling for immediate justice, demanding an end to the slaughter in Gaza. A movement of refusal is growing too, among both conscripts and reservists. But they are still too few.
The silence, in the end, will break. Truth always has a way of surfacing. And then what? What will happen the day after? What will become of Israeli society? What of the people of Gaza? What of all of us?
Also read: Thank Qatar for Hamas’ response to Trump’s Gaza help. Doha got a new security umbrella
End the occupation
In recent weeks, several Western states—including the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Spain, and others—have declared recognition of a Palestinian state. How does that help them? How does it help us?
I write these lines as a plea to India, to the world: stop the war in Gaza. Stop Israel’s assault. End the occupation.
Despite the large and courageous protest movement inside Israel, it does not seem able to derail this train of horrors. It is not enough for the war to end. Palestinians need a State of their own.
The world can act—but not with empty declarations. What is needed now is courage. Not symbolic, easy boycotts of culture, the arts, or academia, but real pressure—on the Israeli economy and the arms trade. Not forever—now. Say it clearly: what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) must end, and it must end now.
Please. For the people of Gaza and all Palestine, and no less, for Israelis too. Perhaps then we may still have a chance to be saved.
Dr. Michal Riva Erlich is an Associate Professor at the Jindal School of International Affairs and Associate Director of the Jindal India Institute. Her research explores lived religion, well-being, and healing practices in contemporary India. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)