Israel - a very good interview series
Rachel Youdelman
Benny Beit-Hallahmi
14h ·
An excerpt from a Facebook post by Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham of No Other Land fame.
"In many conversations I've had with soldiers, they describe different methods they developed for burning houses in Gaza. One said they would collect pillows from the bedrooms and couch cushions from the living room, pile them in the center of the house, and then set them on fire. Another said they used to take cans of tuna, place them under furniture, and ignite them. And there was also the olive oil method.
"In every Arab home we entered, there was olive oil," said a soldier from the Nahal brigade. "We poured the oil on the couches, on anything flammable in the apartment, and then we lit it or threw in a smoke grenade. It was a common practice. We'd burn down the entire building." It has also become a very casual matter. One commander, holding his phone in one hand to send a video blessing to a friend who had just gotten married, was with his other hand pouring olive oil around an apartment. A soldier said they burned houses out of boredom.
None of this is new. The systematic burning of houses in Gaza has long since been replaced by a more 'efficient' destruction of entire cities with heavy machinery, strip by strip, through subcontractors who are paid by the number of floors, along with units of Hilltop Youth. Rafah no longer exists. Khan Younis is being annihilated as we speak.
And that sentence, "In every Arab home there was olive oil" - I keep thinking about it. About the use of oil that may once have been at the center of a family's daily life, now used to ignite and destroy everything they had in the world. The oil that expresses the Palestinian bond to this land becomes in our hands a tool of uprooting. The oil that we appropriated for ourselves as a symbol of 'Israeliness,' drizzled elegantly over Eyal Shani's cauliflower, with his partner Shahar Segal - who proudly did PR for Gaza's 'hunger centers' where, over the last six weeks, nearly a thousand starving people were slaughtered.
Before they burned them, soldiers told of family photo albums they found in the apartments, letters in drawers, children's toys, university textbooks. One soldier found the ID card of a woman born in Jaffa before 1948. Another saw scattered suitcases, clothes strewn across the floor, "as if people had just been there and fled in a hurry." Some houses were burned immediately. And some were lived in by soldiers for days or weeks, and only burned down at the end."
In the photo: Israeli soldiers in Gaza taking a souvenir photo of themselves after setting fire to a UN school. Posted some time in the first few months of the genocide (before January 8, 2024).
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