There is no way of understanding the manner in which the Israel Defense Forces and Israeli society operated over the last two-and-a-half years without recognizing the fact that vengeance was part of the fuel that drove things. The destruction and killing in the Gaza Strip, the Jewish terror in the West Bank, the destruction of villages in southern Lebanon and the legislation of capital punishment have no logic other than the wish to take revenge.

If there were any doubts that revenge has become the official doctrine, along came the selection of Avraham Zarbiv – who became a culture hero due to acts of vengeance he carried out – for lighting a torch on Independence Day. As explained by journalist Yehuda Schlesinger on Channel 12: “We should have seen much more revenge there, with rivers of Gazan blood.” Broadcasters on Channel 14 were obsessed with vengeance. This also cropped up in sermons by rabbis, in interviews by politicians, in statements by the prime minister, who used the Biblical term Amalek, by the defense minister who talked about “human animals” and in the new hit wedding song, “May your village burn.”

Revenge isn’t something new in Israeli discourse. It underlaid the motivation for reprisal attacks in the 1950s, the demolition of the houses of the families of suicide bombers, the targeted and not-so-targeted assassinations. But until October 2023 and the current government, official Israel saw revenge as something to be condemned, not admitted publicly and definitely not boasted about. The beaten and humiliated Israel following the October 7 massacre felt a need to restore its self-confidence rapidly and recklessly, and the way to do this was to take revenge against the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. The result was killing, destruction, deliberate starvation and uprooting at an unprecedented scale in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Researcher Yagil Levy organized a conference three months ago dealing with revenge in the October 7 war. The conference was held at the Institute for the Study of Civil-Military Relations at the Open University. The usual censors on the right tried to prevent it from taking place, but the university, with courage not to be taken for granted these days, insisted on going ahead with it.

They videotaped themselves spraying graffiti, demolishing houses, abusing prisoners, as part of a vengeance discourse, but no less so as an act of defiance against their commanders. “Instead of erasing the graffiti, let’s erase Gaza,” wrote one soldier on a wall in Gaza after his commanders told him to erase the messages. The fact that revenge served as an expression of identity and a source of military motivation made it hard for senior commanders to uproot this phenomenon.

Revenge, as opposed to reprisal or punitive measures, is not supposed to balance out the preceding sin, said another expert at the conference, Dr. Ariel Handel from the Bezalel Academy of Arts. It doesn’t suffice with an eye for an eye, but demands many eyes for one eye. The revenge song that’s become almost an official anthem in recent years in religious-Zionist circles is called “Remember me.” It is based on the words “for one eye one can kill thousands of Philistines,” Handel said.

Handel and others pointed to a problem with the concept, holding that revenge alone shaped the image of this war. Revenge, Handel argued, “has an endpoint. There is a stage at which you say: I’ve shown you, and the account is closed.” But in Gaza, it seemed that the account was never settled. On the contrary, the more we took revenge, the more we wanted to continue destroying. Revenge alone, Handel said, cannot explain the extent and systematic way destruction was carried out in Gaza.

To understand this, argued Prof. Sara Helman from Ben Gurion University, one needs to use the concept of “permanent security” coined by the genocide researcher Dirk Moses. This was the basis of most genocidal acts throughout history. “Permanent security” is the idea that there is a need to nullify and efface any hint of threat, real or imaginary. According to this approach, an entire population, including women and children, is perceived as a permanent threat to the security of a dominant group – “there are no innocent people in Gaza,” some said.

The best example of this logic is a statement by panelist Stella Weinstein on Channel 13, who said that a baby in Gaza is akin to a “terrorist in an incubator.”

Revenge and the concept of “permanent security” merged into an unbridled war in Gaza. Chasing revenge and permanent security is a recipe for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. But this chase almost always harms the quality of life and security of the attacking side.

One can see this in the deceptive war with Iran and Hezbollah. Chasing after the last launcher, carrying out a Sisyphean effort to kill more and more military and political figures and destroying villages in Lebanon did not contribute a thing to the security of Israelis. It seems that they only bolstered extremist elements and their resolve to arm themselves.

Movie theaters have recently been screening a new version of Quentin Tarantino’s revenge movie “Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.” It’s four-and-a-half cathartic hours of justified revenge. But in the first scene, Tarantino planted a little girl who witnesses her mother’s murder as part of the revenge saga. When you grow up, if the wound in your heart is still fresh, I’ll be waiting for you, says the avenger (Uma Thurman). “The problem with revenge is the cycle of revenge,” Handel noted. “There is a sense of closure and then a surprise when the avenger suddenly realizes that someone is taking revenge against him.”