Amit Segal Responds to Ilana Dayan

After a monolgue by Channel 12's Ilana Dayan, Amit Segal responded in his Israel Hayom weekly column:

Oiy Ilana Dayan

"Ilana Dayan was not the first to cause a stir in the middle of a war when she called for "not to normalize the death around us and insist on sanctifying life." She was preceded, albeit in a novel and not in an investigative program, by the writer S.Y. Agnon:

'A lot of things are happening and going on, every day Jews are killed, secretly and publicly, and every day the newspapers are decorated with black decorations. At first, when we would see a black stripe in the newspaper and read that an Israeli had been killed, we put down our dinner.

'Now that troubles are here, a man sits at his table and eats his fat with butter and honey, reading and saying – Another Jew was killed. Another Jewish woman was killed, another baby from Israel was killed.' 

My friend Ilana's words are worthy of discussion and not insults: 'I want to dedicate the last two minutes of our broadcast to human life. While our screens are being flooded with airstrikes and assassinations, while the Prime Minister is telling how he is once again removing an existential threat that he has already declared has been removed and is once again changing the face of the Middle East, in an apartment in the heart of Ramat Gan an Israeli couple was sitting the other day.

"When the alarm went off, he was probably trying to get to the walker, maybe it was waiting for him and they didn't have time to get to the shelter. The missile hit and both were killed, the mayor and the Home Front Command representative scolded the dead for not following the instructions... The responsibility should be left with those in the government who approved attack plans but forgot to check protection plans for those who have no chance of getting to the shelter in time or who have no shelter at all.' 

I will return to the rest of the monologue, but it is important to note one fundamental difference between Ilana and Agnon. He attributed the normalization of death to weakness in the face of the enemy: "And we sit with our hands clasped and surrender ourselves to killing and say, 'Restraint, restraint.' They kill and murder and burn, and we sit and restrain ourselves."

While Dayan hinted that the source of the indifference is precisely in the excessive enthusiasm of Eli Kareb: "The responsibility should be left with those who take us out to a war within a war within a war. They shoot videos full of excitement and announce that a superpower has arisen here that hits hard and always wins." And this is precisely where the disagreement lies, not only with Agnon but also with little me, with the claim. Because the opposite of the current war is not peace; the opposite is an even more bitter war in the future. After all, this was exactly the justified argument against Netanyahu after October 7: Why did you let the monster grow stronger on our borders instead of acting against it? Obviously, no one is under the illusion that in such a preventive war there would be no victims, perhaps two adults from Ramat Gan who did not have time to reach the protected area, perhaps twenty. Would that have turned such a war into something that the officers "took us out to," a hint at a war of permission to come, a war of luxury to come, perhaps a war of deception?

And in general, this is not a "war within a war within a war." Elhanan Kalmanzon, an Israeli hero who fell in Be'eri on the morning of October 8 while rescuing kibbutzniks, certainly not a sign of neglect and indifference towards human life, wrote to his wife years before: 'If I die as a martyr in the war for the land, I ask that they remember that this is not another war or intifada, this is the same long war for our country and the identity of our people that has been going on for almost a hundred and fifty years.'

'Yaron and Ilana from Ramat Gan will no longer win, and neither will we," Dayan added, "if on the way to crushing the axis of evil, we forget what we came together for. If we become indifferent to the weak and to human life... If we become equal to the lives of the children Yaakov, Sarah, and Abigail from Beit Shemesh and Amit from Petach Tikva. Human life, every human. Also the lives of Ali Wa'ad from the village of Tamon and their young children, Muhammad and Othman. They did not die from an Iranian missile, but from Israeli fire. They were on their way home earlier this week after shopping for the holiday and an undercover force sprayed their vehicle, killing all four of them. You can hear the fighters say they felt threatened, but then you have to see the look in the eyes of the child who saw his parents and siblings being shot before his eyes. Stay with him for a moment and not normalize the death around us and insist on sanctifying life. There is no more complete victory than that.'

I too would have liked to dwell more broadly on the deaths of Yaron and Ilana, or Mary Ann, or the murdered Beit Shemesh children. It seems to me that there is a discussion here about aesthetics and journalism, disguised as a discussion about morality. There is not a lack of caring in the country, but a lack of attention. Already in Tractate Berakhot it is written that "last troubles make one forget the first," and as we know, there has been no shortage of troubles lately.

As for the Palestinian family killed by undercover fire due to mistaken identification, it seems that the veiled claim is not merely a condemnation of the neglect but rather hints at the responsibility of Israeli society, a kind of causing death out of collective indifference due to too-light orders to open fire.

Clearly, the claim is not about forgetting the unfortunate children but about the shooting party, Israel. After all, last week, three Palestinian women were murdered by an Iranian missile in a bridal salon near Hebron, and to this day we don't even know their names. Gideon Levy and Amira Hess didn't bother to visit the village of Amal, Mays, and Sahira until the issue closed, and haven't written a heartbreaking article about them until now. Palestinians are only interesting in their deaths if there is an Israeli to blame for them. If we're going to mention forgotten names, shouldn't we remember them too?"

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