The multitudes who came out to demonstrate around the world demanded more than an end to the genocide in Gaza, they also spoke up about Apartheid and Occupation. The movement has not gone away. Demonstration in New York, August 2025 (Photo: Pamela Drew / CC BY-NC 4.0)

Why do they keep boycotting us? Because we committed genocide

Right after Trump imposed a ceasefire, Israelis were confident that everything was returning to normal in entertainment, in sports, in everything. They are disappointed to hear that the world is in no hurry to forget

By **Orly Noy • Translated by [Sol Salbe](https://www.facebook.com/sol.salbe)**

It seems that the ceasefire agreement that was forced on Netanyahu, and which the top brass of the US administration had to make their way over here to babysit its implementation, was a signal for the Israeli public that the madness was over. The captives were returning, the war is ending, we can put this nightmare behind us and return to normal — at least when it comes to our relations with the world. No longer lepers, no more rejected and outcasts, we will be able to renew our days as before and be welcomed again at tourist sites, world sports leagues, academic conferences, international art stages, and more.

Therefore, how great was the surprise when it became clear that the ceasefire was not a magic wand that returned Israel and Israelis to the bosom of humanity after two years of genocide, and that the boycott did not dissipate only because we were forced — for now, at least — to stop the systematic extermination of the people of Gaza.

So for example, Shai Ringel is astonished in Haaretz that “Musicians’ boycott against Israel only grows despite Gaza Ceasefire.” Inbal Hayat reports in Israel Hayom that “Despite the ceasefire: Javier Bardem calls for continued boycott of cinema from Israel.” Good Heavens: It turns out that the ceasefire failed to even restore our natural and innate right to participate in the Eurovision Song Contest without being threatened with boycotts.

The bewilderment, not to mention the insult, that the world is not rushing to embrace us back following the ceasefire indicates that in the past two years, the vast majority of the Israeli public has disconnected not only from humanity’s mothership, but also from reality itself. It is true that since its establishment, the State of Israel has been granted by the world an all-encompassing licence to abuse the Palestinians in an infinite variety of ways, and it has only rarely been required to curb its violence or pay a price for it.

But the noxious madness that has gripped Israel in the past two years cannot be summed up as “another round of violence” and expected that after it, business will return to normal. This very expectation indicates the extent to which the Israeli public lacks the most basic tools to understand the reality of its life, and the meaning and consequences of the choices it has been making. Therefore, it is also unable to see, let alone understand, the abysmal chasm between its own self-image and the way Israel and Israelis are viewed today in the world.

While the Israeli public was immersed up to its neck in the victim narrative and continued to relive October 7 every day, the world watched live a genocide which has been unprecedented in its cruelty this century. It saw children suffering and dying from hunger, and a campaign of destruction that surpassed in its barbaric destruction even the destruction caused by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It saw everything that the Israeli media avoided showing the public lest the spectacles displease it, or worse — lest it arouse in it heretical reflections regarding the justification of the extermination.

But during these two years, something else happened: the millions who watched the horrors of Gaza and took to the streets around the world understood that a country and a society do not become genocidal following a single event, no matter how criminal it was. In a sense, the Genocide in Gaza forced the world to address the roots of the profound dehumanisation that allowed one people to massacre another, and to confront the nature of this murderous regime, which is inherently built on violent oppression, dispossession, and slaughter of the Palestinian people.

The multitudes who came out to demonstrate not only demanded an end to the Genocide in Gaza, but also raised issues that had been silenced for years by Israel’s partners and supporters around the world, such as the Apartheid regime that Israel established in all the territories it controls between the River and the Sea, such as the Nakba that has been ongoing since 1948, such as the lie of “Jewish democratic” that Israel managed to sell to the world as the absolute truth and has been exposed in all its shame in these two years, and more. These issues did not disappear with the ceasefire, and rightly so.

While it is true that from the perspective of governments and official bodies around the world, the end of the war allows for a renewal of Israel’s normalisation as if nothing had happened, including billion-dollar arms deals and the return of the Euroleague games to Israel, Israel is light years away from the status it enjoyed before the genocide in Gaza, and rightly so; it is enough to see the report by Ta’ayush activists on the events of the past week alone, and only in the area of ​​Masafar Yatta, to understand how much violence has become the most intimate feature of this abnormal state. The expectation that the world at large, which has finally revealed its conscience, will simply ignore all of this because Israel was forced to sign a ceasefire that it is also not maintaining, and is still concerned that Gaza will continue to die in agony, is an almost absurd audacity. The Israeli public still does not want to and is unable to digest this, but over the past two years Israel has committed a horrific genocide in Gaza, monstrous in its proportions. It did so with the overwhelming support of its Jewish citizens, and often with demonstrable joy. No ceasefire agreement will erase this stain from us. Instead of getting angry about the continued boycott of us, it is better for us to acknowledge, truly acknowledge, what we have done. From there, the long process of rehabilitation that awaits us can begin, only at the end of which it will be possible to return to the bosom of humanity.

Translated from Hebrew by **Sol Salbe, [Middle East News Service](https://www.facebook.com/sol.salbe)**

Mekomit (Local Call) Hebrew original:

https://www.mekomit.co.il/למה-ממשיכים-להחרים-אותנו-כי-ביצענו-רצח/