There is a Hebrew phrase that has been etched into Israeli culture and is perhaps one of its most authentic expressions. The phrase is yorim ve-bochim, or “shooting and crying,” and it has become a staple of Israeli cultural production. Its first iteration is dated to a novella written in the wake of the Zionist forces’ deliberate expulsion and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948, what we Palestinians call the Nakba. The novella Khirbet Khizeh, written by S. Yizhar and named after a fictional Palestinian village, follows a young soldier as he attempts both to belong fully to a unit tasked with “ethnically cleansing” the village and to grapple with guilt and moral uncertainty. The soldier decides to defer the reckoning to a later date, to finish the job and then do the emotional labor.

Over half a century, the genre has acquired its own conventions: it usually features a sensitive Israeli soldier who delivers an elegiac voiceover and admits to crimes only when the admission can no longer change anything. Yizhar’s novella itself played a big role in shaping the writing of a generation of Israeli authors, and many Israeli films, including Waltz with Bashir and The Law in These Parts, and even the sloppy Fauda. All of them feature elements of the “shooting and crying” trope.

These works are made by people who remained committed to the Zionist ideal of land and sovereign power exclusively for Jews, but who still struggled to mitigate the toll that a colonial project exacts on the “soul” of its agents, hardening their moral aptitude and producing a soulless, masculine, and unbothered militant figure. In many ways, one can read this genre as a fear of what they will become as they unleash violence and participate in the eradication and destruction of Palestinian life.

The Israeli confession here has become cruder and less sensitive, bearing all the fatigue of an army corps that relies on machines to do its thinking. The system is larger than any one of them: “I am only a cog in a larger machine.” At the outset, these statements could seem like self-justification, placed to advance the classic Israeli line in which one cries over what had to be done. But here the confession seems to ask something else: “Should I be sorry for enjoying what I have done?” It might be a genocide; it might, as one of the interviewees says, resemble the Nazis, but should one be sorry for feeling a sense of all-encompassing power?

The Israeli confession here seems less assured of its moral direction, incapable of exulting as the Ben-Gvirs do after they shoot, and equally incapable of the crying that the classic Israeli non-apology once offered. Today, these are confessions that speak of an addiction, and of a realization, among some of the anonymized figures we hear, that their addiction to mediated forms of killing, and their decision to “cleanse,” “clear,” “kill,” “snipe,” “maim,” and “destroy,” might be unhealthy.