Gideon Levy: The crowing of a rooster in Gaza is more truthful than all the Israeli victory speeches.

Prominent leftist writer Gideon Levy attacked the celebratory atmosphere inside the Knesset (parliament) following the end of the war, describing it as a "festival of arrogance and flattery," criticizing the indifference of politicians and Israeli society to the suffering of Palestinians and the destruction inflicted by the war machine on the Gaza Strip.

In his article in Haaretz, he wrote that everything that happened to Israel over the past two years was embodied all at once on the eve of the country's Sukkot celebrations. Levy described those celebrations as the peak of "flattery, self-love, arrogance, and collective denial, mixed with the 'ecstasy of releasing prisoners' and a flood of self-praise and boasting."

He added that while Israelis were rejoicing, hundreds of thousands of Palestinian families were wandering among the rubble, returning to "non-homes," and hundreds of released Palestinian prisoners were discovering that their loved ones had been killed in the bombardment, yet the local media completely ignored them, just as it ignored Gaza during the war and turns a blind eye to it in peace.

He mocked this neglect, as if the Israeli media did not see Palestinian prisoners as human beings, to the extent that it did not show a picture of that released prisoner returning to Gaza only to find that his wife and children had been killed in the bombardment.

The writer harshly criticized opposition leader Yair Lapid for exonerating Israel from the charge of genocide and starving civilians, reminding readers of former Defense Minister Yoav Galant's statements at the beginning of the war, where he explicitly declared that Israel would prevent electricity, water, and food from reaching Gaza.

He noted that no one in the Knesset noticed that everyone was preoccupied with glorifying themselves and their "feudal lord" (referring to U.S. President Donald Trump). Even in such moments, no one showed any real opposition except for the members of the Joint List representing Arab Israelis, "who were of course expelled from the hall."

Levy believes that the absence of an apology or acknowledgment of guilt in the Knesset turned the occasion into a "disgusting" scene, pointing out that Israel would have appeared stronger had it acknowledged its crimes and shown moral responsibility towards its victims.

In his words, Israel would have had strength if it had acted differently, instead of echoing Yair Lapid's habitual "arrogance," who described Palestinian fighters as "terrorists sending their children" to death, as if Yahya Sinwar was the one piloting the warplane that mercilessly slaughtered Gaza's children.

He concluded his article with a scene from the Nuseirat camp, where suddenly the crowing of a rooster was heard during an interview conducted by France Radio with a journalist from that area in the middle of the Gaza Strip. The rooster's crowing drowned out the sound of the bombardment, which Levy considered more worthy of celebration than all those false victory speeches combined, delivered by Trump and Knesset members that day.