Israel and Gaza

by David Bernell and Ambassador Thomas Graham (Retired)

On October 7, 2023, the state of Israel was attacked by Hamas, which unleashed horrific violence against Israel, killing over a thousand people in grisly cruelty and viciousness, and taking hundreds of people hostage, transporting them back to Gaza. This was not an attack against Israel’s military forces, but an attack on civilians. This day involved the greatest number of deaths of Jewish people since the Holocaust. It was and remains a traumatic event for people in Israel and Jews around the world.

The leaders of Hamas knew that Israel would have a fierce and violent response to October 7. That was the point. The whole world knew this, and the Israelis have done exactly what others expected them to do, as an attack like this could not go without a major response. Since October 7 Israel has unleashed massive levels of violence in Gaza. The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, has stated that the policy of Israeli is for the Israeli Defense Forces to completely destroy Hamas as a political and military force. However, Hamas and its members and leaders are spread throughout Gaza, elusive and hidden, with some still holding Israeli hostages in underground tunnels. What this has meant in effect is that pretty much all of Gaza has been targeted by Israel.

The level of destruction in Gaza is unlike anything Israel has previously carried out against any of its enemies. Most buildings in Gaza have been bombed. Almost two million people have been displaced from their homes, many of which have also been destroyed in bombing. Over 62,000 people in Gaza have died, most of them civilians, including an estimated 14,000 children, and the level of suffering is immense. It can safely be said that few, if any, of these people in Gaza have had any sympathy for Israel, but it is also clear that the vast majority of those who have been impacted have had nothing to do with Hamas and were not complicit in the attacks on October 7.

In the course of fighting this war, the Israeli government has prioritized the complete and total defeat of Hamas, seemingly regardless of the costs, both domestic and global. Soon after Donald Trump came into office, the United States helped to achieve a temporary ceasefire and a phased release of some the hostages, before the Israeli government resumed its war in Gaza. Still, the larger political goal for Prime Minister Netanyahu and his cabinet has been the eradication of Hamas, and this has even eclipsed the goal of bringing the remaining hostages home, as well as international objectives of maintaining good relations with the United States, avoidance of alienating governments and populations around the world, and working with Arab neighbors such as Saudi Arabia who might have been inclined to a larger regional agreement involving governance of Gaza and the establishment of formal relations with Israel. Now even European powers – Britain and France – have said that they will soon recognize Palestine as an independent, sovereign state, which they have refused to do until now, preferring instead a negotiated settlement among Israel and the Palestinians.

The result of these decisions by the Israeli government is that Hamas is being severely weakened as a military and political force, but the people of Gaza are paying the heaviest price for Israel’s security. Life in Gaza is defined by bombings, shortages of medicine and medical care, the lack of humanitarian aid, and what has most captured the world’s attention recently, the growing levels of malnutrition and starvation, which are due to the shortage of food going into Gaza as part of Israel’s blockade and limits on aid. Also, in some instances Palestinians rushing en masse to access limited food supplies have been shot by Israeli military forces. For its part, Hamas continues to hold hostages, and it is highlighting its brutal treatment of them, with a video circulating recently of one emaciated hostage who is shown being forced to dig his own grave in one of the tunnels in Gaza.

Moral and Strategic Failure

Hamas is a terrorist organization that glorifies and celebrates its grotesque and horrific violence against innocent people, and it deserves to be eliminated. This, however, does not make Israel blameless in the ongoing war. Israeli actions that have so terribly impacted the people of Gaza are morally wrong and strategically flawed. The Israeli government is destroying Gaza and its people for an objective that cannot be achieved, and which is dividing Israeli society and generating worldwide blowback onto Israel that will cause it long-term harm.

Benjamin Netanyahu seems to have determined that the Israeli military success that has been achieved with respect to Iran and Hezbollah can be followed by similar success with a decisive military victory in Gaza too. This is an illusion. These are vastly different situations, and trying to apply similar logic in Gaza is a miscalculation and counterproductive. There is no way to totally eradicate Hamas. As former Prime Minister Ehud Barak stated, in an article criticizing the Netanyahu government’s continuation of the war, “since any Hamas group or individual can easily ‘disappear’ within minutes, hiding among the [Gaza] Strip's 2 million civilians and emerging from tunnels or building windows to attack Israelis, their absolute elimination remains a Sisyphean task.” In addition, Hamas is not only a political entity, it embodies an anti-Israel sentiment among Palestinians in Gaza, which is something that cannot be destroyed by guns and bombs and military occupation.

Hamas no longer has the military capacity to seriously threaten Israel. Moreover, members of Hamas and the people of Gaza now know the price they are paying – and will have to pay in the future – for engaging in violence against Israel. Israel has won the war it needs to in order to better protect its security. Another former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, has also expressed this view. He has said that, “we [Israel] have achieved almost everything that a military operation can achieve. We have eliminated most of the leadership of Hamas. We have destroyed most of the tunnels, the launchers of the rockets and the rockets and the command positions.” This is not only his argument, but that of “many former leaders of the army, the Mossad, the Secret Service, the generals…Almost everyone says that we have done everything that we can do in the military operation.” At this point, he says, the war is “an illegitimate campaign that must be stopped.” In spite of this, Netanyahu has continued the war, even as he has been getting advice from the military as early as the spring of 2024 telling him that there was no military advantage in continuing to fight. Nor has the United States sought to restrain its ally by attaching conditions to the use of American made weapons supplied to Israel (as the U.S. has done with military assistance to Ukraine), or threatening the cutoff of American weapons (a move that would be highly unlikely and thus not a very credible threat anyway).

Moreover, Olmert says is important to note that “there are other voices in Israel, not just the messianic groups of thugs which support the government, but that the majority of the Israelis think that enough is enough.” Israeli society itself is divided, and the divisions are growing. (This is not just a phenomenon in Israel. Jewish people in the United States and around the world are divided, as many have voiced arguments that Israel is behaving in an unjust manner and is no longer engaged in self-defense, but the killing of innocent civilians.) Over 600 retired Israeli security officials have called for an end to the war, writing President Trump and asking him to pressure Netanyahu to end the war. They said that since, “Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel…Your credibility with the vast majority of Israelis augments your ability to steer Prime Minister Netanyahu and his government in the right direction: End the war, return the hostages, stop the suffering," Most recently, on August 18, new demonstrations erupted in Israel, with 500,000 people in Tel Aviv and a million people nationwide protesting, calling on the government to end the war and bring home the remaining hostages. The protests were accompanied by a major strike, which included “hundreds of local authorities, businesses, universities, tech companies and other organizations.”

The upshot seems to be that Israel is both more and less secure. It has achieved military victories against Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, as well as in Syria since October 7. At the same time its society is increasingly divided, while its global support is at its lowest point ever. Adding to this is an arrest warrant for Netanyahu issued by the International Criminal Court, and an ongoing International Court of Justice case to decide if Israel should be found guilty of committing genocide. As one commentary noted, “Netanyahu has overseen one of the catastrophes of the 21st century, one that is likely to stain Israel’s name for decades.”

Assessing Responsibility

This policy of unleashing more violence after a ceasefire had been achieved, of keeping food and aid from Gaza, of seeking to reoccupy and control all of Gaza – this is the policy of the Netanyahu government. The Prime Minister and his cabinet are comprised of the most right-wing, extremist government Israel has ever had. They want the territories of Gaza and the West Bank, they reject a Palestinian state, and they are deliberately trying to make life so miserable for the people of Gaza – and this is true to a lesser extent in the West Bank – that the Palestinian people themselves will choose to leave. It is the people of this current government who are responsible for the actions that are destroying Gaza while also dividing Israeli society and further isolating the country throughout the world.

Former Prime Ministers Barak and Olmert have both expressed this view, and both have strongly criticized the Netanyahu government, calling for an end to the war, lambasting the Prime Minister, and in one case even saying that the country is in danger of losing its democracy. They have both argued that government policy is driven by two things. First is the vision of a Greater Israel consisting not only of Israel, but also the West Bank and Gaza. This vision is strongly supported by Netanyahu and members of the cabinet, long before the war began, many of whom seem to share the unstated goal by which prolonging the war would make possible the reintroduction of Israeli settlements in Gaza and maybe even annexation of the territory at some point in the future.

The second, and probably more immediate driver of ongoing war, is the personal interest of Netanyahu, who continues to face legal trouble with ongoing prosecutions involving corruption, and who is only shielded from his legal troubles by remaining in power. This is a key reason why Netanyahu has rejected any type of postwar plan involving the governance and rebuilding of Gaza. Any such agreement on a coherent, long-term plan would surely cost Netanyahu his support within the cabinet and force him from office. (Considering that Netanyahu allowed aid to Gaza to be diverted to Hamas over the years, and that he ignored intelligence reports prior to October 7 saying that Israel’s internal divisions were creating a serious risk of attack by Hamas or Hezbollah, it is a wonder and a testament to his political skills that he has remained in power.) Olmert has said that the fighting is at this time essentially, “a private war of the prime minister trying to somehow escape from the possible ramifications of ending the war now because of political considerations.” As one report put it, “Fearing for his own political survival, Netanyahu hitched his fate to the dreams of Israeli extremists and prolonged the war to sustain their support.” Barak has gone further, saying that “In order to survive, [Netanhayu] is striving to turn Israel into a dictatorship — appointing yes-men to lead the Shin Bet and Attorney General’s office, and breaking the Supreme Court. Nothing is unthinkable, not even the cancellation of free elections and the rise of armed right-wing militias.” Barak has called for public protests against the Netanyahu and his government – and there have been many such protests since the Prime Minister came back to power in 2022 – until they can be forced from office.

This focus on the source of Israel’s destructive policies is important in the midst of longstanding and now growing global criticism of Israel and its very legitimacy as a state. Commentary and critiques objecting to the state of Israel as a country, accompanied by anti-Semitism and violence against Jews, have all increased worldwide since October 7. These opinions offer the idea that the creation of the state of Israel is to blame for the region’s troubles and other problems in the world. Such views are based on the idea that opposition to the policies of the Israeli government can and should include opposition to Israel’s existence itself. These assertions tend to suggest several problematic and dubious elements together, evoking hatred, fear, and opposition to the state of Israel as a country, prior to any specific policies it conducts. Consider this rhetoric: “Zionism, a European colonial movement…syncretised Jewish longing for safety and self-defence with white supremacist, messianic and fascistic ideologies. This synthesis birthed a new, nationalist Jewish identity that equates Jewish safety with the construction of an exclusivist homeland in Palestine through the displacement of the region’s Indigenous populations.” This one brief selection makes the existence of Israel a European, colonial, racist, fascist, religiously extremist, and genocidal project, all resulting from an unexplained “synthesis” that is simply asserted to be true. (One of the more absurd and odious suggestions made is that Zionism is a form of mental illness, reflecting an entire mindset that must be eradicated through treatment).

No other country is held to a similar level of liability or accountability. Opposition to Vladmir Putin and the invasion of Ukraine is not accompanied by a critique of Russia as an illegitimate state or a call for its eradication as a country. People in the United States and around the world that critique the foreign policy of the United States or its leadership are not suggesting that the country’s founding is illegitimate or that the state should be done away with. By the same token, it is not necessary or fitting to call the existence or establishment of the state of Israel as illegitimate in order to oppose its policies and politics.

Even critiques of Israel as a “colonial settler” state miss the mark. Israel was built by a people escaping death and persecution, seeking refuge from populations and places set on destroying the Jews as a people. It was a circumstance unlike any other in modern times. Moreover, if any countries qualify as “colonial settler” states today, they would be the United States and other countries throughout the Western Hemisphere, which resulted from the imperialism of European countries seeking empires, power, glory, and riches. They overthrew existing political communities, while displacing and killing countless numbers of indigenous peoples to establish their empires. Yet there is no accusation of illegitimacy against the very existence of any of these countries born out of colonialism, or any suggestion of doing away with these states or turning them over to populations who were there before colonization occurred. Any such suggestions would be quickly dismissed as non-starters and wholly impractical.

The point here is not to excuse Israeli violence against innocent civilians in Gaza, but to place responsibility for these actions in the appropriate place, with the current government of Israel, while pointing out that arguments and critiques that extend to the legitimacy of the Israeli state offer little of value in bringing peace and justice to the Palestinian and Israeli people. It is possible all at once to hold Hamas in contempt for its loathsome acts of violence, to support the idea of Israel as a country that is just as legitimate as any other, and to call out the government of Benjamin Netanyahu to account for its terrible violence and unjust treatment of the innocent civilians of Gaza. These are not contradictory views. They are consistent in deploring the use of violence against innocents no matter who is the aggressor, standing with victims of violence no matter their religion, ethnicity or political views, and supporting the only just and practical outcome to this longstanding conflict: a world that includes two free, sovereign, and secure states – Israel and Palestine – existing side by side in peace.

Perhaps the recent announcement that Hamas has agreed to a proposal for a ceasefire supported by Egypt and other Arab states, similar to an earlier proposal advanced by the United States and supported by Israel, will lead to an end in the fighting. But it’s a far cry from two countries living in peace, which sadly seems to be an outcome that recedes further into the distance every day.