History will not look kindly on the conduct of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government over the course of the war in Gaza. And people who consider themselves supporters of Israel — of which I include myself, as someone who thinks Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself and would like to see it course-correct and make efforts toward a lasting peace and rehabilitating its liberal democracy — need to stand up and say so.
It’s well past time for many of Israel’s staunchest supporters, particularly Americans, to cease denying the deliberate devastation Netanyahu’s government has inflicted upon Gaza’s civilian population. For Israel’s long-term security, and to preserve any claim to morality, this war of attrition must end immediately. And Israel’s supporters should be the ones demanding it.
The IDF’s continued, brutal execution of the war is not even yielding any strategic benefit against Hamas.
There’s no rationalizing away the horrific reality of what’s happening to civilians in the name of Israeli security. The Israel Defense Forces’ continued, brutal execution of the war is not even yielding any strategic benefit against Hamas. “We are no closer to achieving our main war goal — to erase the military and the governmental capacities of Hamas — and Hamas has not become more flexible,” former Israeli military intelligence officer Michael Milstein told The New York Times this week. “We find ourselves right now in a total disaster.” Milstein’s assessment of Bibi’s war: “total failure.”
The opposition leader, former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, concurred, calling the state of the war in Gaza a “strategic failure, which has led to operational and diplomatic failure.” Lapid added, “The Israeli government no longer knows how to justify why soldiers continue to die in Gaza.”
Starvation and famine are rampant in Gaza — and a deliberate strategy, if officials like the head of Israel’s Heritage Ministry are to be believed. Amichay Eliyahu said in a radio interview last week that the government is “driving out the population” and insisted “there is no nation that feeds its enemies” — which presumably includes every man, woman and child in Gaza.
Indeed, many of the staunchest defenders of Benjamin Netanyahu’s war in Gaza argue that if only Hamas would release the hostages, the manmade hunger will be over. In an X post that’s startlingly representative of this kind of thinking, Rep. Randy Fine, R-Fla., said: “Release the hostages. Until then, starve away.”
A country with millions of descendants of Holocaust survivors ought to recognize that the deliberate starvation of a civilian population is a war crime, an unacceptable cost of continuing a war against a thoroughly defanged Hamas.
But the notion that the release of the Israeli hostages would automatically end the war is a lie. Numerous government ministers, Knesset members and politically powerful activists have clearly stated that they want a Gaza without Gazans — in other words, ethnic cleansing.
It’s well-documented that Netanyahu has had many opportunities to make a deal, get the hostages back and end the war. He has always chosen not to.
Just this week, Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich — who has repeatedly threatened to collapse Netanyahu’s ruling coalition if the prime minister ends the war — said the return of Israeli settlements in Gaza now has a “realistic work plan.” Ha’aretz, citing “details presented by Netanyahu in talks with ministers,” reported this week that Netanyahu will propose a plan to his national security Cabinet for the total annexation of Gaza — which he claims has the support of the Trump administration. (I argued in February that President Donald Trump’s comments expressing support for a “takeover” of Gaza and the displacement of its citizens had moved the Overton Window into places previously considered unthinkable.)
It’s well-documented that Netanyahu has had many opportunities to make a deal, get the hostages back and end the war. He has always chosen not to. Meanwhile, hostages’ families — who want their loved ones back and an end to the war — are ignored by Netanyahu, denied access to the Knesset and smeared by many of Netanyahu’s supporters as traitors. They’ve even been physically attacked in the streets by some of those Bibi supporters.
After over 1,100 of its people were savagely slaughtered on Oct. 7, 2023, Israel was justified in retaliating against Hamas and seeking to uproot its massive network of tunnels and other terrorist infrastructure. But the indiscriminate killing of civilians, the willful destruction of almost all of Gaza’s infrastructure and the slow-motion torture of manmade famine are simply not justifiable.
Supporters of Bibi’s war will argue that this is the cost of doing business in a hostile neighborhood. That this is the only way to make Israelis safe. This gets it backward. The Israeli government has put the country on the brink of international pariah status, to the point that the future of the steadfast support of the United States is even at risk.
A Gallup poll released this week showed 60% of Americans disapproving of Israel’s military operation in Gaza. Just 32% are in support. And now some lawmakers in both parties want to cut off even U.S. defensive weapons transfers to Israel.
Supporters of Netanyahu’s war will dismiss all international criticism as inherently biased against Israel. There’s been some truth to that, historically. Just look at the disproportionate number of United Nations condemnations of Israel throughout the years, particularly compared with notorious human rights abusers like China and Iran.
But longtime allies of Israel, like France and the United Kingdom, have announced plans to recognize a Palestinian state — in large part as a reaction to the endless war, and with perhaps quixotic hopes of resuscitating efforts toward a two-state solution. Because that’s the choice Israel faces: a future as an apartheid state that ethnically cleansed millions of people from their land or a flawed democracy that lives by the rule of law and seeks a lasting peace — even after facing the unspeakable trauma of Oct. 7.
The Israeli government has put the country on the brink of international pariah status.
Many supporters of the continued siege of Gaza will broadly wave away fact-based criticism of Israel’s conduct in the war as inherently antisemitic. But these critics include Ehud Olmert, who as Israel’s prime minister in the late 2000s supported the expansion of settlements and for decades was a member of Netanyahu’s right-wing Likud Party. Olmert has said Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza and decried the pogroms committed by Israeli extremist settler gangs burning West Bank Palestinian villages and sometimes killing their inhabitants — often under the watchful eye of IDF forces. “A self-respecting person cannot have the option of ignoring this phenomenon or blurring its effects, risks and threat to the character and values of Israeli society,” Olmert wrote this year.
There’s the IDF soldiers and officers who said they were ordered to shoot at unarmed Gazans who had traveled miles to receive limited nutritional aid amid starvation and famine. (Since May, according to the U.N., over 1,000 Palestinians have been killed seeking aid at the four international aid distribution centers the IDF has allowed to operate. The IDF claims it only fires “warning shots” near aid seekers.)
And the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem recently issued a report that said Israel is engaged in “mass forced displacement, including attempts at ethnic cleansing and making the latter an official war goal; and an assault on Palestinian identity through the deliberate destruction of refugee camps.” (An Israeli government spokesperson dismissed allegations in the report as “baseless.”)
If you’re a supporter of Israel and someone told you on Oct. 8, 2023, that in almost two years, well over 60,000 Palestinians (mostly civilians) would be dead, Israel would have alienated some of its closest allies and Hamas would still be holding Israeli hostages — would you call that the “total victory” that Netanyahu promised after presiding over the worst security failure and deadliest day in Israel’s history?
At some point, Israel’s supporters need to say, “Enough.” That time was long before today, but now would be good enough.
