After six months, the war in Gaza is making
Israel a pariah state
Jonathan
Freedland
Netanyahu’s decisions have brought death to
Palestinians and harmed his own people. Hamas laid a trap and he walked right
in
Fri 5 Apr
2024 18.38 BST
Six months
after the attacks of 7 October, and it’s time to count again the losses. They
begin with the dead, with the 1,200 Israelis killed on that day and the
estimated 33,000 Palestinians killed in the 182 days since. Some are sceptical
of a Gaza figure that comes from a health ministry controlled by Hamas – while
others suspect those numbers are, if anything, an underestimate, fearing that
many thousands of uncounted Palestinian dead lie under the rubble.
Then you
have to reckon with those who were neither Israeli nor Palestinian, but
outsiders who wanted to help and paid for that kindness with their lives – like
six of the seven aid workers of World Central Kitchen who were killed in three
separate strikes from an Israeli drone this week.
But the
tally of suffering does not end with the dead. It must include the pain of
maimed and orphaned Palestinians, and of the 134 Israelis and others who have
spent the past six months held hostage, many presumed to be imprisoned
underground, with some tortured and sexually abused.
The
accounting of all that agony could last a lifetime and still it would not be
enough. But any audit of this vicious half-year has to go wider still. The
impact of the six-day war of 1967 is felt to this day, marking out the
territories that remain under Israeli occupation. So what might be the lasting
consequences of this six-month war? Who will emerge weaker and who stronger?
At first
glance, you might assume Hamas would be disappointed by the results of its
murderous efforts on 7 October. It had high ambitions: this week, a former Gaza
official revealed that the Hamas leaders were so convinced “that they were
going to bring Israel down that they started dividing Israel into cantons, for
the day after the conquest”. (They approached that ex-official to be a canton
governor.) It did not pan out that way. Instead, Hamas’s rampage through
southern Israel brought hellfire down on the people of Gaza, provoking an
Israeli response that has left a staggering 2% of the population dead and
displaced the rest.
That scale
of destruction won’t unduly trouble the zealots at the top of Hamas: the death
of others is a sacrifice they are willing to make. But they will lament the
losses among their own: an estimated 10,000 men, more than a third of their
fighting force, along with three battalion commanders and seven members of the
ruling political bureau, according to Michael Milshtein, the former senior
intelligence officer widely regarded as Israel’s foremost expert on Hamas. The
group has lost or used up almost all its arsenal of rockets – and, its greatest
disappointment, the action failed to spark the wider regional onslaught against
Israel it dreamed of.
And yet,
Hamas will regard itself as anything but the loser in the six-month war. For
all of Benjamin Netanyahu’s talk of the “total defeat” of Hamas, it is still
standing. Most of its key Gaza leaders remain alive and present; it is still
“the prominent actor in Gaza”, Milshtein told me, adding that there is no
realistic prospect any of the mooted alternatives will take its place. Despite
all that the people of Gaza have endured, their approval of Hamas’s role in the
war stands at 70%, according to the veteran Palestinian pollster Khalil
Shikaki.
Still, the
chief source of the satisfaction Hamas will be feeling, six months on from 7
October, lies elsewhere – not in what’s happened to it, but rather in what’s
happened to its mortal enemy: Israel.
In the
immediate aftermath of 7 October, the country enjoyed widespread – though not
universal – sympathy, especially from western governments. Joe Biden rushed to
Tel Aviv, to sit with the bereaved and to stand with their leaders. But look at
the picture now.
Israel has
never been more isolated. The president of the United States, which for decades
has been Israel’s genuinely indispensable ally, is so “outraged” – his word –
at Israel’s killing of those aid workers that on Thursday night he issued a
barely veiled ultimatum to the country’s prime minister: do as I say or there
will be no more arms. The threat is hardly empty: other western allies have
already cut off weapons supplies or are considering it.
Those
governments are responding to a global mood they can no longer ignore. Because
it’s not Israel’s perennial critics who are denouncing the country; it’s
Israel’s friends. In Britain, the WCK killings saw Lord Ricketts, a former UK
national security adviser who earlier served Tony Blair, demand a suspension of
arms sales. His call was echoed throughout the Conservative party, in a letter
from hundreds of lawyers, including several former justices of the supreme
court, and by usually pro-Israel, right-leaning voices in the media. When
you’ve lost Nick Ferrari, who can regularly be seen acting as MC at major UK
Jewish charity events, you know you’re alone.
Some in
Israel will hope the current outrage is narrowly focused on Monday’s appalling
incident. But that’s not quite right. For one thing, the conduct that led to
those seven deaths is hardly a one-off – it’s just that this time the victims
were not all Palestinian. As the much-admired defence analyst Amos Harel wrote
in Haaretz this week, the WCK killings are “a symptom of a broader phenomenon”
in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), a carelessness or worse “when it comes to
shooting near civilians” and “a serious discipline problem” that has led to
“many violations of the laws of war”.
For six
months, Israel has asked for the world’s understanding, trying to explain that
it faces an exceptional enemy – one that hides underground, among and
underneath a civilian population, and thinks nothing of firing rockets and
missiles from hospitals, schools and mosques. For that reason, foreign
governments have granted Israel a rare patience. But that has now run out. And
much of it comes down to the decisions Israel took not on combat, but on aid.
Amid the
slaughter and with famine looming, Israel’s allies must say enough is enough.
If not now, when?
Even those
allies who, like Biden, accepted that Israel’s war on Hamas would come at an
unbearably heavy price could see no logic or justification in a pattern of
restrictions and obstacles that inflicts suffering not on Hamas, but on
ordinary Palestinians. Anger at the shortages of food and medicine, at the
warnings of an avoidable famine, reached breaking point following Monday’s
killings. After Biden’s demarche, Netanyahu promised to change and to open new
aid crossings into Gaza – though there was a promise of a “flood” of aid from
Israel last month, and it never came.
The result
is that Israel, whose founders longed to be a light unto the nations, stands
today as a leper among the nations. Many Israelis are barely aware of the
change: their media don’t show the war the rest of the world sees and deplores.
They are focused instead on the threatened retaliation from Tehran, which could
come at any moment after Israel’s assassination of two Iranian generals in
Damascus earlier this week, and the looming peril of Hezbollah’s arsenal across
the northern border. And, frozen by the failure to bring the hostages home –
the focus of growing anti-Netanyahu protests – they remain caught in the trauma
of 7 October, replaying the horror of that day, the deadliest in Israel’s
history, over and over again.
I don’t
blame the Israeli public for that. But I do blame their leaders. Even if they
did nothing to address the root causes of the conflict, their job was to
transcend the rage and terror of that moment, to think calmly and strategically
even amid the panic. To realise in that moment that their fight was with Hamas,
not the entire population of Gaza. Instead, they have sown hatred in the hearts
of a new generation, and they have made lonely a country that cannot function
alone.
So, no,
there are no winners in this dreadful war. But Hamas can enjoy a wicked smile
of satisfaction: it laid a deadly trap – and Benjamin Netanyahu led Israel
right into it.
Jonathan
Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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