By Marc Champion / Bloomberg Opinion
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded with fury this week to international criticism of his decision to send troops back into Gaza and occupy it, insisting that the Jewish state was defending itself the way any nation must in “a war of civilization over barbarism.” Wednesday’s murder of two young Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., indeed offered a timely reminder of the threat that Jews and Israelis face wherever they are.
After Hamas conducted one of the most heinous terrorist attacks in history in 2023, any country would and should have responded as Israel did: sending troops to crush the perpetrators and retrieve the 250 hostages Hamas had seized. That’s why the backing Netanyahu received at the time was unconditional, from his own people and Western governments alike.
But a year and seven months after the Oct. 7 attack, it’s become inconceivable to describe the continued razing of Gaza as a justifiable war of self-defense. More war can only perpetuate the cycle of violence that the operation to eliminate Hamas was designed to end. According to a U.S. estimate toward the end of the last administration, Hamas recruited as many new fighters as it had lost in the fighting; and there is no reason to believe that has changed since, or will in future.
Netanyahu is captive to a religious and Greater Israel far right that poses a more dangerous threat to Israel’s future as a democratic, rule-of-law state than Hamas ever could, in a region that’s already dominated by autocrats and blighted by fundamentalism.
The prime minister has himself been doing all he can to destroy Israel’s independent institutions, starting well before the Hamas attack. It is essential to distinguish between the interests of Netanyahu and the extremist minority to which he panders, and those of the Israeli state and population as a whole. The one is doing lasting damage to the other.
Gaza has been reduced to rubble. As of a May 11 audit, the territory’s Hamas-run health ministry said just under 53,000 Palestinians had been killed in the war, of whom 44.6 percent were men aged 18-59: A significant if uncertain proportion of those men will have been Hamas fighters. As a careful analysis of the data from the Washington Institute for Near East Policy says, it’s hard to know how accurate these numbers are; the true figures could be lower, or higher. But there is no basis to dismiss them.
What matters is that the civilian death toll is too high for a war in which Netanyahu still offers no politically or morally acceptable endgame. There is no reasonable cause to increase the carnage now, or to halt humanitarian aid, as the Israeli government did in March. The language Netanyahu and his finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, now openly use to state their goals in Gaza — to “occupy,” “cleanse” and “conquer” — should disturb anybody, especially those who believe in the state of Israel. None of these words describe self-defense. Ehud Olmert, a Netanyahu predecessor as premier, recently called what’s happening in Gaza “close to a war crime.”
But labels are less important than the impact renewing this war will have on more than 2 million exhausted Palestinian civilians, stability in the wider region and Israel itself. It’s hard to see how occupying Gaza long term can benefit the Jewish state, let alone be justified. Nor do Netanyahu and his cabinet have popular support for their actions. According to a May 7-11 poll by the Israeli market-research company Ipanel, 69 percent of Israelis would back a Donald Trump-led initiative to end the war, return hostages, normalize relations with Saudi Arabia and separate from Palestinians in the occupied territories. Fewer than 10 percent of respondents disagreed. In a poll Ipanel did for Israel’s Channel 12 TV station the month before, together with another agency, Migdam, 61 percent of respondents said they feared for the country’s democracy. Only 34 percent said they didn’t.
The U.S. president is right to sideline Netanyahu and look for the wider regional deal that most Israelis want, even if his plan to send Gaza’s current population into exile and turn the strip into a glitzy Riviera is as unacceptable as it is absurd. Similarly, Canada, France and the United Kingdom — all traditional allies of Israel — were right to call time on Israel’s military response to Oct. 7, drawing Netanyahu’s ire. Most Israelis — one-fifth of whom are ethnically Arab — just don’t want the alternate future that the policies of Netanyahu and Smotrich represent, which is perpetual war.
Hamas’ 2023 attack defined barbarism. So, too, did this week’s vile killing of Sarah Milgrim and her fiancé Yaron Lischinsky in Washington, no matter what the killer’s motivation may have been. But in 2025, there’s also nothing civilized about Netanyahu’s renewed war in Gaza.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal.
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