Israel's war in Gaza has lost purpose beyond the killing of Palestinians

By looking away western democracies have surrendered moral authority

Enough. Surely. Enough. 

The plight of the people of Gaza is awful beyond imagination. More than 40,000 Palestinians, the majority innocent civilians and children, have been killed since Israel launched its war against Hamas. The remainder of the population has been imprisoned, starved for more than a year of sufficient food and water, denied fuel and essential medicines, forced into tents as their homes have been reduced to rubble. In the judgement of United Nations and independent aid agencies, conditions in northern Gaza are now “apocalyptic”. Beyond performative protests, the west’s democracies have mostly looked the other way.

The rage and fear engendered among Israelis by the horrific attacks in southern Israel launched by Hamas in October 2023 are entirely understandable. So too was the determination of the government to destroy the military infrastructure of Hamas to forestall any repeat and to rebuild deterrence. It is true also that Hamas has sought to shield its forces behind civilians. The killing of some innocents was inevitable in the pursuit of self-defence. 

Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, however, has channelled the fear and anger into an act of vengeance against Palestinians. The goal reaches well beyond self-defence. The prime minister’s neglect of Israel’s security in pursuit of his political ambitions presented Hamas with the opportunity to kill some 1,200, and take hostage another 250, Israeli citizens. His pledge to destroy Hamas - an always impossible task - was calculated to foreshadow a long, ruthless war that would, so Netanyahu hoped, erase the memory of this failure. The invasion of Lebanon and the attempt to draw the United States into war with Iran have been shaped to the same purpose.

The strategy has been well-described (in the Guardian) by Daniel Levy, a former IDF soldier and negotiator for the Israeli government and now president of the American/Middle East Project: “Netanyahu’s ideological preference is for displacing Palestinians and eviscerating their rights, alongside pulling the US more actively into a regional clash with Iran; his short-term political goal is to maintain an open-ended war which can accommodate varying degrees of intensity, but not a deal”.

Lawyers can argue about whether Israel’s military campaign in Gaza meets the strict definition of war crimes or genocide. Those keeping track of the death toll or casting even a glance at the images of utter devastation wrought by the near-constant bomb and rocket attacks will make up their own minds. What cannot be gainsaid is that the violence visited on the people of Gaza is a brutal affront to any notions of humanity. 

Israel has no closer friend than Joe Biden. US aid and equipment supplies have sustained Israel’s military campaign. American policymakers have shed no tears at the blows struck against Hamas and against Hezbollah in Lebanon. But even the US president has been drawn to describe the bombing of civilians in Gaza as “indiscriminate” and to remark, as he did as long as eight months ago, that “There are a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying….And it’s got to stop.” It did not. Privately, US officials concluded many months ago that the Israeli operation had exhausted all significant military purpose.

Washington points to the frequent (sometimes half-effective) demands from the Administration for the Israeli government to loosen its chokehold on essential supplies for the people of Gaza, and to Anthony Blinken’s intense shuttle diplomacy in the quest for a ceasefire. The problem is that even before the US Secretary of State takes to the air, he has been disarmed by his own president. As long as Biden refuses to contemplate limiting or halting the supply of rockets and shells to Israel, they will continue to rain down on Palestinian civilians.

Europeans have sat on the sidelines. A handful of governments have made the important gesture of backing the Palestinian claim to full membership of the United Nations. Britain has imposed some small limits on arms exports to Israel. France and Spain have called for an arms embargo. But beyond rhetorical flourishes about ending the violence, European governments have shown more embarrassment about the investigations underway at the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court into whether Israel has committed crimes against humanity than outrage about that the fight against Hamas has expanded into a war on Palestinians.

So much for the European Union’s claim to be a normative power, a beacon for a rules-based international order. Daniel Levy again (this time for EuroNews): “Europe has demonstrated that it has no interest in those things. And so today, Europe looks weaker and has less support, and people are not going to be lectured to by the European Union.”

Unsurprisingly, Netanyahu’s response has been to defame critics as anti-semitic, to charge that the UN refugee agency UNRWA collaborates with Hamas, and to insist, in Trumpian fashion, to be acting strictly in accordance with international law.

What’s been happening all the while is that Israel has been surrendering its claim to be the sole liberal democracy in a region dominated by ruthless authoritarians. In so doing it has been subtracting from rather than adding to its future security.

More baffling still is that. even as the leaders of western democracies look away, they continue to imagine they can somehow win the battle for the hearts and minds of the global majority in the contest with autocracies such as Russia and China.