Why
No Real Antiwar Movement Has Developed in Israel
Even
many of Benjamin Netanyahu’s harshest critics have supported the military
campaign in Gaza. “We are seeing a different war than you are seeing,” the
writer Yossi Klein Halevi says.
October
24, 2024
Last week, Israeli forces killed Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, and the man
who orchestrated the October 7th attacks, in which Hamas fighters
killed some twelve hundred Israelis. President Biden responded to the news of
Sinwar’s demise by expressing hope that the realization of this
particular Israeli war aim would lead to a durable ceasefire in Gaza, where
more than forty-two thousand Palestinians have been killed. But Israel’s Prime
Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has given no sign that he
will allow the war to end, despite the humanitarian toll; Israel is also
engaged in an invasion of Lebanon, where its forces are
battling Hezbollah.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow
at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and the author of the
best-selling book “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor.”
He served in the Israel Defense Forces, in the nineteen-eighties, including in
Gaza. (Halevi and I were colleagues at The New Republic a
decade ago, but have never met.) I wanted to talk with him about the way that
many liberal Americans have come to see the war differently than even opponents
of Netanyahu in Israel have, and whether Israelis are getting an accurate
picture of the way the war is being fought. Our conversation, which has been
edited for length and clarity, is below. We also discuss how the trauma of
October 7th played out in Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, whether Israeli
centrists and liberals are placing too much faith in Netanyahu, and whether
Halevi believes the military is targeting civilians in Gaza.
You recently told the New
York Times, “This last year has been a slow and painful and
essential attempt to reclaim the Zionist promise of Jewish self-defense. For
me, the death of Sinwar is a culminating moment in that process.” What did you
mean by that?
What we lost on October 7th were two
foundational elements of the Israeli ethos. The first is that we would be able
to defend ourselves. This is a country that sent commandos halfway across
Africa in 1976 to rescue a hundred
Israeli hostages, and we couldn’t save twelve hundred Israelis within the
sovereign borders of the state of Israel. The second thing that we lost was the
Zionist promise to the Jewish people that we would create a safe refuge here.
Israel on October 7th and since has become the most dangerous place in the
world to be a Jew. And so what this war is about for me is reclaiming the
credibility of these two essential elements of the Israeli ethos.
By “culminating moment,”
did you mean that you hope the war now ends?
I hope that the part of the war that’s
being fought in Gaza ends with the release of the hostages. My sense is that once we killed the
man who was the symbol of October 7th, even those like Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu and his supporters—who prioritized victory over Hamas to releasing
the hostages—will now have a ladder to climb down from. The priority needs to
be saving the hostages. And that goes back to what I said a moment ago about
restoring our credibility as a refuge for the Jewish people. The dilemma of the
hostages for Israel was that it pitted these two really non-negotiable elements
of our ethos against each other: self-defense and safe refuge. The symbol of
the war has gone, and the fighting has largely shifted to the north, which is
where I think it should have been focussed all along, beginning on October 8th,
by going straight to Hezbollah and, for that matter, Iran, and left Hamas alone
until the end. Now I think that we should be winding down in Gaza.
You recently wrote a piece in which you
argued, “Effectively countering evil requires uncompromising resolve.” You also
wrote that, after October 7th, Israel had to decide to “pursue Hamas operatives
wherever they were based, including hospitals and mosques. The terrible result
has been Israel’s most brutal war—and one of its most necessary.” Are you
saying that all of this could be done within the laws of war and so on? Or are
you saying that Israel really needs to respond overwhelmingly, and collateral
damage, to use a euphemism, be damned?
Look, from the beginning the question
was: What would constitute too many civilian deaths? The obvious answer is one
is too many. But if you’ve determined that the future of Israel depends on
removing from our border these genocidal regimes, like Hezbollah and Hamas,
then the question of proportionality shifts. My understanding of the laws of
proportionality is that the number of civilian casualties needs to be
proportional to the military goal. In the past, Israel had limited military
goals in Gaza. After October 7th, the ground rules changed, and the goal
changed. Once you’ve defined a total goal, the question of proportionality
adjusts. Look, it’s a brutal thing to say and it’s an unbearable thing to say,
but if you believe that you are fighting an existential war, and I believe we
are, then I don’t think we have a choice.
The way I understand
proportionality is that military actors need to take account of the military
advantage and weigh that against what will happen to civilians. It doesn’t mean
that, if you define your enemy as totalitarian, then you can do whatever you
want in fighting in a war.
Absolutely. And, according to the laws
of proportionality, each incident, each military decision, needs to be weighed
on its own merit. There is no blanket permission to destroy Hamas at any cost.
I’m certainly not convinced that every decision we took would pass the measure
of proportionality, but I do believe that on the whole the way we have fought
this war is really the only way that you can fight a war with this goal.
One of the reasons I
wanted to talk to you, a Jew who was born in America and then moved to Israel,
is that it does feel that there’s a difference between the way that many
American liberals or progressives see the war and the way that Israeli
liberals, or at least Israeli opponents of Netanyahu, like yourself, see this
war. I don’t know if you consider yourself a liberal.
Liberal in the decidedly
non-progressive sense.
O.K., fair enough. You are
very skeptical of Netanyahu. It’s not clear to me whether this war is just
being fought right now to prolong his political career. And so talking about
these military objectives seems a little bit beside the point.
There’ve been lots of demonstrations in Israel over the last
year: protests to bring the government down, protests to prioritize the
hostages. Some of those demonstrations have been quite massive. Hundreds of
thousands of people have come out. But this is really the first of Israel’s
major asymmetrical wars that has not created an antiwar movement. What that
tells me is that, no matter who would be in power, no matter what party, you
would basically see the same conduct in this war, whether it was Benny Gantz, or even Yair Golan, formerly of the
Labor Party. So there is really a disconnect in the way that many people
abroad—you mentioned American Jews, in particular—see the legitimacy of this
war and how Israelis almost across the spectrum see this war.
On October 8th, Israelis from Yuval Noah Harari to Itamar Ben-Gvir reached the same conclusion
about the goal of this war and the way in which we fight this war. That moral
consensus has held. Now, the consensus has not held in terms of when is the
right time to end the war, where today Israelis are deeply divided over whether
we should be continuing the war in Gaza.
That seems correct, but
I’m not convinced that, if someone other than Netanyahu was in power, then the
war in Gaza would still be going on. Even a lot of the national-security
establishment appears to think that his goal to completely destroy Hamas is unrealistic.
Look, I don’t trust him. My sense of
Netanyahu is that his overriding concern is twofold: staying in power and
defending his legacy. And that’s a very problematic approach for a Prime
Minister of a country fighting for its life.
But am I wrong to say
that, in some sense, you have been trusting him? Because
you’re assuming, when you talk about this war, that he is fighting it for the
reasons that he says, which is for military objectives, not to keep his
political career going or whatever else?
It’s a good question, and I ask myself
that a lot.
O.K.
I trust the military. In Israel, the
Prime Minister is actually not literally the commander-in-chief. There’s the
security cabinet, and I trust the defense minister, Yoav Gallant. If there was
a sense that Netanyahu was artificially prolonging the war for his own needs,
the country would know that because the Army would leak it.
When Benny Gantz left the
war cabinet, he basically said that Netanyahu
was doing this, though. And when I read Haaretz, or other Israeli
press, this idea is out there and it seems like one a lot of people believe.
Yeah, look, it’s interesting because
the focus has really shifted to the north, and there’s very little attention
being paid to Gaza. Again, most of the fighting is happening in the north. Not
that the Gaza front is quiet by any means, but there is a sense of the fighting
winding down. The main concern that I have about this government and Gaza is
the absence of a morning-after plan. That’s purely politically motivated.
That’s a result of Netanyahu’s cowardice in relation to his far-right coalition
partners who have threatened to quit the government.
Well, there’s one way to
avoid having to get to a morning after, right?
Yeah, yeah. True, true. But it’s
interesting because it’s not really the main focus here now.
I want to talk about this
idea that Israelis are seeing a different war than much of the rest of the
world is seeing. How do you wrestle with the reports of the Israeli government
intentionally denying aid to people who are starving? What do you tell yourself about why
that’s happening?
First of all, you’re right: we are
seeing a different war than you are seeing. There has been a failure of Israeli
media. I was in the States not long ago, and I felt that I was experiencing the
opposite conversation about Gaza than the one that takes place here in Israel.
It’s almost as if we’re speaking about two different wars. In Israel, the
conversation often assumes that there are no innocent civilians in Gaza—they’re
all Hamas. And the conversation in liberal circles abroad felt to me that the
assumption was that they’re all civilians in Gaza, no Hamas.
That’s reflected in the way much of
the media routinely reports the casualty figures from Gaza. Now it’s forty-two
thousand. Forty-two thousand who? The media doesn’t tell us. Forty-two thousand
dead in Gaza. Well, that’s according to Hamas’s Health Ministry. Fine, I’ll
accept the figure. But then, at the same time, you need to accept the Israeli
Army’s figure of close to eighteen thousand Hamas fighters who are included in
that forty-two thousand. When you factor in the number of dead Hamas fighters,
the horror is still overwhelming. But the number—
But we don’t know if that
number is accurate, right?
Well, we don’t know that any numbers
are accurate.
Even the U.S. government
is confident that the number of casualties in Gaza is around at least forty-two
thousand. There is reason to believe that there may be tens of thousands more
people buried under the rubble.
If eighteen thousand Hamas fighters
are included in this forty-two-thousand figure, then we are well within the
norm of the ratio of combatants to civilians killed in other asymmetrical wars.
And yet this war is being treated as somehow uniquely different, qualitatively
different. That’s where I feel outraged. What makes this so difficult is when
you are being accused of committing crimes that you know you haven’t done, of
intentionally murdering civilians, and in Israel we all know the I.D.F. because
we are the I.D.F. I’m sure that the I.D.F. has not done everything it should do
in this war to prevent civilian casualties. I’m also sure that the I.D.F. did
not deliberately target civilians. When you’re accused by a lynch mob—and
that’s what it feels like— of committing crimes that you know haven’t
committed, it’s very hard to have a nuanced conversation about the ethics of
war. We need that conversation. I need it as an Israeli. I need it for the
long-term health and moral credibility of my society. And yet what I find is
this disconnect where so many Israelis relate to all of Gaza as Hamas and so
many of Israel’s critics relate to the casualty figures as all innocent
civilians, and it’s very hard to find some space to have the kind of
conversation that Israel needs to have.
My question started with Israel intentionally denying aid
to civilians, which I think is pretty obviously going on. And you responded in
part by saying that Israelis were offended that anyone could believe that
they’re trying to target civilians. Without getting into a dispute about every
bombing and whether it’s a war crime or not, the government was trying to keep
civilians from getting humanitarian aid. How do you wrestle with that? And do
you understand why that fact may make people skeptical of other things the
Israeli government or military says?
I do. I do. In the immediate aftermath
of October 7th, there were voices here, serious voices, that were calling for a
total siege of Gaza. Those voices had quickly faded after a couple of days, and
they realized that it was untenable. And here I’m very grateful, frankly, to
the Biden Administration, which has behaved like a real friend to Israel, both
in supporting us and also in setting limits, in setting red lines. I’m grateful
for both expressions of support.
Why does Israel need to be
told to allow food to starving people if this war is being fought on the
up-and-up?
Because October 7th was—
I’m well aware of how horrific October 7th was.
What happened on October 7th was that
we lost total control over our ability to protect our fellow-Israelis. I’m
speaking specifically now about the hostages, not about those who were killed.
The hostages being in such close proximity to Israel’s border, and Israel being
unable to save these people—it drove Israelis mad. I experienced that, too. We
felt that the whole premise of this country was collapsing. We weren’t reacting
in necessarily a sane way, and that’s the truth. I’m not saying this is a justification
for that initial reaction to impose total siege on Gaza, but that’s where this
is coming from.
Now, the other piece of this is that,
if you look at what’s actually happened on the ground, there has been food aid
almost from the beginning. That is thanks largely to the Americans. But, if
we’re going to talk about genocide, Rwanda is genocide. That’s genocide.
The only person who talked
about genocide in this conversation is you, when you talked about Hezbollah and
Hamas.
Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m not saying
that you are using the word genocide, but it’s out there.
Hezbollah hasn’t done to
Israel what happened in Rwanda either, but you used the word.
Right.
You described to me very
passionately just now a country that you said had lost its mind because of the
horrors of October 7th and the hostages. Does it make you think that a country
that has lost its mind when fighting a war in Gaza might, in fact, be doing
things like targeting civilians or committing war crimes? I’m wondering this
when I read stories about the
I.D.F. using Palestinians as human shields, or when I read about
sexual assaults of Palestinian detainees at an Army base, or when I see what’s
going on with settler violence in the West Bank, or when
you just hear about some of these strikes in Gaza—and I can’t tell if what
you’re saying is that you think it’s all on the up-and-up, or if you’re
admitting that Israel lost its mind after October 7th.
All right, so let’s try to make some
order of the issues you’ve raised, because it’s easy to conflate them and they
shouldn’t be conflated. Israel in the immediate aftermath of October 7th was
not a sane country. None of us here was sane. It was a combination of rage,
dread, horror, helplessness. Those are the emotional components of a breakdown.
We very quickly got our bearings back, and we got them back because we took the
offensive, beginning on October 8th, and because the Army and the Air Force took
control, and because Netanyahu brought into government the centrist leadership
that was sober and acted as a restraint to the extremists of the government.
There was an emerging equilibrium.
Now, I can’t apply that to every soldier on the ground. When you send in an
Army that is a cross-section of Israeli society, you’re arming all kinds of
people, most of whom I believe have the military discipline to behave
rationally, but not all. And when you send a people’s Army, with the emotion
that we were experiencing in the aftermath of October 7th, into the kind of
conditions where this war needed to be fought, then you do have a very charged,
problematic situation. I can’t discount that. But, just in terms of the basic
conduct of this war, I believed from the beginning, and I still believe, that
we have done as well as any Army would in our place.
You said that Israel
regained its sanity very quickly after October 7th, but aid was still being
denied for a long time after that. President Biden called Israel’s conduct in
the war “indiscriminate” months later. The Times had something last
weekend about the number of preteen children in Gaza suffering from gunshot
wounds. It does seem that whatever’s been going on has been going on for a very
long time and not just at the very beginning of the war.
At the same time, Biden has vigorously
defended Israel and continues to. I don’t know if he was expressing frustration
with a particular incident, but certainly the pattern has held of American
support for Israel in this war and support for the war. There’s also the
question of how this war looks from the outside and how it looks from the
inside. I served in Gaza. My son served in Gaza in 2009. I know what the
conditions there are like. And so the real question here is the question that
in some ways underlies all your questions: Should Israel have fought this war
at all?
And my response to that is: if we can’t fight this war,
then we have no ability to defend ourselves against this kind of enemy. I can’t
accept that. As difficult as it is to reach that conclusion—as wrenching as it
is and as aware as I am of the moral consequences and the moral burden that I’m
going to carry as an Israeli who supports this war—I still have no choice in
the end but to say, “Either I’m going to defend myself or I might as well just
say that this country can’t exist, and it’s a failure.” I’m nowhere near that
point, even if some people abroad have reached a conclusion that we don’t have
a right to continue to exist.
You basically said earlier
that, on the one hand, there are a bunch of people in Israel who refuse to even
view Palestinian civilians as innocent. On the other hand, there are people
abroad who were too critical of the way Israel had fought the war. So, essentially,
the argument is that a bunch of people on college campuses criticizing Israel too much is on par with
the fact that the Israeli government is, in some sense, run by quasi-fascists
who want to kill lots of the people that it’s currently bombing. I’ve just been
surprised by the degree to which both of those things seem to have become
nearly equal irritants for a lot of liberal Israelis.
What’s emerged on campuses in the last
year is not a bunch of students criticizing Israel harshly. It’s a mass
movement that denies Israel the right to exist. It is the transformation of
much of liberal and progressive discourse on Israel from criticism, even harsh
criticism, of Israel’s policies to rejection of Israel’s legitimacy. This is
not a negligible issue for Israelis and even more so for American Jews. When I
was growing up in the American Jewish community of the nineteen-sixties and
seventies, there was a sense that America would accept us and that certainly we
were safe in America, but we needed to tone down our Jewishness to be fully
accepted. The great achievement of American Jewry in the last couple of decades
has been the end of conditional acceptance. You could be any kind of Jew you
wanted and you would be fully part of American society. Anti-Zionists are
bringing back conditionality. We will accept you in our progressive circle. You
can even have a Passover Seder at our demonstrations. But you need to repudiate
that problematic part of your Jewishness, which is support for Israel. This is
a historic setback for American Jews.
But I spent a year leading up to
October 7th in the streets every week, sometimes every day, demonstrating
against this government. I wrote appeals to diaspora Jews to join the movement
to try to save Israeli democracy. Since October 7th, I feel that I am fighting
a three-front war. There’s the war on my borders against the forces of October
7th; I’m fighting a war around the world for the legitimacy of the Jewish
story; and I’m fighting a war in my own country against the forces that want to
turn us into the criminal country that our enemies say we already are. The
convergence of these three fronts has made this year for me and for many
Israelis close to unbearable. Any one of these struggles would be historic.
Having to fight all three at the same time sometimes feels overwhelming. ♦
