For fifteen months Israel’s government clung to the fantasy of “total victory” in Gaza—with considerable public support.
January 25, 2025
Toward the end of October 2023 I was taking a taxi home in Tel Aviv. Just after we entered Shapira neighborhood, near the central bus station, the driver turned on the radio to the ongoing terrible news from the south. The Israeli ground operation in Gaza had just begun; there were heavy fights around Beit Hanoun. The newscaster mentioned the Israelis and foreigners whom Hamas had, earlier that month, kidnapped to the Gaza Strip—at the time they numbered 251—before moving on to the next item: clashes were underway between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian militants in Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank. “It is so hard to build, and so easy to destroy,” the driver said, looking at me in the rearview mirror. “So easy to destroy what?” I asked. “You know,” he said, “everything. The peace we had here. Now, they will get nothing, no work, no peace.”
I didn’t answer. Any conversation was bound to end in heavy silence, and I preferred skipping directly to the heavy silence part. Yet that nonconversation captured something essential about the way Israelis perceive “the conflict.” Many in Jewish Israeli society do not grasp, and do not want to grasp, that there is a connection between the eruption of violence on October 7 and the fact that the conflict’s core issues—occupation, settlements, borders, security, water, Jerusalem, refugees, sovereignty, freedom of movement, the existence of a Palestinian state—have never been settled. Many Israelis seem to think that the state’s deceitful formulas of “living with the conflict,” “managing the conflict,” or bypassing it with the illusion of peace (as did the Abraham Accords signed during the first Trump presidency), combined with military superiority, had created a tenable status quo that came to an end on October 7, 2023.
Of course there has never been peace here—a truth that should have been shouted before and must be shouted even louder now, as a cease-fire goes into effect that could have easily begun six months ago. As of October 7, Israel and the Palestinian Authority had not engaged in negotiations for about fifteen years; the “temporary” occupation in the West Bank had passed its fifty-sixth anniversary. Israel had also made it crystal-clear that the settlements were there to stay, not to say annexed, and that it had no plans to permit a real state of Palestine—with borders, a capital, sovereignty, territorial contiguity—to emerge, let alone return to the questions of 1948, including the status of Palestinian refugees. The Gaza Strip had been under siege for about seventeen years, with cyclical eruptions of violence. The Knesset was moving steadily to the right: in 2018 its “Jewish nationality bill” not only removed the symbolic status of Arabic as an official language—a collective right held over from British Mandatory legislation in 1922—but also declared that the right to exercise national self-determination was “exclusive to the Jewish people.” It was as if Israel thought it had solved the conflict by, in effect, telling Palestinians to move on.
For the Israeli government and much of Israeli society, none of the events of the past fifteen months seem to have forced any reckoning with the failures of this logic: the 1,200 people killed in one day on October 7, most of them civilians; the indiscriminate targeting of civilians in Gaza, including the destruction of hospitals and starvation campaigns, killing at low estimate more than 45,000 people; the thousands of Israelis evacuated from their kibbutzim and villages in the south and north for more than a year; the many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese who are no longer in their homes and for whom no homes remain; the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh while on official visit in Iran; the thousands of pagers exploding simultaneously in Lebanon; and for fifteen months the total destruction of the Strip, the uncountable number of times that international media (less often domestic media) have reported an “Israeli strike”—including on a residential building, a school, a tent camp, a “safe zone”—that killed fifty people, or sixty, or a hundred.
This pattern was already clear late in October 2023, when UN Secretary-General António Guterres condemned “the horrifying and unprecedented” October 7 attacks unequivocally but added that they “did not happen in a vacuum.” In short order Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan, demanded that Guterres immediately resign; the speaker of the Knesset, Amir Ohana, called it a “vile antisemitic speech”; the former foreign minister Avigdor Liberman said Guterres “should have been removed from office sooner rather than later”; and the leader of the opposition, Yair Lapid, argued that Guterres’s words “provided excuses and rationalization for barbaric terrorism.” It seemed clear then that Israeli leaders, just like the average Israeli taxi driver, were indeed convinced that Hamas’s attacks happened in a vacuum.
Fourteen months later, they still seem to be. The ruling coalition—much like many of Israel’s governments in the past—spent the past year trying to find military solutions to political problems. “We will not remove the IDF from the Gaza Strip and we will not release thousands of terrorists,” Benjamin Netanyahu said in January 2024. “None of this will happen. What will happen? Absolute victory!”
The result has been a prolongation of a war for coalitional and personal ends. The cease-fire deal now in effect is, to all appearances, similar to the agreement with Hamas that was on the horizon in May 2024, when there was no reason to expect a better one: a staggered exchange of Israeli hostages in Gaza for Palestinians in Israeli prisons and a staggered Israeli withdrawal from the Strip. That the government took so long to accept it is further proof, if any were needed, that Israeli politicians have no long-term vision, that the government wanted to dilute the chances of forming a state committee of inquiry into the events of October 7, and that its members refuse to prioritize life and futurity over death and endless war.
*
Since October 7 the streets of Israel have gradually filled with more and more photographs: stickers of young people killed on that day and soldiers killed in Gaza and Lebanon, usually paired with a sentence their families wanted them to be remembered by; or posters of the ninety Israeli hostages still in Gaza, many of whom are thought dead. They look at you from the vending machines in the train station, from the walls on the platform, from bus stops, from the university gate.
Every family here knows someone who was killed over the last fifteen months. October 7 struck across social strata: the southern kibbutzim, peripheral towns, youngsters from all around the country who were at the Nova festival, soldiers from different units, twenty-one Palestinian citizens of Israel. I have friends and colleagues who lost loved ones: her brother, his uncle, her nephew, his parents, her father-in-law, his son. More than five hundred Israeli soldiers and more than eighty Israeli civilians have been killed since. The images of these people in the Israeli public sphere, it seems, can be understood in two ways. For many, myself included, they have long moved us to call to stop the war, end this madness, and solve the conflict rather than find ever more ways to deny it. The government and its supporters, on the other hand, have clung to the promise of “total victory,” capitalizing on the dead to justify and deepen the war “in their name.”
Having made friends in Gaza over the years—first when I worked with Physicians for Human Rights in 2006, later when I wrote journalism, and over the last five years when cotaught a series of courses on Gaza—I spoke with them often after the start of the war. At the beginning, in October 2023, they asked me what I thought would happen next. As if I knew. As the months went by, some of them reported they were able to escape to Egypt. Others told me, each in their own words, about the journey from the north and center to the south, where the major part of the 2.3 million Gazans now stay, mainly in tents. They told me their accounts of the family members they had lost so far. Often they described when they last saw a relative, or said that a single Israeli strike had killed five members of their family, or ten. In June 2024 the Associated Press identified more than sixty Palestinian families in which at least twenty-five people had been killed. In the last six months that number has only grown.
I remember one surreal conversation. I was speaking on the phone with an old friend in Gaza when sirens began in Tel Aviv. Listening to the sirens from my side of the phone he said, in colloquial Arabic, niyalko, “good for you”—for having a home, a safe room, sirens that give you advance notice, and a super-successful antimissile air defense system. “In our case,” he said, “you just hear boom.”
*
The assault on Gaza was met from the start with enormous Israeli public support. Hardly anyone questioned a thing. Now we also know that hardly any limits were put on the army. According to The New York Times, following October 7 Israel weakened safeguards meant to protect civilians in conflict zones, allowing mid-ranking officers to authorize airstrikes that were projected to kill up to twenty civilians. On October 8, for example, the high command said that strikes on military targets are permitted if they “cumulatively endanger up to 500 civilians each day.” This was three weeks before the ground operation began.
There have been times in our history—for example in 2002, when the IDF assassinated the high-ranking Hamas official Salah Shehade using a one-ton bomb that also killed his assistant and thirteen civilians, including nine children—when such attacks brought Israelis out into the street, or at least prompted some public debate. This time, as the civilian casualties in Gaza rose, many Israelis shrugged; others asked for more.
The overwhelming support for the onslaught probably had a range of sources, especially in the first year: the widely circulated footage of the atrocities that Hamas-led militants carried out on October 7 inspired a widespread desire for revenge, the photos of Palestinian citizens who joined the attack were often said to “ease” the killing of civilians during the war on the grounds that “they are all Hamas anyway,” and the mass recruitment of 300,000 Israeli reservists by the end of the war’s first month further blurred the boundaries between civilians and the military in the country. Opponents of the war—what is left of the Jewish Israeli left and the vast majority of Palestinian citizens of Israel—were paralyzed, either because they had been so horrified by the reports from October 7 or because they feared retribution in the current political atmosphere.
Meanwhile, most images from Gaza or Lebanon showing the extent of the destruction—let alone the victims’ names and personal stories—have still hardly reached the Israeli public. When the war moved from Gaza to Lebanon and the IDF killed the Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah by dropping eighty one-ton bombs in southern Beirut, Israeli media did not even report that it also killed a still-untold number of civilians: initial estimates suggested as many as three hundred casualties. Local media outlets—including rapidly growing stations like the ultranationalist Channel 14, which according to the latest figures by Israeli human rights organizations has called for the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza more than fifty times since October 7—doubted the numbers of Palestinian civilian losses and named the people killed by Israel’s military only when they were senior members of Hamas or Hizbullah. Among the most widely proliferated images or videos from Gaza within the Israeli public sphere were social media posts by IDF rank and file, some of whom filmed themselves dedicating blown-up houses to loved ones.
Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir attending a convention by the far-right settler organization Nachala calling for the resettlement of Gaza, Jerusalem, January 28, 2024.
Even as most venues largely ignored the situation on the other side of the Gaza border, and later in Lebanon, the government started criminalizing outlets that did cover it. In May 2024 it took Al Jazeera off the air, in August it approved a bill to block the Lebanese channel Al Mayadeen in Israel, and in November it ordered state officials to boycott Haaretz, the country’s primary left-wing newspaper, after its publisher challenged the mainstream narrative about the distinction between “terrorists” and “freedom fighters.” In the beginning of the war, in an interview with The Guardian, the Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker analyzed the national media’s response. “The shock [of October 7] was so brutal,” he said, “that journalists see their role now, or part of their role, to help the state to win the war. And part of it is showing as little as possible from the suffering in Gaza.”
Yet the majority was probably not ready to hear the whole story anyway. A new song has almost become the national anthem: titled “Harbu Darbu,” a take on an Arabic slang phrase meaning “war and destruction,” it includes lines like “Sons of Amalek, there will be no forgiveness.” Other merciless chants have emerged, from “there are no innocent people in Gaza” to, more simply, “fuck them.” But as a professor of the sociology of Arabic, I was struck by one slogan in particular. Videos of military strikes on houses and people fleeing were starting to appear online under the Hebrew title Hetkhalnu ledaber ‘Aravit: “We started to speak Arabic.” This is not something most Israelis can actually do—the vast majority cannot communicate in Arabic whatsoever, let alone read a book. The implication is rather that the perpetrators of October 7 were “speaking Arabic”—and that now we Israelis will do the same to them. We will be more Hamas than Hamas.
This suggested a larger change in Israel’s self-image. No longer praising itself as “the only democracy in the Middle East” or the IDF as “the most moral army in the world,” the country has adopted a political grammar that goes beyond old-fashioned appeals to military strength with a liberal veneer, embracing a new kind of illiberal supremacism. The mask is off.
*
These developments matter in part because they have taken place under what has become known as Israel’s first-ever “fully right wing” government (literally memshelet yamin ‘al malé). Well before October 7, Israeli ministers in the current coalition had gone atop the Temple Mount/Al-Haram al-Sharif to pray and show their “presence,” normalized the occupation by giving civilian offices power over the settlements in the West Bank, and advocated cutting off “fresh bread” for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel. Having long argued that the supreme court “is tying the hands of our soldiers,” many of these ministers took the chance to settle the score, seeing the unprecedented damage in Gaza—including the mass displacement of civilians—as an angry refutation of the values the court allegedly represents.
This has been the most fascist ruling coalition the country has ever known. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich (who in 2017 published a “decision plan” to erase the Green line) and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir (who openly admires the extreme religious-nationalist Rabbi Meir Kahane and was himself convicted of incitement to terrorism) have been joined by a range of Messianic ministers who want to spark a religious crusade. In their eyes October 7 and the ensuing war amount to a divine call to conquer Gaza and southern Lebanon and annex the West Bank for good. In July Orit Strook, the minister of national missions, declared that we are living through a tekufah shel nes, a “miracle period,” during which Israel has been fueled with divine energy to expand its illegal settlements. That October, a year after the war began, Smotrich imagined how it would conclude. “The war will end,” he wrote in October 2024 in Israel National News,
only when there is no Hamas in Gaza, and when the movement cannot rehabilitate. The war will end when we…resettle Gaza, and make sure we have constant and stable Jewish presence there…. The war will end only when we topple the regime in Iran and annihilate its nuclear project.
By that point Israel was already deep into implementing the “generals’ plan,” a proposal to cut off the northernmost part of the Strip—including the cities of Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia, and Jabalia—from Gaza City and the other governates to its south, evacuate the area of all people, and suggest that anyone who remains will be treated as a terrorist and starved. That operation nearly obliterated the Jabalia refugee camp, the largest in all of historic Palestine. Haaretz reported in November that “recently published satellite photos…indicate that the area, where more than 116,000 refugees lived…is no longer habitable, showing tens of thousands of homes destroyed or heavily damaged and essential infrastructure in ruins.”
Even Moshe Ya‘alon, a former Israeli chief of staff and minister of defense, described this campaign using the terminology of crimes against humanity. In an interview with the Hebrew channel Democrat-TV, he said that Israel has moved in northern Gaza from conquering to ethnic cleansing. The interviewer was not sure she heard right, and Ya‘alon explained: “This is what’s happening there. There’s no Beit Lahia. There’s no Beit Hanoun. The army is currently operating in Jabalia, and essentially, they are cleaning the area of Arabs.”
Mahmoud Isleem/Anadolu/Getty Images
Jabalia, Gaza, January 19, 2025
In the same interview he suggested that Israel is turning into a “corrupt and leprous fascist Messianic state.” Indeed, last October the settler nonprofit Nachala held an event near the Gaza border in support of resettling the Strip. Twenty-one legislators participated. “Encouraging Palestinian emigration from Gaza is the most ethical solution!” Ben-Gvir said. “Encouraging Palestinian departure is rational! It is right! It is the truth! It is the Torah and it is the only way! And yes, it is also humane.”
In the following month, as the Knesset’s winter session began, legislators advanced a barrage of bills: one, known as the “persecution of teachers law,” to permit firing school teachers for anything that could be understood as “support or identification with terrorism,” which in practice can include simply calling the occupation illegal; another bill to ease the process for disqualifying Arab MPs and Arab parties, again under the pretense of combating “terrorism”; a third to ban the work of the UN Relief and Works Agency; a fourth to allow Israeli police officers to investigate suspected incitement to terrorism without approval from the state attorney’s office; and a fifth, known as “the silence law,” to limit academic speech by obliging universities to fire immediately, in an expedited procedure and without compensation, lecturers who express themselves in a way that could be interpreted as too radical. Perhaps that’s my cue.
*
The current regime seems concerned not just with winning the next election but with winning the next elections after it and foreclosing any viable opposition. Arab-Palestinian citizens were politically delegitimized long before the war, and that process has only gathered force in the last fifteen months. The ruling coalition, meanwhile, has isolated every constituency that smells of a “centrist” orientation—which in Israel can itself be quite right-wing—let alone a leftist one. Its commitment to this cause has been so great that it even managed to politicize the most sacred topic in today’s Israel: the hostages.
For months the religious far-right parties threatened to leave the coalition—depriving Netanyahu of a government—if he chose to free the hostages by ending the war with a deal. (Ben-Gvir did indeed resign from the government as soon as the deal to release the hostages was made.) It was crystal-clear that the war could only end with a deal, that to prolong it would only cost more lives—but Netanyahu chose to stall for more than a year, and not a second before Trump could celebrate the deal as his own achievement. When in November 2024 rumors began spreading that an Israeli citizen had been arrested on suspicion of leaking documents to German media for the sake of sabotaging a deal with Hamas, it came as no surprise that the suspect was one of Netanyahu’s spokesmen.
For the past year the prevailing feeling among a considerable number of the hostages’ families—and the center-left more broadly—has been that the government is trying to sabotage and silence them, especially if they call for the return of their relatives “at any cost” (that is, even if it takes an agreement with Hamas). As the campaign grew to make a cease-fire deal, Netanyahu’s government went so far as to pit the hostages’ families against each other by persuading some of them to say that “only military pressure” would save their loved ones, even though the opposite was obviously true.
The result has been an ever-widening chasm within Israeli society. Take, for instance, the yellow ribbons, the symbol of the hostages. In Tel Aviv, where the current coalition won 25 percent in the 2022 election, you can see them everywhere; in the Ma‘aleh Adumim, a settlement seven kilometers east of the Green Line where the current coalition won 80 percent of the vote, you see none whatsoever. Another example: in September 2024, after Hamas murdered six Israelis who had survived almost a year in captivity, the head of the Histadrut, Israel’s trade union, announced a general strike in solidarity with the hostages’ families. That morning it was clear that Israel had been split in two. Israeli mayors knew that striking would signal to Netanyahu that they supported the release of the hostages, even if it meant making a deal with Hamas. Many of them scabbed: in Tel Aviv there was a strike, in Jerusalem no strike. In Herzliya, strike; in Ariel settlement in the West Bank, no strike. In Kfar Saba, strike; in Safed, no strike.
This government excels at putting across false realities. Around April 2024, as more and more people realized that only a deal with Hamas would bring back the hostages alive, Smotrich, Ben-Gvir, and other hawkish ministers from the nationalist, religious right wing all threw a new idiomatic phrase into circulation. Now the proposal was iska mufkeret—a “reckless deal.” One might have thought that a government composed of four different Jewish religious parties—and other parties with a vast majority of conservative (masorti) Jewish members—would follow the Torah’s message that “whoever saves one life in Israel is considered to have saved the whole world.” Yet this coalition has shown that it evidently hates the Palestinians more than it cherishes its own citizens’ lives.
*
And so the war continued, from Gaza to Lebanon to the West Bank to Syria and back to Gaza. Over the past fifteen months Israelis have heard sirens over and over again. My family has rushed quite a lot into our “safe room” in Tel Aviv—mostly because of rockets fired from Gaza, later from Lebanon, once from Iran (180 in one go), and recently from Yemen. While we were sheltering, I tried to put on a happy front for the kids and came up with some silly games. Unamused, my partner told me to end this pseudo–La vita è bella performance. Instead, she said, we either need to rethink how to change this place or consider moving to another country.
Indeed many of our friends have left, either because of the war or because of the total lack of hope here. Our first-floor neighbors bought a small apartment in Athens; my cousin and his girlfriend moved to Crete; two close friends moved with their families to Berlin; a third with her partner and daughter to Amsterdam, a fourth to Italy with her family, a fifth with his family to India, where he opened a guesthouse. A childhood friend moved with his wife and three children to the East Coast, my sister-in-law and her family to the West Coast. Three friends took likely-to-be-prolonged sabbaticals in, respectively, Edinburgh, Barcelona, and Dublin. Many others moved to Portugal, Cyprus, and Greece, the latter of which, Haaretz suggested, “became an escape to everything Israel could have been before it turned into hell.”
The wave of emigration in fact began a few months before October 2023, as a response to the Netanyahu government’s judicial coup, which aimed at weakening the supreme court and strengthening its own power. (All this, of course, occurred while Netanyahu was on trial for fraud, bribery, and breach of trust—as he still is.) According to Haaretz, more than 100,000 people left the country between July 2023 and the end of 2024. The tens of thousands who left before October 7 sensed where Netanyahu’s priorities were taking us. They might have remembered what he told a 2015 meeting of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. “I’m asked if we will forever live by the sword,” he asked rhetorically, and then answered: “Yes.”
In an interview last October with the website Ynet, the historian Yuval Noah Harari estimated that many more Israelis—between 200,000 and 500,000—would leave, mainly “due to the feeling that Israel’s social contract has been cut into shreds.” He compared the current wave of departure to the flight from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. It was a telling reference. Orbán has in recent years become a great friend of Israel, along with Donald Trump, Narendra Modi, and Geert Wilders. It is in Hungary, where there have been hardly any protests calling for the end of the war and where press freedoms have declined significantly, that Israeli football teams have chosen to host their international home games since October 7.
The muse of history probably laughs—or cries—as Orbán presents himself as one of Israel’s new “natural friends,” even as his administration whitewashes the Holocaust. After the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu, Orbán had another occasion to prove his friendship. He quickly clarified that Israel’s prime minister would be as welcome as ever, because the court’s decision would “not be observed” in Hungary.
*
In the beginning I managed to keep my seven-year-old son, David, from learning about most of what happened on and since October 7. I allowed myself to say only that the war started because of “a conflict that needs to be solved,” that his classmate’s uncle died “because he was in a party in a dangerous area,” and that the photos of people he saw in a Tel Aviv square were of people who were “in their prison, who will be swapped with people in our prison.”
But around a year ago, when we went to see our football team, Hapoel Jerusalem, play their first game after the renewal of the season, I realized that my plan had to change. At the stadium the team’s flags all showed Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an Israeli American hostage who supported the team. Fans held up photos and shirts of him, and his name became part of the cheering: “Bring Hersh back home” and “le-hakhzir et kulam ha-bayta” (“Bring them all back home”). David looked at me, puzzled. These were not the chants he remembered. When the Hapoel Jerusalem basketball team won the final, its players draped a shirt with Hersh’s face on it over the league cup. Soon enough David started to ask more questions. He told me he had a list of dreams: for the war to end, for Norwich City to be promoted to the Premier League, for Hapoel Jerusalem to win the league in Israel. Now, he said, he had added a fourth: for Hersh to come back home.
For months I imagined Hersh’s release. I wanted him to survive; selfishly I also wanted a happy ending for the only story David followed in this terrible war. I wanted him to know that there was hope. I pictured David’s face when he’d look at Hersh at a game after his release; I wanted him to see the people in “their prison” be released with people “in ours.” Then, last August, it was announced that Hersh was among those six hostages found dead in Gaza. I was deliberating whether to tell David when I heard a shout from his room: Aba, mashehu kara l’Hersh—“Dad, something happened to Hersh.” Sport5, an Israeli sports website—the only kind I let him browse—had his photo on its homepage.
It has been stifling here. It is hard to think and speak, still harder to speak out. Over the last fifteen months, my friends abroad used to check in quite a lot on WhatsApp. “How are you?” they wrote, “How is everything?” Their questions were the cold leftovers of the message left unsent: “What on earth are you still doing there?”
A few months ago, when I told my former Cambridge professor Yasir Suleiman that I was about to head the department of Middle East studies at Ben-Gurion University, he said that I could not have chosen a more poisonous time. Teaching in Israel about Palestinian nationalism, reading Arabic newspapers from the Mandatory period, coordinating a practicum for Israeli students in Arab localities, or giving courses about the conflict: all this seems harder than ever. Still, he said, the country’s self-defeating, live-by-the-sword logic needs to be challenged from within. At least some of us could try: there will come a point, after all, when it will be too late for the country to change course. Who knows whether it already is.
Yonatan Mendel is a scholar of language and society. He is currently the head of the Department of Middle East Studies at Ben-Gurion University and a researcher at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. (January 2025)
