Via Joel Beinin [my italics]
They believe that after the horrific October 7 massacre in the communities of the western Negev, Israel “set out to wage… a just war.” In contrast, “the war that began on March 18, with Israel's violation of the ceasefire and its failure to comply with the agreement to release the hostages” is not the same war.
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health (MOH), Israeli forces killed at least 14,500 Palestinian children between October 7, 2023 and January 2025. While the Gaza MOH casualty figures are widely considered reasonably accurate, a study in the British medical journal Lancet concludes that they may actually undercount casualties by as much as 40%.
Were the deaths of children before March 18, 2025 less immoral than those of the 1,100 or more children slain by Israeli forces since then? And what about their mothers, fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers? Why do the authors of the “Open Letter” promote such an implausible account of Israel’s devastation of Gaza?
Ilana Hammerman is a literary scholar, author, and editor with decades of fearless anti-occupation activism. She is the sort of “leftist” Israeli who might have signed the intellectuals’ open letter.
Instead, she published a fulsome critique of the text in Haaretz. Hammerman has “no doubt that their intentions were good. The problem is that the open letter itself wasn't good, because it was wrong and misleading. Its drafters and signatories were lying to themselves.” Hammerman explains, “this war was a war of annihilation from its inception, 19 months earlier, with massive airstrikes by air force pilots and drones that dropped bombs weighing almost a ton from afar (in modern wars, we no longer kill face-to-face), and even more so once the ground operation began. And in fact, this war had goals other than military victory.”
Yuval Abraham termed the initial bombing campaign in October-November 2023 a “mass assassination factory.” Much of it was directed by an artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender.”
Hammerman also challenges the intellectuals’ assertion that “Netanyahu is not Israel” and that, “[t]his war is contrary to the will and the values of the majority in Israel. “Really? [T]his government was elected by the votes of a majority of Israelis in free, democratic elections on the basis of the platforms of the parties that comprise it, from Likud headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu down to Religious Zionism and Jewish Power, headed respectively by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir.”
The government’s guidelines proclaim: “The Jewish people has an exclusive and unassailable right to the entirety of the Land of Israel. The government will promote and develop settlement in every part of the Land of Israel [including] Judea and Samaria (the West Bank).” The current government, like most of those that preceded it since 1967, had been fulfilling that promise since it was established in January 2023.
The well-educated and intelligent signatories to this open letter are the elite opinion leaders of the sectors of Israeli society that incessantly proclaim that Israel is and must be a “democratic and Jewish state.” Are they ignorant of Israel’s history? Are they asserting that the election of governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu since 2009 (except for 2021-22 when the even more aggressively annexationist Naftali Bennett was prime minister) was a failure of Israeli democracy? If governments that don’t represent the will of the people have been in power for a decade and a half, what is the meaning of the claim that Israel is a democracy (for Jews, of course, certainly not for second class Palestinian citizens or Palestinians living under occupation who have no political rights)?
In late May, Tamir Sorek and Shay Hazkani, Israeli-American professors at Pennsylvania State University and University of Maryland respectively, released the results of a survey they commissioned from the Israeli Geocartography Knowledge Group. Based on a representative sample of 1,005, 82% of Israeli Jews favored expelling the Palestinians from the Gaza Strip; 56% favored expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. A similar 2003 survey reported that 45% and 31% of Israeli Jews supported expulsion of Gazans and Palestinian citizens of Israel respectively. Nearly half, 47%, of Israeli Jews agreed that the Israeli army, “when conquering an enemy city, should act in a manner similar to the way the Israelites acted when they conquered Jericho under the leadership of Joshua, namely, to kill all its inhabitants.”
For obvious reasons, the number of Israeli Jews who support the ethnic cleansing and mass murder of Palestinians has increased sharply since October 7, 2023. However, it is disingenuous to maintain, as the authors of the “Open Letter” suggest, that for the two previous decades supporters of ethnic cleansing did not represent the “real Israel.” They did not constitute a majority of Israeli Jews from 2003 to 2023. Nonetheless, they comprised the social base of Likud rule for most of that period. Today they include many opponents of the current government.
After they published the results of their survey in Haaretz, Sorek and Hazkani were attacked for somehow falsifying its results or relying on a faulty methodology. Dahlia Scheindlin, a respected analyst of Israeli public opinion, confirmed that the survey was methodologically sound. Its results are “brutal” and “true” and the underlying “trends are as consistent as they are shocking,” she said. Scheindlin also properly noted that any public opinion poll reflects a moment in time.
The crisis of Israeli society is far more profound than support for ethnic cleansing. For nine months before October 7, 2023, hundreds of thousands of Israelis demonstrated weekly against the Netanyahu government’s assault on the independence of the judiciary, even as the vast majority of them insisted on ignoring the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Since then, the government has defied the rulings of the Supreme Court by dismissing Shin Bet (internal security) chief Ronen Bar and Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. With the notable exceptions of Haaretz and the +972 webzine, much of the Israeli media ceaselessly disseminates racist incitement and authoritarian populism. Religious outlets like Arutz 7 promote neo-fascist messianism.
As Scheindlin notes, wars can generate crises that bring new political leaderships to power. “The time for leadership by brave people of vision and values is now,” she declares. However, “the candidates displaying such qualities are pitifully few.”
“Holding Liat,” a film about the abduction of my niece, Liat, and the death of her husband, Aviv, on October 7 had its North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival three days ago. I don’t wish to conclude on a false note of optimism. But in the face of the moral bankruptcy of Israeli Jewish society, I am immensely moved that members of my family have maintained their humanity and determination to dissent despite our ordeal, as Liat expresses in this interview in the New York Times.
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