Waging war against innocent Palestinians does not make Israel safe

In January, after months of negotiations intermediated by the United States, a phased ceasefire agreement was announced between Israel and Hamas. Shooting stopped on January 19, and a sequence of hostage releases occurred. On March 25, when the 42-day Phase 1 period ended, Israel didn’t move to the Phase 2 negotiations on a permanent ceasefire. Instead, the Netanyahu government abruptly terminated its participation in the ceasefire agreement and announced a blockade of all food, fuel, and humanitarian supplies into Gaza.

Foreign Minister Bezalel Smotrich outlined the new plan: “Launch a campaign to defeat Hamas, occupy Gaza, and implement a temporary military government until another solution is found, return the hostages and launch the Trump plan — or this government has no right to exist.”

The Trump plan, announced on February 4, called for a U.S. takeover of Gaza and the permanent displacement of the Palestinian population living there. Smotrich said: “The decision we made last night to completely halt humanitarian aid to Gaza until Hamas is destroyed or completely surrenders and all our hostages are returned is an important step in the right direction.”

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Several weeks later, Defense Minister Israel Katz discussed annexing Gazan territories.

Smotrich’s statements highlighted several important policy features. Israel’s objectives were no longer about security. The new objective was territorial expansion and Palestinian displacement. These new goals were to be achieved by explicitly targeting not Hamas but the Palestinian civilian population. The announcement highlighted Smotrich’s role: the most extreme wing of the most extreme right-wing government in Israel’s history was determining Gaza war policy.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has acquiesced to this program because it suits his personal and political needs. The war’s continuation postpones a day of reckoning about his administration’s security failures leading to the October 7 disaster, as well as two significant corruption scandals involving both Netanyahu and ministers in his government. He has agreed with the program also because he believes the new U.S. administration cares little about the Palestinian humanitarian crisis in Gaza and explicitly supports a displacement plan. A complete population removal might also be the only way to defeat Hamas without a complicated program of political engagement with Palestinians and the leaders of other Arab countries, which might end up establishing a successful non-Hamas self-governing regime that is outside Israel’s direct control.

The new Israeli government program has obvious flaws. The vicious assault on defenseless civilians and their forceable displacement are indefensible violations of humanitarian values. Beyond that, the project is not workable and is antagonistic to  Israel’s long-term security rather supportive of it.

Displacement from Gaza means resettlement of 2.3 million destitute and traumatized people somewhere else. No one wants that problem — certainly not the fragile governments of Middle Eastern countries. No one also wants to pay the enormous short- and long-term costs implied. That includes the Trump administration, which openly called for the project.

That means the Gazans are going nowhere. The Israeli government’s Plan B calls for Palestinians to be rounded up into tight hubs, which also might be food distribution sites. In short: concentration camps.

To facilitate such a plan, the renewed military offensive, begun March 18, has included intense bombardments of civilian infrastructure and aerial attacks at small numbers of targeted Hamas operatives. Those attacks generate enormous noncombatant casualties, all in the absence of functioning health systems. It is difficult not to see these attacks as meant to terrorize.

The plan also depends on massive numbers of Israeli soldiers to occupy and hold territory, but remobilized units entering Gaza are understaffed because exhausted and demoralized reservists increasingly are not responding to call-up notices.

Now, a month and a half into the new program, with malnutrition apparent, and Hamas still undefeated, the political costs of the campaign are starting to add up.

The Biden administration had attempted to solidify Israeli security by integrating it with Sunni Arab countries into an anti-Iran defense architecture. The Hamas October 7 attack was timed, in part, to disrupt such a political and security realignment. Netanyahu’s handling of the Gaza war has handed Hamas a total victory on this point. Integration with Israel is again unthinkable in the Arab world. Nor is Netanyahu getting any help on this front from Trump, whose peripatetic approach to policy seems to have dropped Bibi during the president’s recent Middle East tour promoting U.S. business interests.

But it is not only in the Arab world that Israel’s war against the Gazan civilian population has generated antipathy. Britain, Canada, and France have jointly declared “the level of human suffering in Gaza is intolerable… We will not stand by while the Netanyahu Government pursues these egregious actions…If Israel does not cease the renewed military offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid, we will take further concrete actions in response.” The U.K. Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, called Israel’s new campaign in Gaza “unjustified,” and suspended trade talks. The newly elected German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, declared, “Israel must also remain a country that lives up to its humanitarian obligations, even where — especially where this terrible war is now raging in the Gaza Strip — where this confrontation with the Hamas terrorists is necessarily taking place… Humanitarian aid in the Gaza Strip must be ensured.” In an important development, Kaja Kallas, the European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, announced a review, backed by a “huge majority” of the bloc’s foreign ministers, of its free trade agreement with Israel, due to Israeli government policies resulting in “catastrophic” conditions in Gaza.

In the face of international criticism, Smotrich remained unfazed, calling for the bombing of food warehouses and generators, “destroying everything that is left,” and the resettlement of the Palestinians there into compressed areas in the south of the strip.

A longstanding Hamas goal has been to delegitimatize Israel. It seems the Netanyahu government is determined to help Hamas achieve that end.

The Netanyahu government always says the release of hostages is a war aim, but there has never been a coherent military plan to rescue them; with very few exceptions, hostages have come home only after negotiations and a political agreement. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, an association of hostage family members, opposed the latest offensive. “Was a decision made to sacrifice the hostages for ‘seizing territory’?” they asked.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, swamped by investigations, removed the head of the Security Service —the Shin Bet — in a political move the Israeli Supreme Court termed “unlawful” and a “conflict of interest.” Undeterred, Netanyahu appointed a replacement, who declared, “I am against hostage deals. This is a forever war.”

Who is to fight this forever war? Polls show a majority of Israelis want to see an end to the fighting in Gaza and a return of the hostages. And who is to pay for this very expensive forever war, which Israel itself can’t finance and the Trump administration is indicating it is unlikely to fund?

The new offensive has generated vocal opposition in Israel. Former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said the fact that Hamas remained in Gaza represented a “resounding failure,” which was due to the Israeli government’s reluctance to create a political plan for Gaza’s future. Yair Lapid, head of the centrist Yesh Atid party, criticized the large call-up of reserves without defining a clearly attainable objective. Yair Golan, head of the newly formed Democratim Party, was more strident, saying the offensive was only to perpetuate a floundering government and “serves no security purpose and does not bring the release of the hostages closer.” Speaking later, Golan declared, “Israel is on the way to becoming a pariah state among the nations, the South Africa of yore, if it does not return to behaving like a sane country…. A sane country doesn’t engage in fighting against civilians, doesn’t kill babies as a hobby and doesn’t set the expulsion of a population as a goal.” When the government responded harshly to Golan’s criticism, he retorted, “The intention of my statements was clear. This war is the enactment of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich’s fantasies. And if we let them enact them, we will become a pariah state.”

Recall that on October 7, Golan, who was then retired, went to IDF headquarters, re-enlisted, and drove to the southern border while the IDF was occupied elsewhere. He rescued many civilians from the Nova festival.

It is time for American Jews to join those in Israel who are critical of the Israeli government’s war policy. The war is no longer being conducted for defense purposes, and its extension undermines rather than promotes Israeli security. It is an affront to humanitarian values — the values Jews believe are promoted by our tradition. Concern for Palestinian noncombatants in Gaza is not anti-Israel, and it is not antisemitism. The best way to win freedom for the hostages is to engage in a political process.

To advance that process, it will likely be useful to engage rather than repel leaders of the many Middle Eastern countries who are interested in Palestinians but have antipathy for Hamas. To do this, however, will mean rejecting Israeli annexationist fantasies. It means embracing a vision of peace and cooperation to build a creative future for the peoples of Israel and Palestine.

Mark Gold of Teaneck holds a Ph.D. in economics from NYU. He is on the executive board of Partners for Progressive Israel, a member organization of the American Zionist Movement and an affiliate of the World Union of Meretz.