Widening the cracks in Israel’s war machine

January 8, 2025

Meron Rapoport

It takes a certain kind of audacity or disconnectedness, or perhaps both, to try and write something hopeful for 2025. A sober and realistic assessment of the political forces in Israel-Palestine, the wider region, and the world as a whole does not elicit much optimism that the ongoing catastrophe of the past 15 months — particularly what Palestinians are enduring in Gaza — may soon come to an end. 

 

 Graffiti of a police officer revealing a pristine beach behind the separation wall in the Palestinian village of Abu Dis, near Jerusalem in the occupied West Bank, March 6, 2006. (Melanie Fidler/Flash90)

Israel’s far-right government enjoys a solid majority in the Knesset and appears to be committed to carrying out the second and third clauses in Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s “Decisive Plan” in Gaza: the expulsion of the Palestinians or their elimination by the sword if they refuse to leave. (The first clause, to allow Palestinians to live quietly and peacefully under conditions of apartheid, is by now considered too humane and liberal by this government and its supporters.)

The army is incapable of rescuing the hostages or dealing a decisive final blow to Hamas, so it resorts to what it knows best: ethnic cleansing, which, by all indications, will only intensify and could potentially lead to premeditated annihilation. This is especially true if the military adopts Israeli lawmakers’ recent call to destroy Gaza’s food and water sources, just as it adopted the “Generals’ Plan” to starve and ethnically cleanse Gaza’s northernmost cities.

Palestinian society is fragmented and battered. If, in the months following October 7, there were Palestinians who believed that Hamas’ attack had demonstrated the possibility of a military victory over Israel, the total and systematic decimation of the Gaza Strip — along with Hezbollah’s retreat and the collapse of Assad’s regime and the “Axis of Resistance” in general — has dispelled that illusion. Hamas cannot acknowledge its war crimes on October 7, nor can it admit that its bloodlust brought disaster upon Gaza. Moreover, it is incapable of finding a way to end the war, remove the Israeli military from the Strip, and begin reconstruction efforts.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, meanwhile, is unable to make diplomatic advances toward the establishment of a Palestinian state in the face of the current Israeli government, and it’s hard to see how the Palestinians can formulate a new and effective strategy for national liberation in the current conditions.

The past year has also been sobering for liberals who believed naively that the United States would save Israel from itself, and rescue us from the futile wars our government keeps waging. On the contrary, the past 15 months have made clear that the United States is the cornerstone upon which Israel’s wars are built. There would be no destruction in Gaza without the Biden administration’s support, and the Trump administration threatens to make matters even worse. Meanwhile, Europe faces its own looming dark cloud: a Christian far right that views Israel as carrying the burden of the white man’s struggle against the “barbaric” East.

In times like these, it can help to take inspiration from the famous lyrics of Leonard Cohen: “Ring the bells that still can ring,” he sang. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” In other words, our task is to identify the cracks in what has often seemed for more than a year to be an impenetrable machine of death and destruction. No less important — and perhaps more challenging — is to figure out how to widen these cracks so that light can enter and drive out the darkness, as we sang recently during Hanukkah.

Netanyahu and the military

And the cracks are certainly there, even within Israel. The first, which has already grown significantly, is the Israeli public’s trust in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners. In hindsight, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly which aspect of the judicial overhaul that Justice Minister Yariv Levin began unveiling in early 2023 not only sparked fierce opposition on and scale not seen in Israel before but also created a sense among a significant portion of the country’s Jewish population — likely the majority, according to polls — that their very way of life was at risk.

In light of everything that has transpired since October 7, the abolition of the “reasonableness standard,” which stripped power away from the High Court, now seems like a minor issue. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets every week for nearly a year, facing the threat of arrest and police brutality, to try to prevent it and other laws from passing. “Democracy or rebellion,” they chanted as they set fires on Tel Aviv’s main highway. They even dared to challenge the holy of holies in Jewish-Israeli society: military reserve duty.

True, the vast majority of them did not fully acknowledge the direct link between the subjugation of Palestinians in the occupied territories and within Israel on the one hand, and the suppression of democracy for Jews on the other (though some certainly did). However, it seems that many understood the connection between the corruption, racism, and messianism of the current coalition and the threat it poses to democracy.

After October 7, though, protestors who vowed to refuse subsequent army service in protest of the judicial overhaul flocked to reserve duty. Those refusing to participate in war crimes in Gaza could be counted on two hands. Still, the chasm that burst open in 2023 between the far-right government and the urban middle class has not healed. If anything, it has deepened.

Polls repeatedly show that a majority of Israelis believe Netanyahu is obstructing a deal to release hostages and end the war due to his own political considerations; this recognition is a direct result of the aforementioned fracture, born out of the protests against the judicial coup and even earlier.

In what is perhaps a surprising twist, the ceasefire in Lebanon, the so-called “victory” over Hezbollah, and the collapse of the Assad regime have not boosted public support for the government. Even the widespread euphoria over Gaza’s destruction has not been enough to mend the chasm between Netanyahu and his government and large swaths of the middle class — and here, too, another crack is emerging.

Even figures deeply rooted in the security establishment, such as former Defense Minister and IDF Chief of Staff Moshe (“Bogie”) Ya’alon, are calling the Israeli army’s systematic depopulation and flattening of northern Gaza by its name: ethnic cleansing (Ya’alon has not walked back this statement, despite significant pressure). Likewise, recent investigative reports by Haaretz’s Yaniv Kubovich about a senior commander who turned his division into a militia of slaughter and destruction would not have come to light had other soldiers within the division not felt discomfort about their actions.

Similarly, the fact that The New York Times managed to interview 100 soldiers and officers who corroborated investigations published months earlier in +972 Magazine and Local Call — regarding the monstrous levels of “collateral damage” permitted against Palestinian civilians and the flawed statistical justifications the military uses for its attacks — may stem from the same sense of unease. At Local Call, and alongside colleagues at Haaretz, we can take pride in helping to open this crack. It proves that we must persist.

The unresolved issue of the hostages has also eroded Israeli society’s habitual sanctification of war. Before October 7, abandoning prisoners and hostages was considered sacrilegious, as it contradicted the cohesion of Jewish society during wartime. Now, senior right-wing figures, from Amichai Eliyahu to Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, openly declare that other things are more important: firing the attorney general, expelling Palestinians from Gaza, or “destroying Hamas.”

These divisions have driven individual hostage family leaders like Einav Zangauker to sharpen the equation: it’s either the hostages or settlements in Gaza. A majority of Israelis, according to polls, understand that this is the choice in front of them and choose the former.

International pressure

Abroad, too, the cracks are growing. Even the imminent return of President-elect Trump to the White House cannot paper over the fractures in international support for Israel, which have only widened since the war began. The issuance by the International Criminal Court of arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant represents an important step toward accountability.

Notably, Netanyahu has not yet tested these warrants; he has avoided traveling to any state that is a signatory to the ICC’s Rome Statute since the warrants were issued, nor has any leader of such a state visited him in Israel. Meanwhile, vacationing Israeli soldiers who previously filmed themselves committing war crimes in Gaza are having to be smuggled back home due to fear of arrest in countries around the world.

And there could be more accountability on the way: in the ongoing proceedings at the International Court of Justice surrounding the question of whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, the final word has yet to be spoken. An ICJ ruling theoretically has even greater enforcement power than the ICC, given that all nations, including the United States and Israel, are members, and the UN Security Council serves as its executive arm.

It’s true that most governments around the world, wary of the looming threat of American retaliation should they dare to oppose Israel, have not yet severed relations. In the West, as mentioned, there are also powerful parties and movements — mainly of the neo-fascist, evangelical, or authoritarian variety — that view Israel as a model to emulate. However, in the arena of public opinion, numerous polls show that growing numbers in the West, and certainly in the Global South, support the Palestinian cause. The proliferation of student encampments at universities across the United States and beyond last year only further demonstrated the winds of public opinion among youth.

It is worth remembering that the sanctions movement against apartheid in South Africa began on campuses and within civil society. Only after it gained momentum did Western governments adopt it — which could very well be the case with Israel.

No less importantly, while Hamas has suffered military blows and the Strip has been ravaged, the Palestinians of Gaza, despite facing inhuman hardships, are still holding on. The same is true in the West Bank and inside Israel. The appetite among Palestinians for military action against Israel has diminished significantly, at least in the foreseeable future, but they are not going anywhere.

Despite the delusions of grandeur held by Smotrich and his associates — or, more accurately, their oscillation between euphoria and frustration — Israel is not truly close to “settling the conflict.” If, by some chance, a ceasefire and hostage deal is reached that would halt the war, even temporarily, the sense of despair among Israel’s fascist right may resemble the aftermath of the 2005 “disengagement” from Gaza: a feeling that a golden opportunity to empty Gaza of Palestinians was squandered.

The need for political imagination

The Israeli army’s obliteration of Gaza is paralyzing. The combination of grief and rage at the scenes of mass killing, starvation, and now the freezing to death of infants, along with the inability to stop Israel’s war machine which daily devours another neighborhood and another hospital, creates a sense that words are meaningless, that political action is pointless, and that it verges on being immoral to discuss any political horizon at such a time.

But perhaps, even unconsciously, this is precisely Netanyahu and his allies’ intention in prolonging the endless war: to render the discussion of alternatives meaningless. Yet the refusal to abandon political discourse, the refusal to give up on an alternative horizon, is itself an act of resistance to the war machine. This is our moral obligation to the victims who have already fallen, to those who will yet fall, and to the survivors of this carnage.

Any action that envision a future of national and civic equality in this land — one free of supremacy, occupation, military bombardment, and siege — carries political significance today. This is especially true if such actions are joint between Jews and Palestinians, but even if they occur in parallel they remain vital.

Many Israeli Jews — though it is difficult to quantify quite how many, as their voices are completely marginalized from the mainstream media — feel deep moral revulsion at what Israel is doing in Gaza, or at the very least sense that Israel is heading in an extremely dark direction. Yet they see no way to halt the decline and instead choose despair or emigration. Palestinian citizens of Israel undoubtedly oppose this war of destruction but are understandably afraid to speak out as a result of harsh repression since October 7. In this context, presenting a vision of a future where both Palestinians and Jews can imagine realizing their personal and national aspirations is crucial.

As my friend Ameer Fakhoury says, engaging with history is not only about exploring the past; it is about serving the present. Similarly, engaging with an imagined future must serve the present by importing inspiration, political energy, and oxygen — not as an escape from the catastrophic and unjust realities surrounding us, but as an act of political imagination that can further widen the cracks in the machinery of destruction, and let in a little more light.

At the beginning of December, we witnessed how a regime of repression that had instilled fear in Syria for 50 years collapsed within 10 days. In hindsight, everyone now speaks of Assad’s downfall as inevitable — he had lost the people, lost the army, the state he built had crumbled, and his allies had abandoned him. But in real time, few noticed the cracks, and even fewer believed those cracks could so easily bring down a regime.

This doesn’t mean that, thanks to the cracks in Israel’s right-wing government, 2025 will necessarily be a year of opportunity and hope, erasing the darkness of 2024. But identifying and leveraging those cracks is essential for such a transformation to take place.

 

Israel kills two children in air strike in occupied West Bank

Fayha Shalash

Israel has killed three Palestinians, including two children, in an air strike in the occupied West Bank town of Tammun on Wednesday.

Palestinian sources said the three victims of the attack near the city of Tubas in the north of the occupied territory were cousins.

They were named locally as 24-year-old Adam Bisharat, as well as Hamza Bisharat aged 10 and Reda, eight.

Two air strikes in Tammun within the past 24 hours have left five Palestinians dead.

Israeli media outlets said the attack, which targeted the yard outside the victims’ family, had “liquidated an armed Palestinian cell”.

Locals said the Israeli army arrived at the scene soon after the attack and seized the bodies of those killed, preventing Palestinian medical teams from attempting to administer medical aid.

Speaking to Middle East Eye, Obai Bisharat, the brother of Adam, said he was inside his family home when he heard the sound of an explosion outside.

He rushed outside to discover his brother and young cousins covered in blood without any signs of life.

"I tried moving them and to pull them away from the place but I was surprised by how fast the Israeli army stormed the area," Bisharat said.

"The soldiers pushed me away, took away my phone and forced me to the ground."

The soldiers then raided the house and assaulted its residents before making off with the body.

“I didn’t know that my brother and cousins were outside,” he said. “The children were playing in sunny weather.”

The house and nearby cars were also damaged during the attack, Obai Bisharat added. 

‘Soldiers prevented us’

Palestinian medical sources told Middle East Eye that they rushed to the scene when they heard the explosion.

However, when ambulance driver Dhiyab Bani Odeh headed towards the scene he and his colleagues were prevented from advancing by Israeli soldiers.

"We could have reached them and perhaps rescued them, but the soldiers prevented us from approaching and stopped their military vehicles in our way.” Bani Odeh said.

“We tried to convince them to at least give us the children, but they refused and took them."

Three ambulances pursued the Israeli vehicles that were carrying the bodies of the dead in an attempt to retrieve them but to no avail.

Bani Odeh said this is not the first time that medics have been prevented from reaching the bodies of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks.

“If the target is someone whom the Israeli army suspects to be a member of the resistance or armed, we are absolutely prevented from reaching him, and if we succeed, we are interrogated,” he added.

Israel has been accused of attacking ambulances in recent weeks, as well as shooting at paramedics and storming hospitals.

Since the war on Gaza began in October 2023, Israel has carried out a simultaneous escalation of violence in the occupied West Bank.

The Israeli army says it has launched 110 air strikes on the territory since October 2023, killing more than 200 Palestinians.

 

Genocidal President, Genocidal Politics

Norman Solomon

When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel’s defense.” Following the reports last month from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch concluding that Israeli actions in Gaza are genocide, Biden’s decision was a new low for his presidency.

It’s logical to focus on Biden as an individual. His choices to keep sending huge quantities of weaponry to Israel have been pivotal and calamitous. But the presidential genocide and the active acquiescence of the vast majority of Congress are matched by the dominant media and overall politics of the United States.

Forty days after the Gaza war began, Anne Boyer announced her resignation as poetry editor of the New York Times Magazine. More than a year later, her statement illuminates why the moral credibility of so many liberal institutions has collapsed in the wake of Gaza’s destruction.

While Boyer denounced “the Israeli state’s U.S.-backed war against the people of Gaza,” she emphatically chose to disassociate herself from the nation’s leading liberal news organization: “I can’t write about poetry amidst the ‘reasonable’ tones of those who aim to acclimatize us to this unreasonable suffering. No more ghoulish euphemisms. No more verbally sanitized hellscapes. No more warmongering lies.”

The acclimatizing process soon became routine. It was most crucially abetted by President Biden and his loyalists, who were especially motivated to pretend that he wasn’t really doing what he was really doing.

For mainline journalists, the process required the willing suspension of belief in a consistent standard of language and humanity. When Boyer acutely grasped the dire significance of its Gaza coverage, she withdrew from “the newspaper of record.”

Content analysis of the war’s first six weeks found that coverage by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times had a steeply dehumanizing slant toward Palestinians. The three papers “disproportionately emphasized Israeli deaths in the conflict” and “used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians,” a study by The Intercept showed. “The term ‘slaughter’ was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and ‘massacre’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. ‘Horrific’ was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.”

After a year of the Gaza war, Arab-American historian Rashid Khalidi said: “My objection to organs of opinion like the New York Times is that they see absolutely everything from an Israeli perspective. ‘How does it affect Israel, how do the Israelis see it?’ Israel is at the center of their worldview, and that’s true of our elites generally, all over the West. The Israelis have very shrewdly, by preventing direct reportage from Gaza, further enabled that Israelocentric perspective.”

Khalidi summed up: “The mainstream media is as blind as it ever was, as willing to shill for any monstrous Israeli lie, to act as stenographers for power, repeating what is said in Washington.”

 

The cnformist media climate smoothed the way for Biden and his prominent rationalizers to slide off the hook and shape the narrative, disguising complicity as evenhanded policy. Meanwhile, mighty boosts of Israel’s weapons and ammunition were coming from the United States. Nearly half of the Palestinians they killed were children.

For those children and their families, the road to hell was paved with good doublethink. So, for instance, while the Gaza horrors went on, no journalist would confront Biden with what he’d said at the time of the widely decried school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, when the president had quickly gone on live television. “There are parents who will never see their child again,” he said, adding: “To lose a child is like having a piece of your soul ripped away. . . . It’s a feeling shared by the siblings, and the grandparents, and their family members, and the community that’s left behind.” And he asked plaintively, “Why are we willing to live with this carnage? Why do we keep letting this happen?”

The massacre in Uvalde killed 19 children. The daily massacre in Gaza has taken the lives of that many Palestinian kids in a matter of hours.

While Biden refused to acknowledge the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that he kept making possible, Democrats in his orbit cooperated with silence or other types of evasion. A longstanding maneuver amounts to checking the box for a requisite platitude by affirming support for a “two-state solution.”

Dominating Capitol Hill, an unspoken precept has held that Palestinian people are expendable as a practical political matter. Party leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries did virtually nothing to indicate otherwise. Nor did they exert themselves to defend incumbent House Democrats Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, defeated in summer primaries with an unprecedented deluge of multimillion-dollar ad campaigns funded by AIPAC and Republican donors.

The overall media environment was a bit more varied but no less lethal for Palestinian civilians. During its first several months, the Gaza war received huge quantities of mainstream media coverage, which thinned over time; the effects were largely to normalize the continual slaughter. Some exceptional reporting existed about the suffering, but the journalism gradually took on a media ambience akin to background noise, while credulously hyping Biden’s weak ceasefire efforts as determined quests.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu came in for increasing amounts of criticism. But the prevalent U.S. media coverage and political rhetoric — unwilling to expose the Israeli mission to destroy Palestinians en masse — rarely went beyond portraying Israel’s leaders as insufficiently concerned with protecting Palestinian civilians.

Instead of candor about horrific truths, the usual tales of U.S. media and politics have offered euphemisms and evasions.

When she resigned as the New York Times Magazine poetry editor in mid-November 2023, Anne Boyer condemned what she called “an ongoing war against the people of Palestine, people who have resisted through decades of occupation, forced dislocation, deprivation, surveillance, siege, imprisonment, and torture.” Another poet, William Stafford, wrote decades ago:

    I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

    to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.