More Israelis Question Morality of War in Gaza

Hindustan Times

9 hours ago

TEL AVIV—Dor Eilon held up a poster of an emaciated Gazan child for the first time at an antiwar protest last week. The 29-year-old lawyer had joined dozens of other Israelis as they stood silently in the summer heat at a square in Tel Aviv with the photos in hand.
'It's not moral to ignore this,' said Eilon, who began attending protests to free the hostages several months ago, but now says she feels a duty to highlight the plight of Gazans. 'Usually I hand out stickers and people smile at me. And here people look away from me.'
In recent weeks, more Israelis—including prominent public figures—have called to end the war in Gaza while decrying the dire humanitarian situation in the enclave, marking a shift in the public discourse. A majority of former directors of the Israeli military; Mossad; Shin Bet, the country's internal security agency; and the police, called on the Israeli government on Sunday to end the war against Hamas. The cause began as a just one after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, they said. But now it has become futile.
While polls in Israel have shown for months that a large majority of Israelis, including on the right, want to end the war in exchange for the hostages, dire conditions in the enclave and the worsening food crisis is spurring more dissent on moral grounds and leaving Israel more internationally isolated than ever.
Dor Eilon, in Tel Aviv, demonstrated against the war in Gaza on Thursday.
Nightly news reports have featured more Gazans talking about suffering in the strip. Photos of Gazans killed in the war are now more visible in some public spaces such as protests. More than 1,000 leading Israeli artists created a stir when they signed a petition calling to end the killing of children and civilians in Gaza. A large proportion of those who have been killed during the war, 60,000 in all, have been minors, according to Gaza health authorities who don't say how many are combatants.
Heads of the country's major universities demanded Israeli authorities do more to help adequate food supplies enter the strip. Israel's most famous living novelist, David Grossman, and a former deputy director of the Mossad spy agency even called the war a genocide as did two Israeli human-rights groups for the first time.
Analysts say the growing willingness by Israelis to question the morality of the war is connected to more Israelis asking hard questions about whether Israel can achieve its goal of destroying Hamas and freeing the hostages after almost two years of fighting.
While Hamas has been substantially weakened, it is still capable of guerrilla warfare and 20 Israeli hostages remain captive along with the remains of 30 others. Cease-fire talks remain at a stalemate and many Israelis believe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own political survival, which he denies. Netanyahu will convene a security discussion on Tuesday about the fighting in Gaza and its expansion into areas where hostages could be held, an Israeli official said.
'In light of what is happening, there is a need to make our voice heard—a voice of values, compassion,' said Eyal Sher, director of the Israel Festival, who helped organize the petition signed by over 1,000 Israeli artists and musicians in recent days. It is the first time such a large group of cultural figures has voiced its opposition to the war.
Antiwar sentiment in Israel has so far been unsuccessful in persuading the country's government to change course.
A street in Jaffa, in the south of Tel Aviv, displays photos of Palestinian children killed in Gaza.
Some Israelis pushed back against the petition. One of the country's most popular singers, who was injured while fighting in Gaza as a reservist, accused the signatories of spreading lies. Eilon, the protester in Tel Aviv, and other activists were at times confronted by bystanders, telling them they should be ashamed of themselves for spreading lies about people starving in Gaza.
Polling also shows that the rise in concern for the suffering is mostly found in Israel's political left and center, according to Tamar Hermann, a pollster and senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute think tank in Jerusalem. A new poll by the institute led by Hermann which was taken at the end of July, showed that 79% of Jewish Israelis weren't personally troubled by reports of famine and suffering by Palestinians in Gaza.
But a breakdown of the result showed stark differences based on political views: 70% of Jewish Israelis on the left and 32% of those affiliated with the center said they were personally troubled by reports of famine and suffering in Gaza, compared with just 6% from those on the right.
'There is a very big difference between the camps,' Hermann said. 'It is really as if it isn't the same public opinion. These are people who think totally differently.'
Significantly, voters on the right of the spectrum who comprise Netanyahu's core base have barely shifted. The recent outpouring of sentiment to end the war has so far been unsuccessful in persuading the Israeli government to change course. But some analysts say the fact that the dire situation in Gaza is being discussed at all means it has to be confronted.
'We moved from a stage where we really didn't see anything about what is happening in Gaza to public discourse—people are talking about it,' even if they don't agree, said Eran Halperin, a professor of psychology at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. 'It is a very significant change.'
Up until recently, there was almost no graphic footage of Gazans killed or coverage of their suffering on major Israeli news channels as is widely featured in international media around the world.
That is now beginning to change. After her show aired a segment on the way hunger in Gaza is covered around the world, Israeli news anchor Yonit Levi shocked many by saying the negative views of Israel weren't due to a failure of public diplomacy, but what she called 'a moral failure.'
Demonstrators in Tel Aviv on Thursday protested against the war in Gaza.
In the past few weeks, groups of protesters have held demonstrations outside the studio of Channel 12, Israel's most popular news channel and where Levi works, calling on it to cover suffering in Gaza. Now, more mainstream journalists are covering Palestinians in Gaza and even taking a stand against Israeli actions.
'It is an earthquake compared with what was covered before but it's also a tiny, minuscule movement when you look at what's happening on the ground and how it's being covered elsewhere,' said Ayala Panievsky, a media scholar at City St. George's, University of London. Panievsky's research found that out of over 700 news segments published on Channel 12, during the first six months of the war, only four mentioned civilian casualties in Gaza. Channel 12 declined to comment.
In recent weeks there have also been more protests against the war by Israeli Arabs, who make up around 20% of Israeli citizens.
While Hermann's poll found that 86% of Israeli Arabs are personally troubled or very troubled about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, this group had stayed mostly quiet up until recently, due to heavy-handed Israeli policing over shows of support for Gaza, even on social media.
'The situation was very difficult in terms of the combativeness of the police, arrests, questioning, intimidation for anyone who tried to show solidarity or protest against the war and the starvation in Gaza. People were very scared,' said Amir Badran, 53, a Jaffa city council member who helped organize a protest against the war attended by dozens of local Arabs and Jews on Friday.
A change happened around two weeks ago starting with local protests, he said, and he hoped more people would join.
'People burst, burst out because they can't hold it inside anymore,' Badran said.
Amir Badran, a Jaffa city council member, is organizing local demonstrations against the war in Gaza.
Write to Anat Peled at [e-mail]
More Israelis Question Morality of War in Gaza
More Israelis Question Morality of War in Gaza
More Israelis Question Morality of War in Gaza
More Israelis Question Morality of War in Gaza