War on Gaza: The world is turning, but Israel has yet to reckon with its crimes

Middle East Eye

a day ago

As the father of a four-year-old daughter and a newborn baby, as I watch the international response to the genocide in Gaza, I cannot help but wonder: at what age will my children cease to be considered children, and their lives be deemed less important?
The world is shocked at the number of children being killed and starved in Gaza, but there remains no substantive critique of what Israel has done over these past 19 months to all Palestinians in Gaza. The threshold of demands has been lowered to merely alleviating the humanitarian crisis.
Israel has succeeded in destroying Gaza's infrastructure, healthcare system, municipalities, education networks, families, mosques and churches - in short, every framework that organised human life.
But now, having exhausted its 'target bank' and with nothing left to bomb, Israel is striking refugee tent camps and burning people alive. Such cruelty, along with the passage of time and mounting international pressure, have led to a turning point, both globally and within Israeli society.
Despite the support provided to Israel by two successive US presidents and the consensus among Democrats and Republicans alike to give Israel a free hand, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has failed to defeat Hamas or secure the release of the remaining hostages.
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Across the spectrum, Israel's political establishment adopted a revenge narrative from day one, priming the Israeli public to be complicit in its forthcoming crimes.
Israel's failure was not its inability to free the hostages or disarm Hamas. As early as November 2023, Israel could have reached a deal to free all the hostages, while various proposals have been advanced to settle the conflict, including bringing in other entities, such as the Palestinian Authority, to govern Gaza.
But Israel's real objective is clear: to empty Gaza of its population. As Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich's recent statements candidly reveal, the true aim of the war is to conquer Gaza, expel its Palestinian residents, and occupy the territory. This was the original intention all along.
Strategic failures
This has resulted in two strategic failures for Israel. Firstly, it has failed to compel Egypt and Jordan to participate in this scheme and accept Palestinian refugees.
Israel's second failure is moral. The government and Israeli society itself have normalised a narrative of genocide and ethnic cleansing, defending this stance with euphemisms like 'voluntary migration' and 'encouraging relocation'.
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Now, with the intensification of international criticism, cracks have begun to appear in the Israeli consensus. The insistence of thousands of activists and media figures worldwide - Palestinian and non-Palestinian alike - to continue speaking out on Gaza has generated sufficient pressure to make an impact.
This initially affected Israeli tourists, who discovered that most people around the world view genocide as an unforgivable atrocity, prompting Israel's foreign ministry to remind Israelis to suppress national symbols abroad, fuelling a silent boycott of Israeli academics and cultural figures.
The West will scavenge for Israeli movements and leaders who speak out against the war, without offering a genuine moral alternative
We are now seeing a shift in the tone of western foreign policies - late, but significant. The US administration's decision to hold direct negotiations with Hamas to secure the release of dual citizen Edan Alexander reinforced the feeling among Israelis that their government is not genuinely interested in advancing a hostage deal.
Conversely, the US has grown weary of Israel, as evidenced by President Donald Trump's Middle East tour skipping over Israel.
The shift in Israel's global standing was further evidenced by a recent Financial Times editorial titled 'The West's shameful silence on Gaza', as European threats to suspend trade agreements have begun to bite.
French President Emmanual Macron has shifted his tone toward overt criticism, saying this week that European nations must 'harden the collective position' against Israel over Gaza's worsening humanitarian crisis. Even Germany's new chancellor said Berlin would not export weapons used to break humanitarian law, in a break from 19 months of loyal support for Israel's war.
Within Israel itself, one of the most striking signs of fracture came in a recent statement from Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats party, who declared: 'A sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not give itself the aim of expelling populations.'
Golan, a former deputy military chief of staff, was disciplined two decades ago for employing the banned 'neighbour procedure' in field operations, a method in which civilians are used to persuade their neighbours to surrender to the army.
The path forward
This context suggests that Golan is no ethical pacifist. Rather, like many former Israeli generals, he realises that Israel is on its way to becoming a pariah state, incapable of surviving in the Middle East without western support.
Indeed, many Israelis who were once fervent supporters of the war now frame the Gaza genocide as a political gambit for Netanyahu's survival. Yet this was a war many in Israeli society wanted and supported, including Golan himself.
Today, public discourse in Israel oscillates between those who wish to continue the genocide, and those who are worried about the repercussions. This fracture is a byproduct of Israel's failure to ethnically cleanse Gaza, and the fact that it will have to face armed resistance for many years to come.
Why the wall of silence on the Gaza genocide is finally starting to crack Read More »
Amid this backdrop, Netanyahu's far-right coalition partners speak of returning settlements to Gaza, a move that would place Israel squarely on the blacklist of pariah states.
Sadly, neither Golan nor others in Israel's political and civil spheres - not even those who oppose the war - are prepared to admit that the state has carried out a genocide. But still, the public backlash against Golan's remarks took its toll: days later, in a televised interview, he declared that Israel 'has not committed war crimes in Gaza'.
During a visit to the southern city of Beersheba on Tuesday, angry Zionist crowds heckled and booed Golan, who - despite retracting his earlier statements - is now being portrayed around the world as a supposed alternative to Netanyahu, even though he offers no real alternative.
Regrettably, this is likely to be the future: the West will scavenge for Israeli movements and leaders who speak out against the war, without offering a genuine moral alternative. Similar to the periods after the First and Second Intifadas, millions of dollars will flow into Israel's 'peace industry', which will talk about Arabs and Jews living together, without confronting the essential political questions that brought us to this reality.
In the meantime, we must support every statement and initiative that contributes to ending the war - because what matters now is Gaza, and not only the children of Gaza, but also the youths, the women, the men and the elderly.
To prevent further disaster, we must demand more from Israelis, including a real acknowledgment of their actions over the past 600 days.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.