This is an advance version of my Grassroots column for The Progressive Populist. It was a difficult one to write, because it focuses on Israeli atrocities and cuts the core of what I was taught about Israel growing up. The Israeli government is corrupt, and its war against Gaza is a war against civilians, no matter what Netanyahu or much of the Israeli public believes.
Do not assume that I am absolving Hamas for its crimes against humanity, but I can’t allow that crime to justify the massive destruction of Gaza and the cleansing of the strip of its people.
War is a Virus
The Israeli war against Gaza appears to be spreading, not just to the West Bank and southern Lebanon, but to the entire Mediterranean region.
For more than 100 days — as I write this — Israel has been bombarding Gaza in what its government says is a direct response to the Oct. 7/Shemini Atzeret massacre of Israelis by Hamas in which 1,200 Israelis were murderd and another 240 were taken hostage. Israel, however, has used the Hamas assault as a pretext for a wider war in Gaza, targeting civilians and civilian institutions — something the government denies. About 25,000 had been killed in Gaza as of mid-January.
Israel claims self defense, but the extremity of the assault goes beyond any just-war rationale. Its logic is based on the racist notion that all Palestinians are terrorists — or, at the least, that the lives of civilians in Gaza are less valuable than the lives of Israeli civilians — warranting a collective response.
This, unfortunately is the logic of war, which operates like a virus, metastasizes and spreads, growing more hateful and violent as each day passes. We saw this with the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and, to go back farther, Vietnam), which grew increasingly violent and resulted in inexcusable acts on the part of the American military (indiscriminate bombing, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the destruction of infrastructure), and we are seeing it in Gaza, in Ukraine, and we are watching it spread.
Israel is expecting its war to spread to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Houthi rebels in Yemen have attacked shipping routes in the Mediterranean, triggering U.S. bombing raids there. Iran launched missiles into Iraq (targeting an Israeli spy base, it says) and Syria (targeting the Islamic State).
We are at a precipice — not of a world war of the kind that twice devastated the world during the last century, but of a slowly burning and spreading conflict that will pull in more and more nations. This makes the calls for ceasefire in Gaza that much more important.
The humanitarian toll in Gaza is astonishing. Israel has imposed a relentless pounding that has shattered the fragile infrastructure of the Gaza strip, perhaps most notably its healthcare system. This only exacerbates the suffering of a population already internally displaced, uprooted from their homes, and subjected to terror.
“In Gaza, the health care system is on the brink of collapse. In any conflict or crisis, access to health care is a question of life or death,” International Federation of the Red Cross Secretary-General Jagan Chapagain said on X.
“Civilian population in Gaza have suffered enough, and healthcare is one of the last remaining beacons of hope. It’s a humanitarian and moral imperative to ensure the people of Gaza can access health care,” Chapagain continued.
The damage and suffering inflicted on Gaza’s civilian population would be viewed as a war crime if inflicted by any other nation (South Africa has accused Israel of genocide). And this is not easy to write, given my background, but Israel — with its corrupt, right-wing leadership and claims of exceptionalism — is in danger of becoming a pariah state. Some will say this is because of international antisemitism, and I certainly will not dispute that antisemitism plays a role. But the images being broadcast from Gaza, horrific images created by Israeli bombs, have erased much of the sympathy that followed Oct. 7.
None of this is to excuse Hamas for its brutality, but Israel cannot keep using Oct. 7 to justify the unjustifiable (the United States did the same thing with 9/11 and the results continue to haunt us), especially when it threatens to spiral into a broader conflict.