Former Reuters journalist Peter Bale examines the war in Gaza, which is described now as leaving Israel open to accusations of committing the same crimes that led to its creation.
Benjamin Netanyahu has burnt through the sympathy from allies and much of the world after the October 7 massacre by Hamas. In doing so, he has jeopardised decades of accumulated goodwill since the foundation of Israel in 1948.
After October 7, US President Joe Biden invested his prestige and 80 years of Washington backing for the Jewish state by flying to Jerusalem, hugging Bibi (Netanyahu’s nickname) and standing beside Israel unconditionally with arms and diplomatic muscle. He pledged “rock solid and unwavering” support. Americans, he said, understood Israel’s “shock, pain and rage”.
The President also had a warning for Netanyahu – which the Israeli Prime Minister seemingly ignored – not to repeat mistakes Washington made after 9/11. “Justice must be done. But I caution this: while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11, we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes,” Biden said.
If not Bibi, who?
Netanyahu is the lightning rod for despair at tactics Israel has deployed against Hamas and Gaza. The ultimate survivor in Israeli coalition politics, he faces corruption charges on top of responsibility for the intelligence and defence failings exposed by October 7 and the medieval tactics of the Gaza campaign.
Yet Israeli commentator Gideon Levy says dismissing Netanyahu would not solve the existential crises in Israel.
“It’s not only about Netanyahu,” Levy told the Listener. “Israel would have done most of the things that he did under any of the other candidates for prime minister. Israel would have gone into this war. Israel would have attacked Gaza in the same brutal way …”
Levy, a former Israeli Defence Forces conscript who was a spokesman for former prime minister Shimon Peres, says he had to overcome “brainwashing” to recognise the plight of Palestinians.
He is able to hold two arguments: that Hamas is an Islamic terror organisation but that its attacks did not come out of a vacuum. It is a hard position to take in a country where the media has been one-sided, even to the point of blocking the signal from Al Jazeera.
“You should see the media here on a daily basis. It is totally disconnected from reality. In terms of health conditions, I would hospitalise Israel,” he says.
Death and distraction
Netanyahu, distracted from his own failings and those of Israeli intelligence and military leaders who believed they had an almost indestructible shield against attack, launched a scorched-earth attack on Gaza that has made the marginal strip unliveable.
Nine months on, with his right-wing coalition and premiership depending on staying on a war footing, Netanyahu risks opening a second war front against a much more powerful Islamic enemy in the form of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
It is hard to imagine Israel sustaining wars against whatever remains of Hamas in Gaza and the much-better-equipped Iran-backed guerrillas of Hezbollah.
As if to emphasise the isolation of Israel from its allies, Washington has warned Netanyahu not to open that front. It has also warned Hezbollah that it might not be able to restrain the Israeli forces if it continues to fire daily missile barrages across the border into northern Israel. Most recently, it has defended Israel’s right to defend itself against drone and missile attacks from Houthi forces in Yemen.
Biden drew a now badly faded red line over Israeli plans to attack the southern city of Rafah, telling Netanyahu, “I can’t support it. It will be a mess.” He appears to have drawn another red line over Netanyahu going to war against Hezbollah, as he did after the Iranian attacks on Israel, telling Netanyahu not to retaliate at scale, and “take the win”.
Says Levy: “Israel didn’t listen to Biden and had no reason to listen to Biden. Israel can do whatever it wants, even though it depends on the United States more than ever.
“The problem is that the Americans never condition their support to Israel; it’s always unconditional. Therefore, [Netanyahu] did what he did, not listening to Biden from the first day. The only problem is that Israel is going to pay a hell of a price.”
In saying Israel has outsized influence, in the US, Levy strays into territory opened by academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who created a storm with a 2007 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. It argued Israel had too much influence over US foreign policy. They were accused of propagating the antisemitic tropes that Jews control the world and have divided loyalties.
“Ben-Gurion [Israel’s founding prime minister] started this crazy line that no matter what the world says, what matters is what Israel is doing,” says Levy. “That’s the mindset in Israel. ‘We don’t care about the world. We are independent. We will fight with our fingers’ – all kinds of totally far-fetched ideas … because Israel without the United States is destroyed within weeks.
“Israel has no chance to exist without the United States, but still we play as if it is the opposite and we are the superpower and the United States is some small country that needs Israel. This mindset makes all the right wingers and the patriots and the nationalists very proud, but it is so hollow and so dangerous.”
Nine months into the conflict in Gaza, Israel faces once-solid and respectable allies recognising a Palestinian state and putting pressure on others to do the same.
Israel also faces the almost obscene shame of being accused of genocidal tactics as a nation and through its political leadership. To have the claim of genocide launched against Israel is almost inconceivable, given that the term was created only in the wake of the Holocaust to name a crime so grave it had never previously been described.
Jerusalem understandably and vigorously rejects the charge of genocidal tactics and intent in the war against Gaza in response to what it argues was itself a genocidal attack from Hamas on October 7. It also questions the legitimacy of South Africa launching a case against Israel in the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
In another decision, the UN’s top court announced late last month that Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories went against international law. While not legally binding, this is the first time the court, which has been considering the issue since the beginning of last year at the request of the UN General Assembly, has stated its position on the legality of the occupation in 57 years.
Writing on X, Netanyahu condemned that judgment: “No absurd opinion in The Hague can deny this historical truth or the legal right of Israelis to live in their own communities in our ancestral home.”
The scale of recent destruction in Gaza has rendered the sliver of coastal territory almost uninhabitable for its 2.1 million population. This and tactics that have led to the killing of tens of thousands of civilians, along with Israel’s extreme statements about total war and biblical threats of destruction, make its position clear.
That is without the extension of the conflict into the Occupied Territories, where the Israel Defence Force appears to collude with militant settler groups to try to contain Palestinians, take more territory and exact retribution against perceived terrorists.
Apartheid charge
Israel and its defenders bridle against the charge that the country practises the crime of apartheid – a claim detailed in a groundbreaking 2021 investigation by Human Rights Watch – accusing HRW of antisemitic smears and false equivalence.
Either way, however, the Western democratic consensus of support for Israel has been broken and may be irreparable. Five independent candidates standing on a pro-Palestinian ticket won seats in the UK general election.
“The consensus of unconditional support for Israel has been breached,” British commentator Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who is of the Ismaili sect of Shia Islam, said on X.
Whether that is literally true may be tested by any further confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah, especially if Iran gets involved directly. When Tehran launched missiles and drones at Israel in April, in a well-telegraphed and almost symbolic-yet-deadly attack, Western allies and even Arab neighbours shielded the Jewish state in a spectacular show of combined military prowess and support for Jerusalem.
Netanyahu has surely put that sort of backing in jeopardy.
How does Israel respond? Classically, the reaction to pressure from outside Israel has been to accuse others – whether nations or individuals – of perpetrating antisemitism, which, if one embraces the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, can be construed as holding Israel to a double standard.
Levy expresses frustration at the weaponisation of antisemitism to shut down what he argues is legitimate criticism of Israel. “Israeli strategy is exactly this, to label any critics as antisemitism … and that these people will be scared. It will come to the point in which it will turn back toward Israel, because it’s about freedom of speech. It is a cynical manipulation of Israeli propaganda.”
It is also true Jerusalem faces nearly impossible situations trying to find an accommodation. The Palestinian Authority, weakened by Netanyahu as much as its own leadership, is in no fit state to run the West Bank, let alone Gaza. It is also undoubtedly correct that genuine antisemites may exploit pro-Palestinian causes.
Yet Netanyahu and the shift to the right overall in Israel also put at risk one of the achievements of Donald Trump, the Abraham Accords, which normalised relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco. Saudi Arabia was next in what would have been a momentous step, but as Hamas knew when it launched the massacre, normalisation was stalled by October 7. Saudi Arabia has said it can only entertain normalisation between Riyadh and Jerusalem if there is progress to a Palestinian state.
That brings us back to the theoretical bottom line most of Israel’s allies purport to support: the so-called two-state solution. Levy reckons it is as dead as a dodo.
“There is no solution. I mean, there is a solution, but there is no way [to get there],” he says. “The 700,000 [Jewish] settlers [in the Occupied Territories] will never be evacuated, because they are a very powerful group in Israeli politics. There is no prime minister, and there will never be one, who will be able to evacuate them … Therefore in Israel, in Palestine, everywhere, we have to admit that the idea of two states is [dead]. There is no chance. We missed the possibility. A viable Palestinian state is not an option. It’s not that it’s a bad idea; it’s a wonderful idea. But it’s not practical, not viable.”
He urges a “one-state” solution – “a democracy between the river and the sea”.
‘A self-hating Jew’
Israelis point out, with some justification, that a fifth of the country’s 9.5 million people are Israeli Arabs who, they argue, enjoy democratic rights and play a full role in the country’s prosperity – rights Arabs in many other states lack.
Levy sees Israeli Arabs differently. “They live under very deep discrimination, discriminating rules. They are not [under] the apartheid. The real apartheid is only in the Occupied Territories, but it defines the whole nature of Israel. You cannot be in one part democratic and in one part apartheid and call yourself a democracy.”
Many supporters of Israel condemn Levy, accusing him of being a “self-hating Jew” – a description levelled at some of the greatest Jewish thinkers, including the historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt who dare to question those foundations and the conduct of Israel.
“I learnt to live with it,” Levy says. “It’s not always very pleasant. It’s not that I can change anything I say, what I think, what I see; and I’m not a politician. I will continue as long as I can. There is a price, but it’s really marginal, because still, Israel is a democracy for its Jewish citizens, and therefore I can still raise my voice, with the emphasis on the word still. And as long as this is the case, I will continue.”
Jewish-Russian-American writer Masha Gessen found themselves recently at the centre of a similar controversy: facing accusations in Germany of antisemitism by the sponsor of a freedom of speech prize given in Arendt’s name. Gessen’s supposed offence was to compare the Gaza destruction to the Nazi liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto.
“The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from diseases spread by Jews,” Gessen wrote in the New Yorker, the piece that offended the German sponsor. “Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians.
“The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate – and, now, mortally endanger – an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.”
It seems shocking any writer could make that comparison with Israel. That, however, is where Israel finds itself today – accused of the crimes that led to its creation.
What would Gideon Levy, who has visited Aotearoa, advise New Zealanders when considering Israel and the dilemma it faces? “My impression from New Zealand was so good. I really think that it’s an example of a liberal society that thinks in liberal and moral parameters according to those values. This situation, which has now lasted 60 years, of an apartheid state is unacceptable.
“The young generation should ask their parents, ‘What did New Zealand and the world do when there was the first apartheid state, South Africa?’ What the world did then was very effective, and without the intervention of the international community.
“Finally, it was the world that made the apartheid system fall and I think we should adopt the same ways of action, the same way of thinking, because Israel is an apartheid state. You cannot cover it up any more. Yes, Israel is a democracy for Jewish citizens. Also, South Africa was a democracy for its white citizens. So what?”
Many Israelis and supporters of Israel will recoil from that comparison.
Peter Bale is a New Zealand-born journalist with a long history of roles with Reuters, CNN and other news organisations.