SHLOMO BEN-AMI
TEL AVIV – October 7, 2023, is a date that will forever haunt Israel. The events of that day were grisly: Hamas carried out a vile attack on Israel, killing some 1,200 Israelis and taking another 251 hostage. But Hamas’s attack soon led to far greater atrocities, with Israel’s retaliation against Hamas devolving into a prolonged war of unimaginable savagery in Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu started the war in Gaza without any realistic vision of how to end it. His chief concern was protecting his fragile coalition government – which depends on the support of far-right religious zealots – and shielding himself from being tried on corruption charges. So, while Israeli troops reduced Gaza’s cities to rubble, Netanyahu also launched an all-out assault on Israel’s laws and institutions, all in the name of achieving “total victory” over Hamas – which, from the Netanyahu government’s perspective, appears to be synonymous with Palestine.
Two years later, Israel can hardly be considered victorious. At least 60,000 Palestinians are dead, with even the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) admitting that 53,000 had died as of May, and those who remain in Gaza are enduring a severe and escalating humanitarian crisis, which has drawn increasingly sharp condemnation from a growing share of the international community. Meanwhile, Israeli society is deeply fractured, and the underpinnings of its democracy have been shattered, perhaps irreparably.
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