Yossi Klein Halevi: Our season of reckoning: Israel’s moral crossroads in Gaza

Source: The Times of Israel

Yossi Klein Halevi

As we head into the Jewish season of self-reckoning, many of us are struggling to make moral sense of this new era that began on October 7.

To be an ambivalent Jew today is not to be uncertain so much as torn between conflicting certainties. We know Israel’s war against Iran and its proxies is unavoidable. We know any nation in our place would have reacted to Hamas’s mass atrocities as we did. We know we face an enemy willing to commit any crime and that the IDF is fighting under conditions that would test the moral limits of any army. We know the young Israelis who have fought for months, many for nearly two years, are among the most heroic and self-sacrificing this country has produced. We know Israel is subject to a relentless campaign of lies, half-truths, distortions and convenient omissions. We know the outrageous accusation of genocide against Israel only diverts the world’s focus from radical Islamism, the truly genocidal side in this conflict.

But we also know that something has gone very wrong in Gaza. That two years of fighting the most brutal war in Israel’s history has inevitably affected the standards and behavior of parts of the IDF (though we don’t yet know to what extent). That the Netanyahu government, a coalition of the fanatical and the corrupt, is disgracing the Jewish state. That, if implemented, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s chilling description of the goals of this next phase of the war – total destruction and mass emigration of Palestinians – will implicate us in a war crime. That once-marginal fanatics among the settler community are protected by government patrons as they burn and injure and occasionally kill. That even as our nightmares return and Jews around the world face a familiar hatred hiding behind a new name, we are no longer innocent.

Limits

At the heart of this war lies a tension between two moral imperatives. The first is to protect innocent lives on the most complicated battlefield the IDF, or perhaps any army, has fought. The second is to deny terrorism the ability to hide behind innocents and thereby achieve immunity.

Even when fighting an existential war against enemies without moral restraint, there are limits to what is morally permitted to the Jewish state. And given the nature of our enemy and the threats against us, there are limits to the self-recrimination Jews should assume.

The Israeli public has avoided a moral conversation about the war for understandable reasons. Though two years have passed since the Hamas massacre, we are still grieving, enraged and afraid. Polls show that many Israelis are no longer certain about the country’s long-term prospects. Hardly the emotional state conducive to moral self-inquiry.

The wounds of October 7 have been pried open by a global lynch mob. Every red line has been crossed – from hunting Israelis on the streets of Amsterdam to burning to death an elderly Jew in Boulder, Colorado, who was protesting for the hostages.

Why, outsiders wonder, have Israelis been so desensitized to Palestinian suffering? Perhaps, in part, because Palestinian suffering has been weaponized – not only against the legitimacy of the war but of the Jewish state. For no other country is the right to exist dependent on its moral conduct.

The lies and wild exaggerations — the baseless warnings of imminent mass starvation in Gaza that began immediately after October 7, the attempt to downgrade or ignore altogether the number of Hamas combatants among Gaza’s casualties – accumulate with such rapidity that scarcely have we begun to address one distortion when another is upon us.

But perhaps the most daunting obstacle to a moral self-examination among Israelis is that in this war, morality itself has been weaponized in the service of terrorism. Hamas’s greatest asset is the outraged conscience.

Spiritual protection

How then, in this poisoned atmosphere, are we to subject ourselves to moral self-critique? How dare we risk inadvertently reinforcing the campaign of hatred and lies?

Because we have no choice. Because preserving our moral credibility is essential for our strength. Because we cannot let the haters determine the inner life of the Jewish people. Because engaging in moral introspection reminds us that Zionism has won and that, even though we are vulnerable, we are no longer victims. Because we owe an accounting of our actions to our friends who have stood with us.

Most of all, because Judaism demands it.

This season of self-reckoning that begins with the Hebrew month of Elul and culminates on Yom Kippur is intended not only for individual Jews but also – in fact primarily – for the Jewish collective. Undergoing this process as a people doesn’t weaken us. It provides spiritual protection.

Just as we need a language for defending ourselves against the lies and distortions, we need a parallel language in which we struggle with the moral dilemmas raised by this war. Those of us who love Israel must not forfeit the moral conversation to Jews who have despaired of Israel or who openly side with our enemies.

Simultaneously defending and critiquing ourselves requires two very different tones. In confronting the anti-Zionist mob, we must respond with outrage and contempt, but our internal conversation requires humility.

After two years of war, we need to ask ourselves hard questions.

On Gaza’s hunger crisis: The Israeli government didn’t set out to deliberately starve Gaza but to deny Hamas access to the UN’s food distribution system. That was a legitimate goal. But when it became clear that our counter-system was disastrously inadequate, and that the warnings of approaching starvation might this time be true, why didn’t the government change course? Why did it require a world outcry and American pressure to prevent a catastrophe that would have haunted us for years to come? And why were we, the Israeli public, largely silent?

On civilian casualties: The IDF doesn’t deliberately kill civilians. This war, with its hundreds of kilometers of tunnels and thousands of booby-trapped apartments and total entwinement of civilian and terror infrastructures, has inevitably produced terrible civilian suffering. Still: Has the IDF done everything it could to protect civilians? Has it tolerated a recklessness that would have been unacceptable in the past?

On war crimes: Every war produces deviants. But has this war produced more instances of war crimes than our previous conflicts? And is the army properly investigating?

On Gaza’s ruins: If Gaza resembles Berlin 1945, that is, in part, a consequence of fighting an enemy that wears no uniform and operates from hospitals and schools. Still: How much of the devastation has been a gratuitous act of vengeance? It is true, as Israelis often note, that the Allies weren’t squeamish in their war against evil. But the Allies had a plan to rehabilitate Germany. What is this government’s plan for Gaza? Is the model post-war Germany or the Roman destruction of Carthage?

On the continued legitimacy of a just war: The IDF has repeatedly made clear that its goals are saving the hostages, defeating Hamas and ensuring a new post-war government for Gaza. Those are noble goals. Yet the government refuses to rule out the far-right vision of a Gaza free of Palestinians. Can this war still be justified if the government doesn’t present a post-war political and economic blueprint for Gaza that is not based on de facto expulsion and permanent Israeli occupation?

On Israeli society: Enraged at the starvation and torture of our hostages, haunted by the scenes of mass celebration in Gaza on October 7, we have allowed our moral discourse to become coarsened. Politicians and commentators repeat the terrible words, “There are no innocents in Gaza.” There are consequences to that kind of rhetoric. How far has this attitude penetrated the army and affected the conduct of some commanders in the field?

There are those among us, on the right and the left, who have no questions. One camp insists on our total innocence (“the IDF is the most moral army in the world”). Another uncritically adopts the libels of our enemies.

I fear those Jews without ambivalence who, no matter how wrenching the dilemma, always offer a simple narrative that resolves our inner conflicts. Especially now, as we face some of the most morally complicated dilemmas in our history, those one-dimensional voices must not be allowed to determine Jewish discourse.

Strategic disaster

We need to raise our questions now, not only because of the approaching High Holidays but because the war is about to take its most fateful turn. The imminent invasion of Gaza City, many of us fear, will be a strategic and moral disaster.

Eyal Zamir, the IDF chief of staff, backed by heads of other security branches, has warned the government against going to this next phase of the war. Seizing Gaza City, he said, will risk the lives of the hostages, confirm Israel as a pariah state and result in the long-term Israeli occupation of Gaza. And two more consequences he didn’t mention: It will likely result in the worst humanitarian crisis of the war. And risking the lives of the hostages will tear apart Israeli society and likely the army, too.

Even if we win against Hamas, we lose.

Israel’s war with Iran and its terror proxies is among the most justified in our history. It is a test case for whether terrorism can be effectively fought in the 21st century. Whether the West realizes it or not, the outcome is crucial for it too.

But the Gaza phase of the Israeli-Iranian war has reached the limits of its strategic effectiveness and, in the absence of a morally credible post-war plan, its justification. The war that began on October 7 is far from over, but its outcome will be determined in Tehran, not Gaza City.

Until the Hamas massacre, Israel had experienced two strategic disasters. The first was the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when we were taken by surprise by an enemy we had underestimated. The second was the 1982 Lebanon War, when military overreach divided the nation, and Israel lost its moral credibility among many of its friends abroad and for large parts of Israeli society. The result was our first-ever military defeat.

On October 7, we experienced an even worse version of the Yom Kippur War. Now I fear we are about to experience a far worse version of the Lebanon War.

On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, 1982, following the assassination of their leader, Bashir Gemayel, Lebanese Christian militiamen massacred hundreds of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. Israeli soldiers stood guard around the camps, unaware of what was happening inside. Nevertheless, hundreds of thousands of Israelis demonstrated to demand a commission of inquiry. Though Prime Minister Menachem Begin initially resisted it, (“Goyim kill goyim, and they come to hang the Jews,” he said), the pressure was overwhelming. Even cabinet members from the right joined the demand. Begin relented.

The Kahan Commission, headed by Chief Justice Yitzhak Kahan, found Defense Minister Ariel Sharon guilty of negligence: Given the assassination, it ruled, he should have anticipated the massacre. Sharon was forced to resign.

Taking partial responsibility for a massacre Israel didn’t commit was a high point in the moral history of the state.

Now, as Rosh Hashanah approaches, we are once again at a moral crossroads. Perhaps the most profound move of the High Holidays is not that God puts us on trial but that we hold ourselves accountable for our actions. Even as the mob taunts us with its lies, our self-reckoning can no longer be avoided.

About the AuthorYossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, where he is co-director, together Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University and Maital Friedman, of the Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI), and a member of the Institute's iEngage Project. His latest book, Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, is a New York Times bestseller. His previous book, Like Dreamers, was named the 2013 National Jewish Book Council Book of the Year.