Belated anti-war letters are a cowardly indictment of Israel’s moral code

Smoke plumes billow from Israeli bombardment on the east of Gaza City as pictured from Jabalia, northern Gaza. on 14 April 2025

Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz on 17 April 2025:

All the protest letters against the war deserve recognition − and all of them are belated and cowardly. Reading them, one might conclude that only 59 people are suffering in the Gaza Strip. No one else exists. No 50,000 corpses. No tens of thousands of orphaned, traumatizedor maimed children. No two million displaced and destitute Palestinians. Just 59 Israeli hostages, living and dead, whose blood is sacred and whose freedom outweighs all else.

According to these letters, the hostages are the war’s only victims. Anyone reading these supposedly brave documents is met with the distorted and selective moral code of Israeli society − even the best of them. The awful subtext is that if only the hostages are released (and if only Benjamin Netanyahu is removed from office), then the bloodbath in Gaza can continue unhindered. After all, the war is justified.

While many hail these letters − praising their supposed courage and civic engagement − it’s hard not to be appalled that not one of them calls for ending the war first and foremost because of its crimes against humanity and human dignity. The fate of the hostages should move every Israeli, and every human being. But when the focus is placed solely on them, while the suffering of over two million others is ignored, one cannot help but recognize this for what it is: nationalist morality, where Israeli blood and freedom stand above all else.

Of course, every nation must care first and foremost for its own. But to turn one’s back entirely on the other victims − victims of our own making − even when the scale is so vast, is profoundly disheartening. No person of true conscience could sign such letters.

Some of the letters paid lip service to Gaza’s victims, as if to check a moral box. The pilots referred vaguely to “innocent civilians,” without saying who − perhaps they meant Israeli residents of the Gaza border region? The writers showed a bit more courage, citing “disproportionate harm to Gaza residents,” and even “horrific harm to helpless human beings,” as they should have. But even in these cases, it’s clear the main impetus behind the call to end the war is the fate of the hostages.

Two thousand reservists from the military’s paratrooper and infantry brigades, 1,700 Armored Corps members, 1,055 pilots and air crews and even 200 reservists from the elite Talpiot training program – veterans of nearly every corner of the military – signed these letters. In response, the military top brass threatened dismissal, adding an unnecessarily dramatic and pompous flair to what remains a modest protest.

Next came the artists, the architects, the doctors − just about everyone, suddenly waking up after more than a year and a half of horror and silence. “End the war to save the hostages,” they all wrote with the same copy-paste tendency. It’s a a cautious and calculated form of protest − one that avoids even mentioning refusal, let alone any bold plunge into the heart of the fire. The letter writers knew exactly what they were doing: had they placed Palestinian victims front and center, many of the signatories would have walked away.

The signatories are right: the war must end in order to save the hostages. But that cannot be the only reason, or even the primary one. The war must end, above all, because of what it is doing to more than two million Palestinians, the vast majority of them innocent and defenseless. There is no need to rank suffering, or compare one kind of pain to another, to grasp this truth.

The hostages and their families are enduring unimaginable suffering, which must end immediately. But we must also raise our voices, just as forcefully, against the killing of journalists and medical workers (here, Israeli medical professionals who have spoken out deserve credit), against the bombing of hospitals and schools, the uprooting of entire communities like pawns on a game board and the total devastation being inflicted by the military without purpose.

Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are languishing in Gaza. They must be freed immediately. But contrary to prevailing Israeli opinion, they aren’t the only ones in Gaza who must be immediately rescued from their torment.

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