The Intolerable Irresponsibility of Israeli Ministers Refusing to Quit This Bloody Government
War cabinet minister Gadi Eisenkot and Benny Gantz (left), in the Knesset
The State of Israel is in the midst of two wars – the one it is waging in the Gaza Strip and on the northern border, and the second it is fighting in Judea and Samaria away from the eyes of most of the Israeli public.
Operation Swords of Iron continues to rumble along in Gaza’s north, center and now also in the south in Rafah. Brave young soldiers undertook the ground fighting with determination in an effort to eliminate or expel the remaining Hamas fighters. They thought they had done just that, but the gunmen have returned and continue to fight. Our soldiers continue to pay with their lives, as do so many Palestinians, many of them civilians caught in the eye of the storm. Food convoys trying to bring aid to the two million Gazans continue to make their way on land and through the new port the United States has built to facilitate aid to hundreds of thousands of Gazans, whom Yahya Sinwar deliberately turned into a human shield to protect him and his fighters.
Squeezed between pressure on both sides, Israel has been cooperating with those delivering aid – not with enthusiasm, but with the knowledge that it is inevitable and it can justify and provide a moral validity to the continued pursuit of the war until “total victory,” even though that is unlikely to ever come.
But at the same time, with barely anyone noticing, a war is developing that threatens to overshadow all the tragedy, blood and destruction in Gaza. This is the war in the West Bank, the territories we historically call Judea and Samaria, where some 3 million Palestinians have lived for many generations. They didn’t immigrate there, indeed they regard the area as their homeland. They were born there, as were their parents and grandparents. They have no other country. We are doing everything we can to expel them, to force them out of their homes and the landscapes where they have always lived, in order to annex the territories to the State of Israel and fulfill the dreams of a messianic, extremist, reactionary and murderous minority that is gradually taking over the government in the State of Israel.
I have said it before and I will say it again: The war in the Gaza Strip is not really the heart’s desire of Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich and their friends. Their calls for the conquest of Rafah is secondary to the war in the West Bank. Rafah is in their mouths while Judea and Samaria are in their hearts.
The war of the settlers and their supporters now being waged in the West Bank is a crime being committed under the aegis of the government, which is deliberately turning a blind eye with a self-righteous impudence that cannot cover up its cruelty, vileness and shocking consequences, not only for its victims in the towns, fields and orchards, places of business and the other centers of Palestinian life, but inside our country, too.