Widening the cracks in Israel’s war machine
Israeli protest, calling for the release of hostages in Gaza outside the Defense Ministry HQ in Tel Aviv, 7 September 2024
Meron Rapoport reports in +972 on 8 January 2025:
It takes a certain kind of audacity or disconnectedness, or perhaps both, to try and write something hopeful for 2025. A sober and realistic assessment of the political forces in Israel-Palestine, the wider region, and the world as a whole does not elicit much optimism that the ongoing catastrophe of the past 15 months — particularly what Palestinians are enduring in Gaza — may soon come to an end.
Israel’s far-right government enjoys a solid majority in the Knesset and appears to be committed to carrying out the second and third clauses in Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s “Decisive Plan” in Gaza: the expulsion of the Palestinians or their elimination by the sword if they refuse to leave. (The first clause, to allow Palestinians to live quietly and peacefully under conditions of apartheid, is by now considered too humane and liberal by this government and its supporters.)
The army is incapable of rescuing the hostages or dealing a decisive final blow to Hamas, so it resorts to what it knows best: ethnic cleansing, which, by all indications, will only intensify and could potentially lead to premeditated annihilation. This is especially true if the military adopts Israeli lawmakers’ recent call to destroy Gaza’s food and water sources, just as it adopted the “Generals’ Plan” to starve and ethnically cleanse Gaza’s northernmost cities.
Palestinian society is fragmented and battered.
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In times like these, it can help to take inspiration from the famous lyrics of Leonard Cohen: “Ring the bells that still can ring,” he sang. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” In other words, our task is to identify the cracks in what has often seemed for more than a year to be an impenetrable machine of death and destruction. No less important — and perhaps more challenging — is to figure out how to widen these cracks so that light can enter and drive out the darkness, as we sang recently during Hanukkah.
Netanyahu and the military
And the cracks are certainly there, even within Israel. The first, which has already grown significantly, is the Israeli public’s trust in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners. In hindsight, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly which aspect of the judicial overhaul that Justice Minister Yariv Levin began unveiling in early 2023 not only sparked fierce opposition on and scale not seen in Israel before but also created a sense among a significant portion of the country’s Jewish population — likely the majority, according to polls — that their very way of life was at risk.