It was a cold, wet Friday afternoon in Israel when International Court of Justice President Judge Joan Donoghue read these words, carried live on Israeli media: "Israel must take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip."
But no matter how dismal things felt in Israel, it was worse in Gaza.
It's the same temperature in Gaza as Tel Aviv, but it's not the same cold. Here we have heaters and electricity; there, people like me live in tents pitched on mud. Here we have water and food, toilets and toilet paper. They are at risk for cholera – a dangerous disease spread through fecal matter. People like me don't have regular medicine in Gaza, health care, or food for that matter: At least half of Gazans are at risk of starving, and most are skipping meals daily. When people insist that Israel must simply keep pounding Gaza, I want to ask when they last had an arm amputated without anesthesia.
The humanitarian catastrophe of nearly 2 million displaced Palestinians was at the heart of the ICJ's ruling, wrote the legal scholar Aeyal Gross. Yet many Israelis are fuming at the order for Israel to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza's civilians (even as Israel is relieved the world court didn't order a cease-fire). According to Agam Institute surveys, nearly 60 percent of Israeli Jews oppose humanitarian aid – a stable figure over time.
Let me break with analytic artifice: Opposing water, medicine and supplies to the most wretched people on Earth seems grotesque, a new low for Israel or for anyone. Why would anyone do it?
Last week, even prior to the ruling by the United Nation's top court, a cluster of Israelis gathered at Kerem Shalom – the southern cargo crossing between Israel and Gaza – to physically block the trucks carrying the limited humanitarian aid that Israel is allowing through.
They blocked the crossing for days on end; by Friday, the Israeli human rights group Gisha reported that only nine trucks got through, over 100 were delayed and re-routed through Egypt's Rafah crossing. Finally, this week the Israel Defense Forces declared the region a closed military zone, blocking the protesters and letting the aid through. "No aid to murderers," wrote the group, which calls itself Tzav 9 (the name for super-emergency IDF call-up notices). "We won't stop until the last of the hostages returns." This week they went on to block aid at the Nitzana crossinginstead.
Tzav 9 claims to represent a cross section of Israeli society, especially the families of hostages, but videos from the protests showed that many wore the distinct clothing of far-right religious activists. So there are two substreams. The segment who represent family members of hostages believe that starving the whole population in Gaza is the most effective means of securing the captives' release. The far-right ideologues among them have a different agenda: to brand all Gazan civilians as Hamas, so that all of them are legitimate targets.
But there's no neat divide between who thinks what. It was the Netanyahu government that first cut all supplies for all civilians at the start of the war to pressure Hamas, since the latter is so well-known for its deep and abiding concern for the welfare of its people. Supplies were stopped almost hermetically through mid-November, when Israel began allowing just a trickle of fuel to power sewage treatment and water desalination plants – for Israel's own self-interest, said the prime minister. Then came the cease-fire/hostage release deal, when Israel allowed greater quantities of humanitarian aid – but far from enough.
Many in Israel concluded (and the government argues) that the tremendous humanitarian pressure and physical bombardment in that first phase "softened" the target, creating the conditions for the deal.
In the public sphere, the former chief of the National Security Council, Giora Eiland, has become a relentless advocate for creating a humanitarian disaster in Gaza. He made the argument in Globes newspaper on October 8, and gets even more elaborate in his many repetitions in TV and radio studios. He argued that a humanitarian catastrophe – including epidemics – is fine, in an opinion for Yedioth Ahronoth in November. A group of alarmed public health officials wrote an open letter pleading for Israel not to take this route, which would be regionally and morally disastrous.
Of course, Eiland is not alone in viewing all Gazans as fair targets. South Africa famously collected many quotes by Israeli ministers and lawmakers to this effect for its world court case – leaving Israelis to sheepishly insist that this was idle talk by unimportant blowhards.
A demonstrator wearing a bullet shell and a T-shirt that reads "Only settlement will bring security," during a Kerem Shalom crossing protest on Sunday.Credit: Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters
But some guilty parties know precisely why that's wrong.
Back in 2009, a minister in the Olmert government was charged with coordinating humanitarian needs for Gaza during what we then saw as the mother of all bombardments: Operation Cast Lead. The minister met with the head of UN delegations and offered convincing words of support for the civilian needs of Gazans. Still, when it was over, Gaza lay in ruins and a UN-appointed commission investigated both sides for war crimes.
The minister had a legal background, and he lamented that the Goldstone report had found evidence of war crimes because of inflammatory statements by politicians: "The report determined that the government of Israel knowingly set out to destroy Gaza … based on statements of leaders in Israel who don't understand that their loose chatter has severe implications. We're talking about people with respectable titles but no influence on the combat [decisions]. It's a culture of spin that is meaningless. We need to understand that everything said can ultimately harm the interests of Israel."
One wonders, then, what Isaac Herzog was thinking when as president of the state – not just welfare minister, like in 2009 – he told a roomful of foreign journalists that "an entire nation is responsible. This rhetoric of 'unaware, uninvolved civilians,' is not true." Now he says the world court twisted his words, but the ruling simply says: "On 12 October 2023, Mr. Isaac Herzog, President of Israel, stated, referring to Gaza" – and quotes the entire long paragraph, verbatim.
And yet, these are the less dangerous voices in Israeli society who oppose humanitarian aid. The most dangerous ones represent what was once an ideological fringe, now in the heartland of power. That ideology was on frenzied display at the conference on Sunday advocating for Israel to take over Gaza for good and rebuild Jewish settlements there. Speakers advocated no less for expanding or rebuilding West Bank settlements.
The hall was packed with swaying sidelocks and comically huge head coverings – an ostentatious display of materialist, cultic, triumphalist Judaism that violates every value I cherish. The speakers roared about reestablishing Gush Katif, vanquishing enemies, destroying Amalek – and "destroying the enemies of God." Perhaps they meant Palestinians, but maybe next they'll adopt takfiri ideology and target other Jews.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir speaking at the "resettle Gaza" conference on Sunday. His Otzma Yehudit party would win eight to nine seats in the next Knesset, according to recent surveys.Credit: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
In the meantime, how to accomplish these Gaza settlement plans? Ecstatic participants held banners with the answer: "Only transfer will bring peace!" "Trence-fer" is Hebrew for "expulsion." Itamar Ben-Gvir, a prized speaker at the confab and a key minister in the current government, is getting eight or even nine seats in surveys lately – a steady rise from the six to seven he was getting in polls a few months ago. (Since the last election in November 2022, his party together with Religious Zionism had fallen significantly from their 14 Knesset seats in most polls.) Now he's rising, with lots of time to keep climbing before the next election.
The "meaningless fringe" excuse is dead. In Israel, what looks insane one minute becomes state policy the next. Starting in the mid-2010s, the "sovereignty" movement – a far-right and settler-driven group advocating Israeli annexation over the occupied territories with a glossy magazine, conferences and high-level political endorsements – preceded the great annexationist policies of the later-Netanyahu era. The hit-list plan for the judiciary published by Religious Zionism two weeks before the November 2022 election was a preview of the Likud-led plan in January 2023 – following a decade of anti-judiciary incitement. And a chunk of Likud figures enthusiastically participated in the "resettle Gaza" conference.
Cue Likud lawmakers Boaz Bismuth, Moshe Saada, Amichai Chikli (a minister in the current government) and Dan Illouz (formerly of the Kohelet Policy Forum for a decade, and before that an Im Tirtzu man). Last week, the not-fringe four sent a letterto Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, demanding an immediate halt to all humanitarian aid to Gaza under the current arrangements. Their reasoning: the aid is distributed through the UNRWA refugee agency, which they view as synonymous with Hamas.
You won't find any daylight between Smotrich and the Likud members' Decisive Plan for Hamas; only detailed maps and arrows explaining how Israel will herd more than 2 million Palestinians into squeezed segments of Gaza.
Israel's dossier accusing UNRWA employees of participating in the Oct. 7 attacks is both depraved if true, and simultaneously unconscionably exploited to defend destroying UNRWA and deepening the collective torment of Gazans. Aid distribution, they argue, strengthens Hamas. This brings us full circle to the "resettle Gaza" conference, because what they propose for aid distribution lays the groundwork for the reoccupation of Gaza.
The Likud Four note their general reservations about letting aid in – but if there must be any, they support transit through Israeli-controlled areas, "as proposed in our Decisive Plan over Hamas." That refers to a short, slick PDF brochure they posted on their social media feeds in mid-January; it's a brief manifesto for complete Israeli military takeover of Gaza.
The term "Decisive Plan" might ring a bell. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich of Religious Zionism released his own "Decisive Plan" back in 2017 – a screed for Israel to annex the entire West Bank. Palestinians could stay and submit, leave or be killed. There wasn't much about Gaza in the plan back then; these days, Smotrich is proposing to simply reestablish a new military government in the Strip.
Attendees at Sunday's conference in Jerusalem calling for Israel to resettle the Gaza Strip.Credit: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
You won't find any daylight between Smotrich and the Likud members' Decisive Plan for Hamas; only detailed maps and arrows explaining how Israel will herd more than 2 million Palestinians into squeezed segments of Gaza. Corridors between these zones will be manned by the army, with no one allowed to cross. Gaza City will not be reconstructed but instead "purified of nests of resistance," while Israel controls the whole north, the corridors and the perimeter in perpetuity. Two tiny sub-strips with the unbearable name of "de-escalation zones" will serve as aid distribution sites, like feeding troughs. For anyone who doesn't wish to live like a "human animal," Israelis have been debating the options and incentives for "voluntary departure" for months now.
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There's no escape, no "just wild fringes" defense. In wartime, this is who we are. Israel needs to stop the mad assault on humanitarian aid now, and rehabilitate its soul when all this is over.