Israeli leaders celebrate assassinations — and make the living pay the price
Has the genocide in Gaza increased the security of a single person in Israel? Are we safer while we wait for Iran’s response to Haniyeh’s killing?
We are now faced with the regional war of Gog and Magog that Benjamin Netanyahu has been so determined to ignite. Every one of us is now trying in horror to guess what the response will be to the recent assassinations — which our leaders are celebrating as a “brilliant achievement” of Israel’s sophisticated war machine — and whether our children will survive it. We are now contemplating the fate of the hostages, afraid to say what we know may be true.
So maybe now is a moment to stop and ask: was there really no other way? Was this sinking into a bottomless hell an inevitable fate?
An Iranian response to the killing of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran will come, as will a Hezbollah retaliation for the killing of its commander Fuad Shukr — even if their intensity or nature cannot be known. Masoud Pezekshian, the new Iranian president and the more moderate of the Islamic Republic’s candidates, pledged to distance himself from his predecessor’s belligerence and to return Iran to the path of dialogue with the West.
But the assassination of Haniyeh, immediately after Pezekshian’s inauguration, puts the president in a corner. He will now have to prove his leadership, respond to this blatant violation of his country’s sovereignty, and deepen his alliance with Hamas.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, and Minister Benny Gantz hold a joint press conference at the Ministry of Defense, in Tel Avi, November 11, 2023. (Marc Israel Sellem/POOL)
“Death-worthy” is probably the most well-worn phrase in Israeli public discourse to describe the recent assassinations. It is one among many justifications Israel has found for its uninhibited violence over the last ten months. But there is something terrifying about the fact that the question of whether or not someone is deemed “death-worthy” dictates our fate here more than whether we civilians are life-worthy.
At every intersection since the massacres of October 7, Israel has chosen the path of violence and escalation. Justifications have never been lacking: we must respond forcefully to the attacks; we must persecute those who initiated and executed it; we must intensify the pressure until they return the hostages; we must attack Lebanon in response to the rockets; we must signal to Iran that we will not be silent about its support for Hezbollah.
Ultimately, however, the automatic choice of violent escalation is suicidal. This inertia is so sweeping that it does not allow us to ask basic, existentially vital questions: Has the criminal genocide we are perpetrating in Gaza increased the security of a single person in Israel? Are we safer now, while we wait for the Iranian response? Is Israel doing better on the world stage than it was on October 7?
The obvious answer to all these rhetorical questions is a resounding no. So why do we continue on this destructive path, when the price we are paying is only increasing? Why do reasonable people celebrate Haniyeh’s death as a brilliant operation, when we can’t even estimate the price tag it carries?
A customer at the Yesh Chesed Supermarket in the northern Israeli city of Tzfat, August 1, 2024. (David Cohen/Flash90)
It is easy to pin everything on Netanyahu; to say that the war serves his political survival, and that he has an interest in continuing it indefinitely. This is true, but it is too easy a way out. Netanyahu indeed chose to sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, the lives of Israeli hostages, and our collective security for his personal gain. But the Israeli public devoted itself from the very beginning, with chilling joy, to the deadly path that Netanyahu paved.
It’s not just the lust for revenge that swept through Israeli society after October 7, galvanizing a murderousness of a kind we didn’t know. It is the extinction of the ability to imagine anything other than futile violence. The Israeli public faces the disturbing reality that it lacks the tools to interrogate its own interests, and to decide between different courses of strategic action. Because there is nothing in the Israeli toolbox but a hammer — and a country without a range of tools is a very dangerous country for its citizens, and even more so for its occupied subjects.
Ten months after the massacre, Israeli society could have been somewhere else. It could have already been in the process of recovering from its terrible trauma, with all the hostages returned home alive. Tens of thousands of its citizens would not have been displaced from their homes in the north and south, and so many soldiers’ lives would have been spared. The Gaza Strip would not have become the Hiroshima of the Middle East, with nearly two million besieged Palestinians uprooted and starved. Instead, ten months of criminal choices have brought us to a security, economic, social, and moral abyss that even the pessimists among us could not have imagined.
This is not wisdom in hindsight. There were those among us who warned about the consequences of the terrifying path that Israel chose from the beginning, and advocated an alternative. We have been denounced as defeatists, as deniers of the massacres, and as Hamas supporters.
Even now, against the backdrop of jubilation following the assassinations, we repeat: this is a destructive, stupid, dangerous path, and we can still change course. But a society that cannot imagine a nonviolent approach is doomed to extinction. And it is chilling to see how we are still walking down that path with our eyes wide open.
A version of this article was first published in Hebrew in Local Call. Read it here.