Secretary
of State Marco Rubio, President Donald Trump, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth attend a dinner
in the Blue Room of the White House on July 7. / Photo by Andrew
Harnik/Getty Images.
During the Nixon years, as the Vietnam War wound down, the American GIs had a sadistic running gag about how to end the conflict: collect a fleet of passenger ships and put the remaining Vietnamese civilians on board, then sail the ships far out to the South China Sea, and sink them.
Late last month Haaretz, Israel’s most distinguished newspaper, which has been consistently skeptical about the war in Gaza, published a series revealing that Israeli combat soldiers assigned to guard newly created food depots for the starving masses were ordered by a senior commander to open fire on—that is, to shoot to kill—Gazans who were lining up for food before the official opening hours of the depots. The newspaper cited Gaza Health Ministry figures saying that 549 Gazans have been slain by Israeli bullets and more than 4,000 wounded in this way since the depots opened in late May. It reported that the senior officer whose name came up most frequently in interviews as issuing the shoot-to-kill order was Brigadier General Yehuda Vach, a regional IDF commander and a favorite of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“This is Vach’s policy,” one IDF officer told the newspaper, “but many of the commanders and soldiers accepted it without question.” He said the Palestinians “were not supposed to be there”—before the official opening hours of the food centers. Was his point really that those executed were responsible for their own demise?
I had a special reason for accepting the truth of the Haaretz account. Vach, then a colonel, so I learned last year, had been the commander of the IDF troops guarding the Netzarim Corridor, a zone off-limits to Gazans that separates north and south Gaza. I wrote then that the young IDF troops assigned as guards there were given orders to shoot to kill any Gazans who dared to approach in search of food and water.
The Haaretz series was not picked up by the mainstream US press, with the exception of the Intercept, an online news agency known for its liberal bent. I thought it took a lot of guts for Haaretz to tell it like it is—I know it only happened rarely in the early days of America’s Vietnam War. And so I began asking Israelis I know what was going on. All of them have fought for the country and been grievously wounded in action.
The answers I got explain why Netanyahu and the religious fundamentalists among the Israeli leadership may think time is on their side, in terms of the vexing issue of what to do about the two million Gazans who are still alive. (The Gaza Health Ministry reports that 56,900 Gazans have been killed and 137,000 wounded since the start of the war; many experts in demography are convinced that those statistics significantly undercount the actual number of dead and injured Gazans.) There were the usual pie-in-the-sky answers, like the refrain about bringing in a prominent Palestinian from the outside to administer a new government that would be supported by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or Jordan. The crucial issue, I was told, was finding a political alternative to Hamas that would enable both Israel and the United States to get out of Gaza.
Meanwhile, the war goes on. Five Israeli soldiers were killed and fourteen were injured, two of them seriously, on Monday by a series of remotely triggered roadside bombs set off in northern Gaza, almost certainly by Hamas operatives.
The attacks took place as Netanhayu arrived in Washington for a meeting at the White House with President Donald Trump. A New York Times account of the visit said that Trump was pushing for a ceasefire and that talks between Israel and Hamas are ongoing in Doha, but there was no announcement of any specifics to that end. Netanyahu did announce that he’s recommended Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. The only more inappropriate gesture would be Trump doing the same for the Israeli prime minister. What to do about the two million Gazans still in limbo remains unresolved. A plan to move all of them into three large camps that would be protected by the Israeli Army has gone nowhere, and another ceasefire in Gaza—reportedly advanced by the White House—is not at the top of Netanyahu’s agenda. There has been talk this year of relocating the surviving Gazans to Somalia, Somaliland, Sudan, Syria, or Indonesia eventually.
I was told by one knowledgeable Israeli that the lack of progress in peace talks reflected what he called Israeli “indifference to human life” in Gaza. He said that the Israeli GIs who go along with patently illegal orders to shoot Gazans who arrive early to food distribution centers similarly do so out of “indifference” in a war with no end in sight.
I asked a few retired senior IDF officers about the violent General Vach. I learned that his passion for killing Arabs is widely known. One retired general told me that Vach “is definitely a true rotten apple.” However, he said that “we have just lost five kids,” referring to the Hamas bombings early this week in Gaza, and “everyone is extremely tense. A lot of justified fear. This war must end for humanitarian and strategic concerns.”
Another retired officer who earned Israeli’s highest honors for leading troops in combat responded to my question with a quick history lesson. General Vach, he said, is a symbol of the change in the IDF’s values that began when it turned what seemed to be a losing war in 1973 against Egypt and Syria, which were supported by the Soviet Union, into a victory. The successful war convinced many Jewish kids from Yeshivas and synagogues to join the career army: “What started as a popular innocent move quickly became a political campaign to take the place of the Kibbutz children who, until the mid-1980s, were the backbone of the IDF.
“This suited the Israeli right—even leaders like Menahem Begin [the hawkish Likud Party leader who served as prime minister from 1977 to 1983] and much later Bibi, who formed close political alignment with the Zionists. The first alarming signs came when the front-line combat battalions of the IDF got their own rabbis. The second alarm sign took place during one of the first raids against Hamas in Gaza when an Israeli colonel issued a combat order to his brigade calling on his soldiers to ‘fight the war of God. Eliminate the God-hating enemy as we eliminated Amalek.’” (The Amalekites were a nomadic tribe identified in the Bible as the enemy of the Israelites during their exodus from Egypt.)
The former IDF officer continued his religious history lesson: “From there it went only further and much more extreme. The murderous Hamas attack inside Israel on October 7, 2023, was analyzed by the Zionists as a wake-up call and a miracle and a test God Almighty initiated for all Israelis to turn religious.
“General Vach is only one of many. . . . The war in Gaza, which was and is conducted in the main by combat IDF, has been run and executed as a religious revenge war against ‘Amalek.’”
Netanyahu, in his desperation to stay in office, has completely thrown in with the far right who keep him in power. It all suggests that after more than a year and a half of slaughter and starvation the worst may be yet to come for the beleaguered Palestinians in Gaza.