Zionists who say the Israili war tactics are criminal

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Two weeks ago, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The warrants sparked outrage across the Jewish world.

Israeli politicians and several Jewish organizations condemned the move, calling it absurd, a dark day evoking the past and a mockery of justice. Outraged comments flooded social media, denouncing the move as antisemitic and a modern-day blood libel.

The decision to issue the warrants has been interpreted by many as a denial of Israel's right to self-defense in the face of the brutal terrorist attack of 7 October and the ensuing war on various fronts. If this were the case, it could certainly be seen as antisemitic, since Israel has as much of a right and duty to defend its citizens as any other country.

For many Jews around the world, Israel is part of their identity. They feel the warrants are an attack on them and, more broadly, on the Jewish people as a whole. The days when Jews were falsely accused, dehumanized and, ultimately, exterminated are still painfully close. Any act that evokes this memory is deeply disturbing and, understandably, many people react solely to the accusations, regardless of the situation.

However, the ICC's decision is not an attack on Israel or the Jewish people. Based on the humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip, the indictment states that "there are reasonable grounds to believe that both individuals [Netanyahu and Gallant] intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity."

In the first month of the war, Israel closed its border with Gaza and did not allow any goods in. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said: "We are putting a complete siege on Gaza. There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel."

Then Energy Minister (and current Defense Minister) Israel Katz wrote: "No electrical switch will be lifted, no water hydrant will be opened, and no fuel truck will enter until the Israeli hostages are returned home – nobody should preach us morality."

National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, said: "As long as Hamas does not release the hostages, the only thing that should enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force, not an ounce of humanitarian aid."

Later, under pressure from the United States and the international community, Israel eased the blockade, but the amount of food and medical supplies that were allowed in was only a fraction of the aid that had entered the enclave before the war, particularly in northern Gaza.

Needless to say, the Israeli government must do everything it can to ensure the return of the hostages, but anyone reading the UN reports and listening to eyewitness accounts can see that, as the war progressed, Israel became both victim and perpetrator.

According to the IPC Famine Review Committee, this led to the starvation of a quarter of Gaza's population by early 2024, and UNICEF found that 25 percent of children under five in northern Gaza were severely malnourished. The ICC therefore "found reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Gallant bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare."

This evidentiary basis shows that the ICC is not denying Israel's right to self-defense. It has not ordered the arrest warrants for the military strikes against Hamas and Hezbollah or for efforts to free the hostages, but for war crimes against Palestinian civilians, that are well documented by aid workers, doctors working in hospitals and eyewitnesses in Gaza.

Reacting to the allegations, Netanyahu said that Israel was "fighting a just war" against terrorism. The ICC does not dispute that at all: It considers the way the war is being waged to be unjust.

Anyone who has followed the events of the war and seen the horrific pictures of malnourished children or amputations carried out without anaesthesia, cannot doubt the legitimacy of the accusations. It is heartbreaking to see people drinking contaminated water and having no choice but to eat animal feed.

If we blame antisemitism in situations where it may be obvious to everyone that we are facing a well-founded accusation, and it is made by figures as authoritative as Israel's top leaders, we are seriously devaluing the term antisemitism.

There is antisemitism in the world and, unfortunately, it is on the rise, and it must be fought in every forum and at every opportunity, but if we use the term to deflect attention from an unpleasant fact, sooner or later it will sound hollow when its use is critical for genuine cases.

Drawing attention to Israel's oppressive policy toward the Palestinians and, in this case, to the suffering caused by the war, is not antisemitism. In fact, there is a fair case to make that if Israel were not held accountable for crimes against civilians, that could trigger an antisemitic backlash, on the basis of the illogicality of not applying humanitarian and international laws to the Jewish state.

It is equally disturbing to call the warrants a modern-day blood libel. This is a very serious and completely misleading allegation.

The assertion that Israel first imposed a total and then a partial siege on Gaza, resulting in starvation, suffering and death, is a factual statement. Even those who argue in favor of the legitimacy of the blockade on Gaza cannot dispute this. Do we really think that medieval blood libels had any factual basis? Presenting this analogy suggests the blood libels of the Middle Ages were not blatant lies, but had the kind of factual substantiation of the suffering we see in Gaza today.

I understand that, due to the Hamas attack on October 7, many people believe that Israel is the sole victim in this conflict. Needless to say, the Israeli government must do everything it can to ensure the return of the hostages, but anyone reading the UN reports and listening to eyewitness accounts can see that, as the war progressed, Israel became both victim and perpetrator.

The fact that arrest warrants have been issued for Israel's Prime Minister and former Defense Minister is indeed terrible, but not because there are antisemitic judges in The Hague, but because of the decisions these two powerful men have taken. There is no doubt that in wartime there is enormous pressure on leaders to protect their own citizens and rescue those who have been abducted, but that does not give them carte blanche to commit war crimes.

Many Jews believe that they have a duty to defend Israel, regardless of its conduct. I believe that, besides our natural support and commitment to the Jewish state, we must draw a line. We cannot sacrifice the universal and Jewish ideal of justice and humanity on the altar of defending Israel, right or wrong, even when it acts in an unjust manner.

Moreover, we are not helping Israel either: we are failing to hold up a mirror to it and continue to allow it to fall into an ever deeper moral abyss. Israel has as much right to exist in the world as any other nation, and when it is attacked, it must be supported in the same way as any other country, but we must also speak out against violations and abuses, including those committed by Jews or the Jewish state. It is the only way to preserve our own moral integrity and, in my view, the only right way to show solidarity with Israel.

A former Israeli defense minister has accused his country of committing war crimes and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, in a rare criticism from Israel’s own security community about military operations in the Palestinian enclave.

Moshe Yaalon said the Israeli government was putting the lives of Israel Defense Forces soldiers in danger and exposing them to lawsuits at the International Criminal Court, in an interview with the Reshet Bet radio station Sunday.

“I speak on behalf of commanders who serve in northern Gaza,” he said. “War crimes are being committed here.”

In a separate interview with Democrat TV on Saturday, he said that the Israeli government was seeking “to conquer, to annex, to carry out ethnic cleansing.”

Hard-liners want to re-establish Jewish settlements in Gaza, he said, including in northern areas where civilians have been urged to leave indefinitely as the Israeli military prepares to move against Hamas fighters who have regrouped.

“What is going on there? There is no Beit Lahiya, no Beit Hanoun, they are operating now in Jabalia and basically cleaning the area of Arabs,” Yaalon said.

Yaalon was the IDF’s chief of staff during the second intifada, or “uprising” by Palestinians against Israeli occupation, which ended in 2005. He also served as defense minister from 2013 to 2016, including during a 2014 war in Gaza that lasted more than six weeks and had been the longest conflict between Israel and Hamas until the current one.

He quit in 2016, saying he no longer had faith in Netanyahu, and has been a fierce critic of the prime minister ever since.

Netanyahu’s allies were quick to condemn Yaalon’s remarks.

Yoav Gallant, who served as Israel’s defense minister until he was fired by Netanyahu last month, said Yaalon’s words were “a lie that helps our enemy and harms Israel.”

Netanyahu’s Likud party, of which Yaalon is a former member, said Yaalon was spreading “slanderous lies.”

Former Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said on Sunday that he will not apologize for his comments accusing Israel of carrying out “ethnic cleansing” in the northern Gaza Strip, and countered the oft-repeated statement that the Israel Defense Forces is “the most moral army in the world.”

In a sit-down interview with Channel 12 news on Sunday night, Ya’alon said: “I don’t say anymore [that the IDF is] the most moral army in the world,” precisely because of “the interference of politicians, who are corrupting the army.”

“It’s not the most moral army today,” he repeated. “And it’s difficult for me to say that.”

Again doubling down on his comments from the previous evening — after also doing so in an interview with the Kan public broadcaster earlier in the day — he said he believed his assessment to be “accurate,” and that there is “no other word for it” but ethnic cleansing, given that government ministers speak about how “the Strip will be cleansed of Arabs.”

Asked whether he wanted to take back his use of the phrase, given that it is “extremely harsh,” Ya’alon reiterated that he spoke the way he did “on purpose, to sound the alarm.”

When it was put to him that one of the definitions of ethnic cleansing is “mass murder as a means of diluting the population of a specific group in a specific area,” Ya’alon said, “I’m not talking about mass murder” but rather about “a different definition… evacuating a population from its homes, destroying their homes — that’s what’s happening in Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahiya.”

The interviewer charged that the use of the phrase ethnic cleansing would lead people to associate the IDF with “what happened in Germany in the 1930s,” to which Ya’alon replied that it is “not the IDF” he is charging with carrying out ethnic cleansing but “the politicians.”

He claimed that these were most notably coalition members from the far right, who he said are instructing the IDF to “carry out what are defined as war crimes” and ordering it to “evacuate the population for [ostensible] operational activities,” but are acting out of ulterior motives such as the desire to revive Jewish settlement in the Strip.

Himself a former IDF chief of staff, Ya’alon warned the current IDF chief, Lt. Gen. Herzi Halevi, to “pay attention” to what is happening around him, when allegedly given orders to evacuate the population of large swathes of the Gaza Strip.

Asked if he thought the arrest warrant put out by the International Criminal Court for Netanyahu was justified, Ya’alon said simply that he would “let them judge.”

“I think that, morally, some bad things have happened here from our point of view,” he said.

He suggested that the ICC has a list of other officials, both from the defense establishment and the political echelon, who will be investigated at a later date for war crimes, and said that if it were up to him, far-right ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir would have been arrested “some time ago” already.

Smotrich, he charged in the earlier interview with Kan, “has no moral qualms about starving two million Gazans to death.”

Presented with a clip of a statement he issued in 2003 when serving as IDF chief of staff, in which he said that the IDF does not “harm innocent people,” Ya’alon told Channel 12 that he stands by what he said at the time, to which the interviewer asked if “something has changed” since that 21-year-old clip.

“Do you not live in this country?” Ya’alon retorted. “Do you not hear Ben Gvir encouraging [people] to kill?”

Challenged that Israel’s enemies were now using Ya’alon statements to back up their own accusations against Israel, the former defense minister said, “First of all, let’s take care of ourselves and make sure we don’t do these things” before worrying about what other people say. “That’s what’s more important.”

My partner calls himself a Zionist and has strongly defended Israel's "right to exist" as a Jewish state. But he is absolutely appalled by Israel's conduct in its war on Gaza. He considers Netanyahu to be the "Jewish Hitler."

It’s become increasingly clear that Israelis see and process their country’s military assault on Gaza in one way, and much of the rest of the world sees and processes it — and other Israeli actions — in a very different way.

This is not a mere matter of a polite divergence of opinion. It is a vast chasm that will generate increasingly weighty legal and political consequences. Without a significant measure of reality-checking and re-alignment, which is highly unlikely, Israel will find itself more and more isolated in the world. The latest chasm opened up when Amnesty International issued a report on Dec. 5 that declared, “Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.”

“Our damning findings must serve as a wake-up call to the international community: this is genocide. It must stop now,” the report concluded.

Many Israelis saw it differently. The local chapter of Amnesty International in Israel held to the view that the high bar for determining genocide had not been met, while also stating that “the scale of the killing and destruction carried out by Israel in Gaza has reached horrific proportions and must be stopped immediately.”

But the Amnesty International genocide claim is not a one-off.

The ICC warrants may be the first step toward a new era in the relationship between Israel and the world. Israeli soldiers traveling abroad were recently called home by the IDF to avoid being arrested on charges related to their service in Gaza, based on complaints filed by pro-Palestinian activists. Such a move would previously have been unthinkable; now, Israel clearly senses that the international balance has shifted out of its favor.

It is not just Palestinians and their Arab neighbors who have applauded the ICC’s decision. The European Union, through its foreign minister Josep Borrell — as well as the United Kingdom, and a host of European countries — have declared their intention to uphold the mandate of the ICC in this case. One commentator, Le Monde columnist Stéphanie Maupas, described the decision as “a historic turning point” that indicated that international law was now going to be applied to Western-aligned leaders, and not just figures from the Global South, who account for a large majority of those indicted by the ICC.

The growing divide in how much of the world sees Israel’s actions in Gaza, and how Israel characterizes them, is likely to expand further in coming months and years.

Indeed, Israelis are likely to become more defensive and combative toward the international community,and especially legal institutions such as the ICC. They remain in the throes of the immense trauma triggered by Oct. 7, which has not only caused ongoing pain, grief, and rage, but also prompted profound moral and political blindness. Few Israelis pay attention to the staggering numbers of Palestinians, including tens of thousands of women and children, who have been killed by the IDF in Gaza.

It is perfectly understandable and justifiable that many in the country, with the notable exception of Netanayhu and his far-right supporters, are focused on the return of the long-suffering Israeli hostages as their primary concern. (They are working to realize pidyon shevuyim, the Jewish principle of redeeming those who have been taken captive.) Sadly, they are not able or willing to grasp that Israel’s military campaign has displayed wanton disregard for human life, or that disregard will bring more global condemnation.

The political theorist Michael Walzer has made the essential point that a just war must be waged justly. Yes, Israel had the right to respond to Hamas after the massacre on Oct. 7. That is the first part of the equation. But the second part requires that Israel wage a war that maintains scrupulous adherence to the laws of warfare and international humanitarian law. As many observers have argued, Israel has violated these laws and norms by mass displacement, restricting access to food and other essentials, attacks on mosques, hospitals, and schools, and a repeated failure to distinguish between enemy combatants and innocent civilians.

Israelis now face a profound moment of reckoning. The renowned Russian-Hebrew poet Yehuda Leib Gordon opened a famous 1863 poem by addressing the Jewish people: “Awake, my people! How long will you sleep?” It is now time for Israelis — and their American supporters — to awaken to the realization that their view of reality is grossly distorted. They must re-align their values and understanding of human rights with the rest of the world — or they, not just their leaders, will continue to face ever-intensifying consequences from the international community.

Palestinian resistance is based on the belief that Israeli Jews are European settler colonists who will give up and go home once the world has had enough and really cuts Israel off.