This article was originally featured in Foreign Policy, the magazine of global politics and ideas. For news, expert analysis, and background on the conflict, read FP’s latest coverage of the Israel-Hamas war.
The Israeli military is once again dropping bombs on the besieged Gaza Strip. Over the weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared war on the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which controls Gaza, after fighters from it and other groups carried out a massive assault in Israel that began Saturday morning. So far, at least 900 Israelis and more than 600 Palestinians have been killed; those numbers, particularly on the Palestinian side, are likely to climb significantly as the conflict continues.
The latest Israeli military operation in Gaza is the most recent in a long string of such incursions over the past two decades. Major attacks took place in 2006, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2018, and 2021—virtually every two years. Israel has pursued a strategy of “mowing the lawn,” a phrase it uses to describe the periodic bombing of Palestinians in the territory to keep armed groups at bay. But each time Israel says it is going to degrade and destroy the capabilities of Gazan militants, fighters soon prove they have only expanded and increased their capabilities.
This weekend’s display of these capabilities—and the horrific violence it unleashed—was so extensive it left intelligence experts dumbfounded. Gaza is perhaps the most militarily surveilled spot on Earth. The territory has been under siege for a decade and a half, with an Israeli naval blockade and weaponized drones routinely flying overhead. High-tech Israeli missile interceptors, walls and fences, and underground tunnel detectors constantly patrol the strip. But Hamas was still able to launch its massive, multiphase air, land, and sea assault.
Israel has sought, time and again, to figure out what to do with Gaza—even before Israel’s ground withdrawal from the territory in 2005. Yitzhak Rabin, who was Israel’s prime minister in the early 1990s, once infamously said: “I wish I could wake up one day and find that Gaza has sunk into the sea.” The 2 million pesky Palestinians who demand to be free from the cage Israel confines them in continue to keep Israeli leaders up at night.
The events of recent days clearly indicate that Israel’s military efforts have failed. And it isn’t for lack of trying: Israeli military campaigns in Gaza have wrought death and destruction on its besieged population for years. Each time, Palestinian fighters are killed, as are scores more Palestinian civilians. Presumably, many of the Palestinian fighters who took part in this weekend’s assault were not alive when Israel first started its campaign of assassinating Palestinian leaders in Gaza in 1993.
But even though Israel’s militarized approach to Gaza has been an epic failure, Netanyahu will likely try it again. The Israeli prime minister has already warned he will “turn all Hamas hiding places into rubble.” Given the extensive Israeli death toll from Hamas’s assault, Israel’s retaliatory campaign will be granted unprecedented leeway by its international partners—including the United States. For Palestinians, this can only mean bearing witness to unprecedented massacres.
Though Israel has occupied the Palestinian territories for over half a century, Israeli violence against Palestinians has reached unprecedented levels in recent years. International, Israeli, and Palestinian human rights groups have all concluded that Israel is committing the crime of apartheid against Palestinians, and the United Nations said 2022 was the deadliest year on record for Palestinians killed in the West Bank by Israeli troops. Killings in 2023 are on pace to surpass those numbers: More than 200 West Bank Palestinians have so far died in the Israeli line of fire this year.
Israeli settlers are also running amok in the West Bank, carrying out mass attacks that even Israeli officials have deemed “pogroms.” The current Israeli government is the most far-right in the country’s history and includes politicians such as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who was considered too dangerous to even enlist in the Israeli military. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich—who was handed the reins of the Defense Ministry’s civil administration, putting him in charge of large parts of the West Bank—called for wiping out Palestinian villages.
Talk of “another Nakba” is on the rise in Israel. The Nakba was the mass ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine in 1948, when Israel was founded and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes and into refugee status. Most of Gaza’s residents today are in the territory because of the Nakba and continue to be denied repatriation to their ancestral homes in present-day Israel and the West Bank.
Now Israeli politicians are calling to ethnically cleanse Palestinians again. An Israeli Knesset member who is part of Netanyahu’s Likud party tweeted this weekend: “Right now, one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of ’48.” It is a mistake to think that this sentiment is a product of Hamas’ most recent attack. In fact, it is one that has been held by a growing number of Israelis for a long time. A 2016 poll by the Pew Research Center found that nearly half of Jewish Israelis wanted to expel or transfer Arabs from Israel. The Israeli public has only moved further to the right in the years since.
The continuously deteriorating human rights situation for Palestinians prompted Michael Barnett, a professor at the George Washington University and a scholar of genocide, to write an article earlier this year for the publication Political Violence at a Glance titled “Is Israel on the Precipice of Genocide?” He wrote that “research on genocide over the past several decades has provided insight into the preconditions, which provide a reasonable starting point. … Many states might qualify. Israel ticks all the boxes.”
That was in March. Today, as Israel pummels Gaza once again and prepares for a bloody ground invasion, Netanyahu has vowed “mighty vengeance.” Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant announced that he would tighten the existing siege on Gaza, cutting off any entry of fuel, food, and people into the territory. Gallant said Israel was fighting a war against “beasts.” The collective punishment of the entire population of Gaza and the dehumanizing language used by Israel’s leading defense official foreshadow the absolute worst.
The international community must immediately sound the alarm to prevent atrocities and war crimes, which an Israel with unhinged leadership can easily carry out again. Thus far, that is not the message most Western officials have been sending.
Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism—a genocide scholar, no less—tweeted on Sunday: “No one has the right to tell Israel how to defend itself and prevent and deter future attacks.” The White House has made clear its unwavering support for Israel and even moved naval ships to the Eastern Mediterranean to deter other actors from getting involved. This will be read in Israel as a license to commit greater atrocities than ever before. In doing so, Israel will be using U.S.-supplied weapons, which are supposed to be regulated by U.S. laws that ensure they are used for internal security and legitimate self-defense and do not escalate conflict. Washington is not merely abdicating official and moral responsibility but enabling mass atrocities at a time when all the red flags for genocide are up.
What will be gained from all of this beyond death and destruction? At this critical juncture, there are two paths before decisionmakers in Israel and its Western partners. One path leads down a road of unprecedented killing, oppression, hatred, and potential mass atrocities—all while maintaining the likely prospect that these events will repeat themselves again after a short period of time. The other path requires leaders to demand that Palestinians’ core political grievances, the ultimate sources of violence, finally be resolved.
The first path requires leaders with power. The latter requires leaders with courage and dignity.
