Israel’s violent choices may lead to its extinction
At every moment since October 7, Israel has had the option of taking a different path. But it has consistently chosen the most destructive option — not only for the people of Gaza, but also for its own citizens. That’s the way it works when Israeli society as a whole, not just Netanyahu, has only a hammer in it its toolbox.
By Orly Noy • Translated by Sol Salbe
Now, just before the regional Armageddon that Netanyahu is determined to ignite. Now, when each and every one of us is fearfully trying to guess what will be the response to the assassinations that our leaders are celebrating. Now when we contemplate what and whom will be targeted and who will be hit and whether our children escape it. Now, when we think about the fate of the abductees and are afraid to put into words what we already understand in our guts. Maybe now is a moment to stop and ask — was there really no other way? Was this sinking into a bottomless hell-pit an inevitable fate?
Because an Iranian response will surely come, and only its intensity and nature are not known. Even if Masoud Pezeshkian, the incoming Iranian President, and the most moderate of the candidates that stood, sought to distance Iran from the belligerent line of his predecessor and navigate its way into the path of dialogue with the West, the assassination of a Hamas leader in the capital Tehran, immediately after his inauguration as the new president, pushes him into a corner. He will now have to “prove his mantle as a leader” as the new president, respond to this blatant violation of his country’s sovereignty, and deepen his alliance with Hamas. But Israel is celebrating the “brilliant achievement” of our sophisticated war machine. How wonderfully do our guys and gals know how to bomb, and with what precision!
“Marked for death.” This is probably the most well-worn phrase in the media and public discourse in Israel after the two recent assassinations of a senior Hezbollah commander and a Hamas leader. The ultimate justification in a society, that all it has been doing for ten months is finding justifications for its unbridled violence. There is something terrifying about the fact that the question of whether or not so-and-so is “marked for death” determines our fate here more than whether we are marked for life or not. Whether the abductees are marked for life or not. Whether the inhabitants of the country’s north and south are re marked for life or not.
Since the October 7, at every crossroads in its path, and there have been countless of them, Israel has chosen the path of violence and escalation. There was never a shortage of justifications: after all, we must respond forcefully to the massacre, we must persecute those who initiated and carried it out, we must intensify the pressure until they return the abductees, we must attack Lebanon in response to the shooting, we must signal to Iran that we will not remain silent about its ongoing support for Hezbollah. Israel’s automatic choice of violence as the only response to any situation has wiped out the range of tools that should be in any country’s strategic basket. A country without a variety of strategic tools is a very dangerous country to its citizens.
The automatic choice of the path of escalation is as suicidal as it is lethal. This inertia is so sweeping and self-evident that it does not allow us to ask the questions necessary for our very existence here: Has the atrocious genocide we are perpetrating in Gaza increased the security of a single person in Israel? Are we safer now, while waiting for the Iranian response? Is Israel doing better on the world stage than it was on October 7? Was the sequence of choices taken by Israel since October 7 necessary?
The obvious answer to all these rhetorical questions is a resounding no. So why are we continuing on this destructive path even now, even when the price we are paying for it is skyrocketing? Why do even otherwise sensible people celebrate Haniyeh’s assassination as a brilliant operation, when we don’t even know how to estimate the price tag that it carries?
It is easy to pin everything on Netanyahu, to say that the war serves his political survival and therefore he has an interest in continuing it indefinitely. It is true, of course, but it is too easy a way out. Netanyahu did indeed chose to sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of Gazans, the lives of abductees and the security of us all for his political survival, but the Israeli public surrendered itself from the very beginning, with spine-tingling joy, to the suicidal lethal path that Netanyahu paved.
It’s not just the lust for revenge that swept through Israeli society after October 7 and breathed in it murderousness of a kind we hadn’t known before. It is the absolute obliteration of the ability to imagine anything other than futile escalation and violence. The Israeli public faces the chilling reality that it lacks the tools to examine its own interests and decide between different courses of action, because there is nothing in its toolbox but a hammer.
Ten months after the massacre, Israeli society could have been somewhere else. It could have already been in the process of rehabilitating from the terrible trauma, after all the abductees returned home alive. The Gaza Strip would not have become the Hiroshima of the Middle East, and Hamas rule would have ended with international agreement. Tens of thousands of Israelis would not have been displaced from their homes in the north and south, so many soldiers’ lives would have been spared. We could have begun the long and complex recovery process that awaits us, instead of spiralling in a deepening cycle of terror that makes it impossible for an entire society to even digest, let alone cope, with what it’s going through.
This is not wisdom in hindsight; There were those among us who warned about the consequences of the bloody terrifying path that Israel chose to embark upon from the very beginning, and suggested an alternative. We have been denounced as defeatists at best, and as deniers of the massacre and supporters of Hamas in many other cases. And even today, against the background of the jubilation following the last two assassinations, we repeat: This is a destructive, halfwitted, perilous path. Ten months of atrocious choices have brought us to moral, security, economic and social abysses that even the pessimists among us could not have imagined. A society that cannot even envisage nonviolent behaviour is doomed to extinction. It’s chilling to think how we are walking there with our eyes wide open.
Translated by Sol Salbe, Middle East News Service
Hebrew original article: Local Call / Mekomit
