Most of the Jewish community in Israel does not think there needs to be a critical examination of the Israeli war in Gaza. For the opposing camp, championed by the radical left, the assertion that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza is a necessary prerequisite for entering into any conversation at all. Marooned between blocs of certainty is the Zionist left — a group of about 400,000 people, according to the latest polls — which rejects the genocide label but is also not prepared to give up on any kind of Israeli accountability. The Israeli debate, in other words, leaves little space for serious analysis. Such a space must be created.
I know a senior officer, a man of the Zionist left, who served in the reserves in Gaza for a hundred days. At a certain point in that period he heard from another senior officer that IDF soldiers were using Palestinians as human shields while searching tunnels. This practice is an unequivocal violation of international law. This friend of mine exerted considerable effort to persuade his acquaintance to take this information to the Israeli media, and his efforts succeeded. The man reported the crime.
A year later I found myself in a very different conversation with this same friend. At about that time, a report had been published by the organization Physicians for Human Rights which claimed that Israel had intentionally targeted hospitals in Gaza with the intention of destroying the health networks in the Gaza Strip, and this report was cited by organizations which claim that Israel was conducting genocide. I asked this acquaintance of mine what he thought of the report and he said that he knew from personal experience and direct information that throughout the war Hamas had used hospitals in the Strip as shelter for Hamas activities and also as a place hold Israeli hostages. “This is the information,” he said, “with which any discussion of this subject must begin.”
The majority of the Zionist left lives between the two poles reflected in these two anecdotes. On the one hand, they know that Israel committed large-scale war crimes in Gaza — that it did so knowingly, with the support and sometimes with the encouragement of the government and IDF commanders — and they believe that these crimes must be exposed and discussed. On the other hand, they believe that military action in Gaza was necessary and justified as a consequence of the attacks of October 7, and they are reluctant to enter into any critical conversation that could buttress the claim that Israel has committed genocide.
We are stuck. Here is the spectrum of current Israeli opinion. The majority of Israelis believe that every military action in Gaza has been completely justified. The entirety of the Israeli right sees absolutely nothing wrong with any IDF action in Gaza. If they say anything at all, they say that even more extreme action was necessary — such as bombing civilians without discrimination and without removing them because “there are no innocents in Gaza.” Israeli supporters of the political center may not be entirely comfortable with the number of civilian casualties but they believe that, given the circumstances, there was no choice. And both of these cohorts see no reason to conduct any moral inquiry into Israeli action in the Gaza strip. And in opposition to these views, at the other end of the political map, a small group of activists — most of whom defined themselves as non-Zionists — have collected testimony about the genocide that Israel, in their view, has committed (for example, the project Bearing Witness led by Lee Mordechai, a historian at Hebrew University).
The work of this group is important. At a time when the majority of Israelis are intent on proving Israel’s righteousness and innocence, it is essential that Jewish Israelis are attentive to the unimaginable suffering that the residents of what remains of the Gaza Strip are currently enduring, and that Jewish Israelis ensure that detailed evidence of that suffering and of Israeli responsibility for it are available to the Jewish community. But the problem, again, is that the space that this group has created is a space which Zionist leftist Jews find hard to enter, because the ticket for entry is an affirmation that Israel has committed genocide.
The kind of conversation for which I am trying to create space is not a purely or even mainly a legal one. Still, the conversation that we need is impossible to begin without considering the legal definition of the term “genocide” as defined by international law. The following is article two of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide signed by the United Nations General Assembly in December of 1948:
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
It is important to point out that many experts in international law, around the world as well as in Israel itself, men and women of good will and scholarly expertise, believe that Israel’s action in Gaza falls within the definition of genocide. That is to say, they claim that Israel’s actions were committed with the intention to destroy — destroy totally or in part — the Palestinians inside Gaza.
The primary reason that leftist Zionists find it difficult to take part in the conversation about genocide is because of their strongly held view that this intention — to exterminate all the Palestinians in Gaza — did not exist. Yes, they are fully aware that central ministers of the government have spoken about the destruction of the Palestinians. They are also aware that soldiers and officers who served in Gaza expressed similar wishes. But they also believe — especially those among them who actually served inside Gaza, like that acquaintance of mine, or those whose sons or close friends have served in Gaza — that the vast majority of soldiers was not acting out of a desire to destroy Palestinians; that there was no blanket military order to act according to such an intention; and that there was no broad pattern of behavior motivated by an intent to destroy all the Palestinians. That, of course, is in stark contrast with the massacre perpetrated by Hamas on October 7, which was characterized, in accordance with Hamas ideology, by a blanket order to kill civilians as well as a broad pattern of civilian murder.
Now an important linguistic and psychological point ought to be made. The concept of “genocide” is a concept that extends far beyond the narrow constraints of international law. Since the Holocaust there is hardly an adult in the Western world, and in many places beyond it, who is not familiar with the concept and who does not assign to it a highly specific meaning. When a person hears the term “genocide” in relation to the state of Israel, he does not for the most part immediately go look up the definition offered above, nor does he turn to scholarly and carefully reasoned articles written by experts who argue that Israel is guilty of such a crime in Gaza. Instead, it is much more likely that an adult will think of images of gas chambers and mass executions, since that is what the term “genocide” conjures. And this fact is the reason for another difficulty for the leftist Zionist: he cannot simply disentangle the term from the intractable political and social context in which that term has traditionally been invoked. His emotional response is that Israel is being accused of carrying out mass executions the likes of which were committed in Auschwitz and later in Rwanda and Srebrenica — an accusation that he rejects.
In the international public discourse, as opposed to in legal discourse, it seems that most of the time when genocide is used to describe Israeli action in Gaza, it is applied equally to every action taken by the state in the Strip from October 7, 2023, until today. Contrast this with Bosnia. Usually the massacre that was committed in Srebrenica is characterized as a genocide whereas the word is not applied generally to characterize every action undertaken by the Bosnian-Serb army in the Bosnian War. But when it comes to Israel, the genocide conversation almost always speaks of “the genocide that Israel committed in Gaza” and not about “some of the actions that Israel committed in Gaza which are genocidal.” This is not a merely semantic distinction. And leftist Zionists who are prepared to characterize some of the actions that Israel has taken in Gaza as genocidal are not prepared to engage in sweeping generalizations which do not take into account the timeline and the changes that were made in response to shifting circumstances throughout the war.
In the eyes of the leftist Zionist — who supported the war at its start and protested against it at its later stages — the righteousness and the legitimacy of Israeli action are not fixed concepts but dynamic ones: they change depending on the actions and the circumstances. This perspective distinguishes leftist Zionists from the vast majority of Israeli Jews, for whom the legitimacy of Israeli action in Gaza is black or white. And for them the genocide discourse is easy to engage with because it is either wholly true or wholly untrue.
There is still another difficulty that people such as myself face — the most obvious and essential. No moral human beings — and especially Jews that, individually and collectively, value human rights — want to regard themselves as guilty of the worst sin of all. In this connection one must bear in mind that, in contrast to the non-Zionist left (most of whom, as I understand it, did not serve in Gaza and do not know many people who did), the leftist Zionists see themselves as full members of their nation. They do not absent themselves from recriminations against the state. They themselves, their sons, their brothers, and their students served in Gaza. And so talk of genocide is intensely personal for them — they do not speak distantly of an abstract, alienated “they” that committed genocide. It is not “them” (the government, the right, the extreme right, the rightwing soldiers); it is “us.”
And finally, like much of the Jewish Israeli community, the leftist Zionist agrees that there is bias against Israel when it comes to the implementation of the rules of international law and the discourse concerning that legal framework. Leftist Zionists are suspicious of the motivations of those who accuse Israel of genocide — they believe that at least some of these accusers are motivated by political or ideological concerns rather than by moral or legal ones. He asks himself, for example, why other armies that were active in densely populated places against armed organizations that assimilated into the civilian population — such as the American campaign in Mosul, which resulted in thousands of civilian casualties and against which serious allegations of war crimes were raised — faced no allegations of genocide.
So, a third space must be established.
In this space a serious discussion will take place about the principle of proportionality, a fundamental concept in international law and the legal traditions of just and unjust war, and about the harm done to Palestinian civilians by the Israeli military. At the same time, this conversation will take into consideration the fact that Hamas hid among civilians — in schools, in hospitals, in UNRWA centers — but will stubbornly ask whether the extent of the damage to civilian infrastructure was necessary and justified according to the principle of proportionality. It will also take into account the horrific and inflammatory expressions made by the Prime Minister (“Remember what Amalek did to you”), and by politicians in the governing coalition (“atom bomb on Gaza”), and by officers in the military (“for every person killed on October seventh fifty Palestinians must die — it makes no difference now if they are children”) — as well as the actions of those officers in the field who tried to diminish civilian casualties. And it will also ask the critical question: whether, throughout the war, the IDF had an effective system for investigating violations and whether after the war there was sufficient or indeed existent investigation into war crimes at all.
The timeline and the shifting reality on the ground will also be taken into consideration. It is possible that there are actions that were taken in the first weeks of the war that leftist Zionists would justify, but they would deem those same actions unjustified when undertaken later on in the war when, on the one hand, those actions were less militarily effective, and on the other, it had become possible to negotiate an end to the war but the government rejected such a development for political reasons. And finally, once all of this has been done, this new space, this candid space, this scrupulous space, must allow for a conversation about whether or not some of the actions undertaken by Israel in Gaza can be characterized as genocidal. But this can only be done at the end of the process that I described. The question of genocide is not the first question that needs to be asked, not least because it usually sheds more heat than light. The first questions are empirical ones, factual ones.
Given the current configuration of opinion in Israel and the hardening of the camps, only the Zionist left can create this space. It is not an easy task: no one wants to believe his country committed serious war crimes, or that people in his community participated in them. However, we owe it to our country to blow open the conversation and expand it beyond all the present certainties — and well beyond the intellectually sealed bubble of the non-Zionist left.
The enormous international interest in the movie NAZA, which was recently honored at the Venice Film Festival, reminds us that the conversation outside Israel about Israeli action in Gaza (most of which is a conversation about genocide) will go on for quite a long time, whether or not we in Israel play any kind of leadership role with regard to this conversation. But, despite the bias that I believe exists against Israel, I think that a serious internal Israeli discourse about this subject can have a meaningful impact on the conversation outside Israel.
Right now, the only conversation taking place between Israelis and non-Israelis about Israeli action in Gaza is between Israeli non-Zionists and non-Israeli anti-Zionists. I see no other discussion, I mean responsible discussion, taking place between Israelis and non-Israelis on this subject. I believe that a meaningful internal discourse of the kind I am describing could create a link between the leftist Zionist camp in Israel and, for example, the liberal Zionists abroad who have deep feeling for the Jewish state but are at the same time critical of it.
Alas, there is an important historical precedent for the Zionist left excluding itself from a conversation about Israeli responsibility for war crimes — 1948–1949, the war of independence and the Nakba. Despite the fact that almost eighty years have passed, to this day a serious conversation about the Nakba has not been conducted within the Israeli Jewish community. We have not considered the war crimes that Israel committed in 1948, we have not reckoned with our expulsion of Palestinians, our destruction of their villages — the Israeli responsibility for the tragedy of the Palestinian nation. We have not recognized the historical facts or analyzed them historically and morally.
In practice, the Israeli Jewish community regards the Nakba in precisely the same way that it now considers Israeli action in Gaza. This is profoundly discouraging. The majority believe that Israeli actions in 1948 were totally and unquestionably justified (and many even think that we did not go far enough and that “we should have expelled all of them”). There is a minority that is not totally comfortable with some Israeli actions, but believes that they were generally justified and in any case, they would rather not dwell on them.
On the other hand, exactly as with Gaza, there is a small group that focuses intently on the Nakba, adopts the Palestinian perspective entirely, and places the blame completely on the Jewish side. I am referring to the “new historians” school that writes about the Nakba and (with the important exception of Benny Morris) defines themselves as non-Zionist. I am also referring to the organization Zochrot, which does important work documenting the destroyed Palestinian villages and organizing tours of them.
In this case, too, the Zionist Left is reluctant to participate in the discourse that the non-Zioninsts are leading. What percentage of Zionist leftists has read the new historians’ books about the Nakba and know enough about the events of 1948 to consider them dispassionately? Who among them would be willing to go on the Zochrot tours which, aside from relaying a lot of information about Palestinian experience before and during 1948, also insist on the Palestinian right of return and so imply the illegitimacy of the Jewish state all together? It’s obvious why most would never do so.
My father is a man of the Zionist left who served in the Palmach, the elite assault forces of the Haganah, in the Harel battalion. He once saw his own commander, a well-known Israeli figure, shoot an elderly Palestinian in a village in the Jerusalem hills. But he also recalled entering Palestinian villages that were entirely empty because the residents had fled, sometimes at the insistence of Arab armies. My father believed from the first that Jewish soldiers committed war crimes in 1948, and he thought it was important to talk about this. But he also believed that there was not a top-down, sweeping order for mass deportation according to which all field units operated. In principle my father would be welcomed by Zochrot to discuss the Israeli war crimes that he witnessed, but he will not be as welcomed to question the Palestinian narrative. (I know this because I spoke with its activists when they came to interview him.)
If we want to ensure that the fate of the Israeli (and Jewish) conversation about Israeli war crimes in Gaza does not share the deplorable fate of the same conversation regarding 1948–1949, the Zionist left must create the space I am describing. That is our historical responsibility, dictated by our simultaneous commitments to Israeli society and security and to morality, human rights, and international law.
During the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli poet T. Carmi wrote a cycle of poems which treats his personal and the national trauma following the war. One of them is called “What Happened”:
What happened really happened
What happened really happened
What happened really happened
I believe with perfect faith
That I will have the strength to believe
That what happened really happened
(translated by Grace Shulman)
Like Carmi in 1973, we must begin to deal with our trauma — the trauma that was catalyzed by the fact that what happened really happened, what they did to us and what we did to them.
But at the same time, we also need the courage, honesty, fairness, and wisdom to understand, as much as possible, what actually happened — and what actually happened, as is usually the case with historical events, cannot be neatly organized within a single category — not as a “just war,” but likely not as “genocide” either. Reality is complicated. Saying so is not tantamount to evading responsibility; on the contrary. Recognizing the complexity in a wartime situation like the one created in Gaza after October 7th is a necessary prerequisite for uncovering and seriously investigating the evidence from the war. That analysis, whatever it reveals, is precisely what allows — at least for the Zionist leftist who moves, as mentioned, between the poles of a “just war” and “war crimes” — to take full responsibility for the actions of his state. And taking responsibility is the essential starting point for any repair.