‘They won’t return for a hundred years’

The war depends on lying

LATE LAST YEAR, WHEN the noose-and-hammer of the Generals’ Plan was at its harshest peak of ruin, the right-wing Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon sent its former editor Hagai Segal into the dust of Shujayya. The only foreign journalists allowed into Gaza are those willing to mop the blood. There Segal, a former terrorist, found an IDF officer (or rather an IDF officer was found for him) with the resonant name of Schindler. What he said is the most pure and crisp distillation of the war, its truest goal and objective. “In the end,” Commander Schindler confessed (or boasted),

we’re not fighting an army. We’re fighting an idea. If I kill the fighters, the idea can still remain. But I want to make the idea unviable. When they look at Shujayya and see there’s nothing there—just sand—that’s the point. I don’t think they’ll be able to return here for at least one hundred years.

The war on Gaza no longer has any justification. It never did, really. From about December 1, 2023, when the Israeli army and its civilian controllers chose to go further than a mere thinning out of the enemy’s numbers, we have been hurtling down this lonely trunkline to extermination. But the Western nations required a readymade set of lies—these gashes in the cloth of reality—to continue their death-giving military aid. Britain, Germany, the European Union, and the United States all needed a public rationale to keep up the moral torpor of their diplomatic support and legal screening. What were the reasons given? the rationale thrown back into the teeth of anyone who begged them to stop? That the hostages held by Hamas should be released. That Hamas itself should be disbanded as a military force and as a political party. These are Israel’s “war aims.”

They are not worth the paper they’re written. They are not worth the air wasted to speak them into existence. Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has forfeited the right to prosecute the war on its own terms. Even if these declared “war aims” were honest and legitimate, the army failed to achieve them. And in that failure the IDF has violated nearly every one of the most serious crimes on the statute books of civilisation—this “civilisation” which Netanyahu claims to defend and represent but which is hourly burned in pursuit of a barbaric messianism.

The return of the hostages? Israeli society mobilised for combat, sent its sons to the army, and wrecked their economy, all so the IDF could exact the price of sixty-thousand dead Palestinians in exchange for just eight hostages rescued by military action in nearly twenty-two months of constant combat. Three more were shot by their own side in the process. On the other hand, the ceasefires of November 2023 and January 2025 secured the freedom of seventeen times that number: 139 living captives, and the remains of dozens of others. Edan Alexander, the last American prisoner of war, was also released by diplomacy. The only reliable, proven way for Israel to achieve its aim of getting back its hostages is by negotiation under the peace of a truce.

A third halt in hostilities seems even further away now than it did in May or June, and the IDF itself no longer seems to care. A briefing to the commanders leading “Gideon’s Chariot”—the latest offensive which has placed eighty percent of Gaza under occupation and evacuation orders, with nought but a sliver of land on the coast at al-Mawasi for the “safety” of the population, their backs to the sea—getting the hostages back ranked lowest on their to-do list. “Operational control of territory” and the “concentration and movement of the population” are more important objectives to the army. “Returning the hostages” came last. Orit Strook, the Israeli settlements minister, went even further in suggesting the hostages were an impediment to a total “victory” in Gaza; the IDF should take the risk of bombing everywhere in the Strip, even if it killed the very people they are supposed to be saving. In this sense, the hostages have become a prop or a talisman—an invocation for the war to continue, even if it is not a war on their behalf.

If the true purpose of the war is the definitive end of Hamas as a military force and a political party (a civilian/combatant distinction Israel is often reluctant to notice), then negotiation too is the only viable method. Hamas has already declared its own self-abnegation. The party’s leaders have insisted they would give up armed struggle if a two-state settlement was achieved, or if the governing Fatah party in the West Bank was ready to take over Gaza’s administration. Netanyahu and his cabinet have refused both offers. As recently as May 25, Hamas agreed to hand over control to a technocratic committee during a permanent ceasefire. Netanyahu rejected that too. The state continues to sacrifice its soldiers to Gaza’s maw just as readily as Palestinians are obliterated by military kit made by American hands. All for the illusory goals which could be fulfilled by simpler and safer means.

On their way to butchering people, Israeli leaders butcher their own logic. The calculated, deliberate starvation of an entire society in an eleven-week siege was necessary, they said, because Hamas was diverting humanitarian supplies for its own ends, either to use in guerrilla operations or to fundraise by reselling goods on Gaza’s depleted markets at steep prices. This accusation was useful again when the Israelis were establishing the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation and its four death-trap feeding centres. It was never true. An internal review by the Bureau of Humanitarian Assistance (part of the US Agency for International Development; USAID) completed in June found “no evidence of systematic theft.” Even the New York Times, so readily a partner in matters of obfuscation and propaganda, had to agree. Four Israeli sources told the paper they had “never found proof [Hamas] had systematically stolen aid from the United Nations.”

On May 18—before the GHF set its snare and began shooting, before a tiny trickle of UN supply was allowed into the north of Gaza—Netanyahu and Smotrich conceded that some aid would have to be let in. It was nothing more than a gesture proving Israel had the power to end the blockade with a single word, but which also negated the given reasons for cutting off aid in the first place. Since aid is now entering the Strip, Hamas is therefore being resupplied, and thus the war must continue. Has there ever been an example in history of a state officially pursuing the feeding its own enemy to prolong a battle? If there is, it can only have one reason: the war is not a war, but a cover for something else.

You can trust Bezalel Smotrich to say what others won’t. To say what exactly what that something is. While duplicitous, demure, or dishonest Israeli politicians might officially deny the worst atrocities, Smotrich prays for them. He prays for them publicly. Letting in aid, establishing the cutout of the GHF, he declared, was so “the world does not stop us and accuse us of war crimes.” It’s a little late for that. The two highest courts in the world have open cases against the state of Israel and its leadership. No, Smotrich was invoking the protection of the United States and Germany: being seen to soften the extremes of Israeli policy in case their armorers cut off the vital supply of munitions and missiles, without which the campaign of brutalisation would have lasted only a few weeks. The illusion of the siege being broken, Smotrich said, was entirely so that “our friends…continue to provide us with an international umbrella of protection against the Security Council and The Hague Tribunal.” There’s a word for that, too: a protection racket, at rock bottom prices. A few loaves of bread, and in exchange Smotrich, Netanyahu, and defence minister Israel Katz escape the irons of the law for the worst crimes of the modern age.

If the only reliable way to achieve Israel’s “war aims” is negotiation, then is what is the war for? Perhaps its real purpose is punishment and revenge for the insult of October 7. If this is true, then it should shock our souls (if they are not already rocky and inured to the daily procession of burial shrouds) that sixty-thousand Palestinian souls have not been enough to sate such vengeance. “The village that massacred you, we massacred it back,” one sergeant of the IDF’s 5^th Brigade told Breaking the Silence. At what cost satisfaction? Again, no: punishment alone cannot be the goal. Ehud Olmert, a former prime minister (and convicted crook), claims the newest phase of the war is “without a chance of achieving anything that can save the lives of the hostages.” The war has become, Olmert says, “a war without purpose.” But he is wrong. The war may have no justification or legitimacy, but it does have a purpose.

Seen from outside, the Israeli government’s justifications fall apart or look openly cynical. On the ground, seen from below, coated in the grey dust which has palled Gaza’s length, the strategy is clear and its objective crystalline. Rafah has been emptied. Rafah has been levelled—like Jabalia and Beit Hanoun before it. “It looks like Mars,” an IDF trooper marvels. “The horizon is flat,” says another. “There is no city.” In the first phase of the war, units would clear an area then fall back. The divisions will not be retreating. This time they are preparing the ground for a permanent occupation. What has been done to Rafah will be done next to Khan Younis. What has been done to Beit Hanoun is already being done to Deir al Balah. The hostages were abandoned months ago. It matters little what Hamas does. Ambition goes beyond punishment. Every statement and every incitement points in a single direction, along with every action. Starvation, conquest, expulsion. Annexation, settlements, annihilation. In that order. Finally: the end of the idea of a Palestinian nation, or a Palestinian people. “They starve us,” says the Gazan photojournalist Soliman Hijjy, “then invite us to receive aid, then kill us, so that the world can rejoice in its humanity and civilization.”

Prophecy is a charlatan’s trick. Yet the Egyptian writer Omar El Akkad was correct—hauntingly correct—to make his prediction, in October of 2023, that all those who once tacked their fates to the open murder of a multitude will eventually, brazenly insist that they were opposed to what they had openly willed to happen. It has become one of our catchphrases: “One day, everyone will have always been against this.” We sigh it with cynicism and anger, in mourning; an inverse and opposite to that purposeful slogan “No uninvolved civilians.” Reflected at them in the black grip of an endless siege, in the dire clench of a people’s empty stomach, the grotesque fibs in which Israel’s allies found such cause and safety are becoming harder to hold in the mouth, more difficult to say without feeling at least a little of the sting of truth. A skeleton need not speak. It only needs to present its bones to make you a liar.