Opinion | In Six Months in Gaza, Israel's Worst-ever War Achieved Nothing but Death and Destruction

 

Gideon Levy

Apr 7, 2024 12:43 am IDT

Sunday is the six-month anniversary, and it seems this won't be the war's last six-month milestone; no one in Israel has any idea how to end the worst war in its history, whose costs are piling up at an alarming rate and whose benefits are negligible, nonexistent in fact. That is why we must muster the courage to say, after six months of calamities, that it would have been better had it not broken out.

No, no. Israel did have a choice: don't go to war. If these are its results, it would have been better to show restraint, to punish those who should have been punished for the horrors of October 7 and move on.

Everyone would have benefited, apart from Israel's masculine and military ego, which always imposes disproportionate repayment and punishment, whatever the price may be. This is a supremely childish and foolish policy. Scariest of all is the fear that Israel will behave this way vis-a-vis Iran.

• Israel must end its war in Gaza now
• The Gaza war shattered all assumptions, leaving Israel scrambling without a plan
• After six months, few of the Israel-Gaza war's goals have been achieved

Not even the most advanced ground penetrating radar could burrow into the ruins of Gaza and its graves to find a single benefit Israel has gained from the war. The unprecedented mountains of damage, by contrast, are visible to the naked eye.

It has all been said before, to no effect, but worst of all is the damage to Israel's moral reputation and, as a result, its global standing. This is near irreversible. It will take years for Russia to recover its position after Ukraine; Israel, similarly, will have to work for years to recover its position after Gaza. But Israel is not Russia; it is much more vulnerable.

Set aside all the stories about antisemitism abroad; only some are true. Anyone who sees what Israel is doing in Gaza could be expected to hate and despise it. But never mind the world, look at what has happened to us: We were always indifferent to the Palestinian's suffering, but now we have set new monstrous records for this indifference.

Displaced Palestinians in Gaza.Credit: Mahmoud Issa/ REUTERS

Limbs are routinely amputated at the Sde Teiman detention facility, and there's no reaction. There are 17,000 children in Gaza who have been orphaned or separated from their parents – and nothing. Israel's physicians aren't protesting over Sde Teiman, nor are its social workers over the starving children and those who have died or been killed. We have become as monsters. Not only in our actions, but above all in our apathy.

Once there were Israelis who were shocked and who called for action. Nearly all of them are gone. Only one righteous doctor in Sde Teiman wrote a letter. It is not known whether he continues cooperating with the evil there.

October 7, six months ago on Sunday, destroyed Israelis' conscience. The agenda now is all-Israeli: There is no one else but us. Only our disasters, our suffering, our sacrifices – and everything else can burn for all we care.

However, when the largest and most advanced medical center in Gaza went up in flames, so did Israel's soul, which was problematic even before. At the end of this war, Gaza will be destroyed and killed, and we will discover a different face starting at us in the mirror. The world will treat us accordingly, just as we would expect it to treat any evil state acting this way.

Al-Shifa hospital complex in Gaza City, on Monday.

More and more Israelis are beginning to understand, daring to speak and to sober up from their post-October 7 "sobering-up." The calls for an unconditional cease-fire are growing, even from the pages of Haaretz, but they are too late and too hesitant. Bloodthirstiness and sadism have come out of the closet in the past six months and are considered politically correct in Israel.

The next six months of the war could be even worse than the first. An invasion of Rafah could make the mass killing we've done so far look like a movie trailer.

If so, Israel's northern border will also boil, Iran will also roil. It's better not to go into the completely realistic horror scenarios. Israel will continue collecting the bodies of its hostages, as it did this weekend; the West Bank will join the clients of the war and, for the first time in its history, Israel will stand alone in the face of all this.

It's better to stop here. Stop with the rather realistic apocalyptic descriptions and stop the war. The first six months was enough for us: more than enough, we're in over our heads.

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