On July 26 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz ran this headline: “Israel at War Day 659. Gaza Medical Sources: At Least 25 Killed by Israeli Gunfire, Some While Waiting for Aid.”
If you had been following this Gaza story closely, you would know that Haaretz was running a similar headline almost every day for weeks — only the number of Palestinians killed while waiting for food aid handed out by Israel in Gaza changed. As I watched these stories pile up, the thought occurred to me that roughly a month earlier Israel had managed to assassinate 10 senior Iranian military officials and 16 nuclear scientists sitting in their homes and offices. So how was it that Israel had the capacity to destroy pinpoint targets in Iran, some 1,200 miles from Tel Aviv, and could not safely deliver boxes of food to starving Gazans 40 miles from Tel Aviv?
That did not seem like an accident. It seemed like the product of something deeper, something quite shameful, playing out within the extremist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Key figures in Bibi’s extreme-right ruling coalition, like the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, openly pushed a policy that would result in the starvation of many Gazans — to the point where they would leave the strip entirely. Bibi knew the United States wouldn’t let him go that far, so he provided just the bare minimum of aid to prevent being toppled by the Jewish supremacist thugs he’d brought into his government.
Alas, that turned out to be a little too bare, and terrible pictures of malnourished children started emerging from Gaza, prompting even President Trump to declare on Monday that there is “real starvation stuff” happening in Gaza. “You can’t fake that. We have to get the kids fed.”
How did we get here, where a Jewish democratic state, descended in part from the Holocaust, is engaged in a policy of starvation in a war with Hamas that has become the longest and most deadly war between Israelis and Palestinians in Israel’s history — and shows no sign of ending?
My answer: What makes this war different is that it pits what I believe is the worst, most fanatical and amoral government in Israel’s history against the worst, most fanatical, murderous organization in Palestinian history.