This Editor’s Note was sent out on Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

Let’s deal with this right away. Contrary to Yair Golan’s incendiary assertion, Israel is not “killing babies in Gaza for a hobby.”

I don’t believe Golan, the former deputy IDF chief of staff who now helms what used to be the Labor Party, thinks Israel is doing so either. Twice in the hours after he made the remark in the course of an impassioned Tuesday morning radio interview, he attempted to walk it back without acknowledging he’d gone overboard — first by saying he had been aiming his criticism of the war at the government rather than the IDF and its soldiers, and then, in a televised address, tying himself in semantic knots when attempting in vain to reframe what he had said.

What Israel under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is doing in Gaza, however, is fighting an intensifying war that, while avowedly and legitimately aimed at destroying Hamas and freeing the 58 hostages still held there 19 months after Hamas’s invasion and massacre, is relentlessly reducing Gaza to rubble, causing growing numbers of Gaza civilian fatalities young and old, costing more Israeli soldiers’ lives, and endangering the hostages.

It is expanding the military campaign while telling the Israeli and global public less and less about the specifics of its operations.

It is ignoring the consistent will of two-thirds-plus of the Israeli public to secure the release of the hostages even at the price of ending the war — to return, essentially, to the deal that Netanyahu and his cabinet unanimously approved in January but chose not to pursue after the first of the three envisaged phases had been implemented.

It is also, as Golan was correct in saying, turning Israel into a “pariah state.”

Directly addressing Palestinian civilians in Gaza on Tuesday, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir pointed out: “We are not the ones who brought this destruction upon you. We did not start the war. We did not rob you of food, shelter, or money. We are not the ones hiding in hospitals or schools. We are not the ones staying in luxury hotels while you live in hardship. This is your leadership, those who are holding our hostages. Hamas is responsible for starting the war. It is responsible for the dire situation of the population. It destroyed, and it will not be the one to rebuild.”

True. All true.

But as things stand, the government is, by its own hand, destroying what little international support remains for its efforts, with Netanyahu declaring that Israel is going to “take over all of Gaza” and acknowledging (Hebrew link) that the Gaza civilian populace is nearing the brink of starvation, after 11 weeks in which Israel halted supplies. He has accurately explained that Hamas has been commandeering aid and profiting from it, but he has failed to expeditiously introduce a long-discussed viable alternative supply mechanism.

The government is itself discrediting those legitimate goals of the war — the obligation to get back the hostages and make sure Hamas cannot rise again to slaughter Israelis — with relentless unconscionable ministerial and official declarations that the wider goals of the military offensive include destroying all of Gaza, cleaning it out, forcing the entire populace into a narrow area at the southern foot of the Strip, creating conditions in which Gazans will leave in large numbers for unspecified third countries, retaining the territory, and reviving Jewish settlement there.

Hamas abducted 251 hostages with the clear-eyed cynical intention of using them as leverage to ensure that it would survive Israel’s military response to its massacre of 1,200 people in southern Israel on October 7, 2023. It will not easily give up the last of them, and it will not easily relinquish its control of Gaza and slink away into exile, whatever it might profess readiness to do in any negotiated agreement.

And that is precisely why more than two-thirds of the Israeli public have been pleading with their government to accept a deal that will ostensibly bring the return of the hostages in return for an end to the war and, yes, the release of many more murderous terrorists:

Because Hamas can be relied upon to break any commitment it may make. And thus Israel, sooner rather than later, will need to resume its military campaign. But in the meantime it can secure the release of many, perhaps even most of the hostages, before more of the living captives are dead.

Fighting on, with a growing death toll of Gazans, soldiers and hostages, and with deplorable aims set out by the likes of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, is both tearing at the moral fabric of our society and destroying Israel’s international legitimacy, thereby playing directly into Hamas’s hands.

Because fighting on, with a growing death toll of Gazans, soldiers and hostages, and with deplorable aims set out by the likes of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, is both tearing at the moral fabric of our society and destroying Israel’s international legitimacy, thereby playing directly into Hamas’s hands.

Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Lammy on Tuesday delivered a blisteringly furious speech in Parliament in which he suspended UK-Israel trade talks and threatened further punitive measures: “Netanyahu’s government is planning to drive Gazans from their homes into a corner of the Strip to the south and permit them a fraction of the aid that they need,” he noted. “Yesterday, Minister Smotrich even spoke of Israeli forces ‘cleansing’ Gaza, ‘destroying what’s left,’ of resident Palestinians ‘being relocated to third countries.’ We must call this what it is. It is extremism. It is dangerous. It is repellent. It is monstrous.”

The UK’s stance leaves the Trump administration as the only relatively supportive major ally Israel now has as regards the Gaza war. And, indeed, it was President Donald Trump himself who first raised the idea of the morally untenable and unworkable forced evacuation of Gazans and the leveling of the Strip. But Trump has since wobbled on that idea, latterly insisting that he would not be seeking to expel anybody, and, last week, warning that “there’s a lot of bad things going on” in Gaza. “We have to help also out the Palestinians. You know, a lot of people are starving in Gaza, so we have to look at both sides.”

Netanyahu consistently denies that coalition politics are driving his policies on the war. But the arithmetic is simple: If he stops the war, Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir take their far-right parties out of the coalition, and he loses his majority.

Okay, but so what?

Israel’s existential security interests, its global alliances and its internal cohesion are at stake. But if that’s not enough, the prime minister can reasonably bet on himself to politically survive a deal to bring back the hostages in return for ending the campaign.

He would be able to present it as the vindication of 19 months of military and diplomatic pressure. Domestically, he would be able to insist that he was always doing his utmost to secure the hostages’ freedom. He would be able to depict Hamas as a radically reduced threat, and to highlight his intention to strike at it whenever and wherever it tries to raise its head. For a little while, at least, the killing would halt. Reservists could go back to their families and their jobs. The economy could revive.

He would be able to work with potential regional partners on a non-Hamas postwar Gaza. The path would reopen to wider regional normalization. Britain and other horrified allies would be reconciled. Trump would be delighted.

He’d pull Israel back from the abyss.

So, yes, his coalition would collapse. But he might just free the hostages, halt the deaths for a while, win back the Israeli public and some of the international community… and probably win reelection.