The political leaders of Israel have long spoken of an existential threat. Critics, and many of its well-meaning friends have offered suggestions about the reasonable or fair thing to do. But its enemies and many of its neighbours, Israel says, want the annihilation of the very idea of the Jewish state.

Its enemies can face loss after loss, regroup and gather again. But Israel argues that it can lose only once, because the state would be dismembered, if anything with even more ruthlessness than Israel is using to try and obliterate Hamas. Many of the enemies of Israel would, if they could, kill Israelis, or Jews, with the same lack of mercy being shown by Israel in Gaza. If Israel miscalculates, or drops its guard, they might well do so, aided and abetted by the Palestinians Israel has been displacing for more than 75 years.

But this time about, the main war in which Israel has been engaged is not with its neighbours, but against an ethnic population located in land that Israel controls. It has actually declared war on their political organisation after Hamas’ surprise attack on 7 October nearly two years ago. It has rained terror from the skies, targeting and destroying housing, hospitals, schools and civil infrastructure, and, not incidentally, killing at least 60,000 Palestinians and aid workers, including perhaps 17,000 children. Now it has been starving them, including by shooting at civilians queuing for food and water. It has excused some of its actions with claims that the enemy, Hamas, has been using schools, hospitals and other civilianised areas for their operations. These excuses, even if true, do not stop Israeli tactics from being serious war crimes.

This is, of course, a war in which Israeli defence forces are allowed to shelter behind the claim that they are agents of a state, with more immunities and power than any rag-tag army of people trying to overthrow the state. No-one has ever characterised the resistance of Palestinians, since 1948, to Israeli dispossession and punishment as civil war, with Palestinian (or Hamas or Palestine Liberation Organisation) combatants being entitled to Geneva conventions. But many rebels, insurgents or militias acting against their state have been characterised as “freedom fighters” rather than terrorists (particularly when their cause has been favoured by the US). Palestinians, whether in Gaza or on the West Bank, are by contrast terrorists subject only to local law. Even before Gaza, and despite the depredations of intifadas and suicide bombings Israeli soldiers have been killing the more bolshy Palestinians at a rate far far higher than killings of Israelis by Palestinians.

Hamas has been using guerilla tactics against a more powerful enemy

Deplorable as the Hamas atrocities of 7 October were, they were of an ilk with tactics used by guerilla groups everywhere, including the American Revolution of 1776 against overwhelmingly superior numbers. Indeed, those promoting a Jewish state used similar tactics, including attacks on civilians prior to 1948, and many became Israeli political heroes and national leaders.

As well as its own resources, Israel has an open and unlimited overdraft with which to resupply itself with bombs, military aircraft and ammunition from the US. It also buys in other countries what Australia’s Kim Beazley would describe as good, honest and essential weapons of mass destruction. Beazley, when not presiding over a memorial to Australian victims of this industry, is also employed by merchants of death.

Hamas and others have been mischievously given missiles by Iran, but are ill-equipped with military hardware compared with their enemies. Palestinians also face armed soldiers and settlers almost continuously, compared with which their own possession of military equipment is harshly punished. Their lives and their freedom of movement is closely regulated.

I do not make these points to suggest complete moral equivalence between Hamas and the state of Israel, but to emphasise what most observers have come to recognise. This is first that the 7 October massacres were not some sudden or unexpected new form of Palestinian resistance, perpetrated on civilians. They fit into a continuum of Palestinian resistance to Israeli settlement and colonisation, going back more than a century, with ample atrocities, all deplorable and inexcusable, on both sides. Second, by any standard the degree of Israeli retaliation, in which Palestinian civilians have been killed at a rate 60 times the Israeli victims, has been disproportionate, effectively untargeted, indiscriminate and murderous. The prevention of access to food and health resources has been every bit as wicked as raining bombs from the sky.

The Israeli Government is particularly incensed by allegations of deliberate genocide (the targeting of an ethnic group) and by allegations of ethnic cleansing. Yet the vehement denials are complicated by open statements by extremist members of the Israeli cabinet calling for just that – taking the opportunity provided by 7 October to drive all the Palestinians out of the old Palestine. Zionist Israelis campaigned before 1948 to be given the right of exclusive settlement in the old Palestine province (“a land without people for a people without land”).

But the UN mandate of 1948 did not provide this and intended that two separate states be created in the space. Israelis promptly began terrorist acts to frighten out Palestinian villagers and to seize land designated as part of a Palestinian state. Arab neighbours, who had neither agreed to the UN partition nor enlarged area conquered by Israel (and who did not in any event agree to a Jewish state), invaded. It ended inconsequentially, in an effective Israeli victory, and for many decades there was no effective second state in operation.

The world will not allow a greater Israel with the Palestinians pushed into exile.

Israel exists because of a Zionist political movement seeking a Jewish homeland in the 19th century. It was not, originally, necessarily about recovering parts of the old Jewish lands of the Roman era, before the Romans dispersed the Jews (and destroyed the temple in Jerusalem in 62AD. There had been discussions about Uganda and the Australian Kimberley, all taking place without any regard for the rights of the original inhabitants). But Zionist pressure for the homeland to be Palestine intensified during WWI. Britain and France (in part to rally American support against the Central powers) announced that they would move for a Jewish national homeland. Both Britain and France acted arrogantly: they had previously promised independent statehood to Arab groups for their support in the war.

The Balfour declaration of a Jewish homeland said that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine”. Israel, however, regards neither this declaration nor the UN resolution on a two-state solution (which did not mention Zionism) as its birth certificate. Essentially it regards its sovereign rights and boundaries as resting on its conquests in 1948. Neither then, nor later, were Palestinian political rights, or lands, recognised. The Palestinian grievance has subsisted since, occasionally erupting into war, or heavy resistance, invariably put down harshly by Israel.

A pre-emptive war against the Arab neighbours in 1967 saw lightning Israeli strikes and heavy defeats for Arab countries, and Israel’s taking of the West Bank and most of Jerusalem. Israel has never formally annexed these lands, although it effectively governs them as if it had done so and has encouraged a settler movement to occupy extensive areas. A Palestinian Authority has some political status but is regularly overridden by Israeli force majeure.

Ironically, PA corruption and incompetence, and Israel’s desire to make it ineffective, saw Israel encouraging the creation of Hamas, which began by providing municipal functions in Gaza before taking a lead in Palestinian resistance. Hamas is today sometimes discussed as though it were some sort of outside growth, rather than a not terribly democratic elected representative administration of the population. It is quite true that Hamas has been greatly influenced by Iran (as has Hezbollah in Lebanon) but it also has been an organic part of Gaza.

It is not likely that Hamas will disappear by Israeli extermination and its replacement by the Palestinian Authority. Nor will the world allow a Trump holiday resort, or settler movement into Gaza’s space. It might once have happened by stealth, but things must now happen in the sunlight.

Is Netanyahu prolonging the war and the killing spree to delay his criminal trial for corruption?

The government of Israel, like the government of Gaza, is an active body politic, with widely different views. But its character has changed over the years as the population came to be dominated by former Eastern Europeans, many religiously strict and fundamentalist. Right-wing offshoots are increasingly pushing for ethnic cleansing. The prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, faces corruption charges once his “war” is over; many of his Israeli critics allege that he is prolonging the war to stay in power.

For most citizens of the West, Israel was once identified as an outpost Western-style democracy surrounded by authoritarian and obscurantist Muslims of an essentially hostile and anti-enlightenment tradition. Its easy military victories against neighbours in 1956, 1967 and 1973, when the Soviet Union was supplying the other side, made it seem a natural object of sympathy, managing brilliantly against bullies. But Western opinion has cooled on Israel, not only because of its dragging the chain on Palestinian rights and statehood, but because the Israeli state itself has become very right-wing, and intolerant of criticism of its ill-treatment of Palestinians. It has also lost a good deal of latitude given it by substantial lobbies in many Western democracies. All Jews have a legal right to reside in Israel, although Palestinians who fled in 1948 are not allowed to return. By now, however, most of the Jewish people who live abroad, such as in the US, France or Australia, have no plans to emigrate to Israel, and do not necessarily support modern Israeli right-wing governments. A considerable number are not Zionist – in the sense of seeing Jewish people as having an historic right to be restored to an occupation of up to 2000 years ago.

Israel made serious mistakes in handling the events of 7 October. There was global outrage at the massacre of innocent women and children. Even national leaders in countries which had traditionally looked to the Arab side of Middle Eastern conflicts condemned the murders and were slow to link them to a continuum of Palestinian resistance to Israel’s occupation. Netanyahu declared war on Hamas, and Western politicians, including Australian ones, spoke of an Israeli “right of self-defence”. It soon became clear that Netanyahu’s words were more than rhetorical: bombs began falling on the inhabitants of Gaza. At first there were claims of precisely targeted missiles, and bullets, firing at known Hamas centres, with civilians “unfortunately” paying the price of allowing alien and wicked Hamas soldiers operating in their midst. In time, as casualties began to mount, it has come to seem as if Palestinian civilians are living in a deliberately constructed free-fire zone.

What Israel is doing may have the support of a substantial number of Israelis who were shocked and horrified by the 7 October massacre. So also, among the Jewish diaspora. But soon there was substantial unease at the ruthlessness and disproportion of the retaliation, and at suggestions that the war had become a cover for ethnic cleansing. Around the Western world, as much as in areas traditionally much more friendly to Palestinian aspirations, protests and demonstrations began, sometimes, in the west, including in NSW, put down harshly by police and civil authorities.

What was surprising was the amount of open Jewish dissent, both in Israel itself and in Western countries. Any former reflex of holding back because of a Jewish sense of siege, or fury at comparison of the scale of killing with the Holocaust, seems to have given way to a sense that Israel has abandoned civilised restraint, is committing war crimes, and exceeding any moral or legal rights that might have been there because of an unprovoked attack. That sense has increased with Israeli restrictions on the supply of food and essential health items to Gaza and by sophistry blaming Hamas, the UN, or the victims themselves for the death toll. That the Western media is not permitted inside Gaza aggravates the suspicion and sense that the truth is being hidden.

Israel has lost the support of many Jews, many old sympathisers, old allies and most Western nations

If Israel thought it could harness outrage to quietly push the inhabitants of Gaza, and perhaps later of the West Bank out of the country, it could hardly have created an environment more likely to make such a task impossible – even in the face of some of its more rabid and unapologetic ministers. Israel has embarrassed its population, many Jewish people and their friends in the outside world and made the life of politicians who have usually been excessively effusive miserable. Even Donald Trump, hitherto an uncritical friend of all of Israel’s excesses, has signalled his disgust with official denials of starvation and blaming of the victims. Many of the ordinary public have become angry at the lack of progress, correctly discerning that the problem has been Israeli intransigence. Responding to the public reaction, old allies have become more measured in any statements supporting Israel and much more inclined to acknowledge the roots of Palestinian grievance. By now, Israel, which had friends and sympathisers aplenty 22 months ago, is significantly more unpopular around the world. Westerners tend to estimate this by Western opinion polls. Most of the non-industrial world has long been hostile to Israel, if perhaps now even more unpopular.

Now it is manifesting itself in a renewed movement to recognise the right of Palestinians to become a nation within the bounds of the old Palestine – including in control of lands taken from them in war. Some national leaders, including Anthony Albanese, have dragged their feet on this, while others such as France, Canada and now Britain have adopted the cause with less reservation. Albanese insists that Australia will make its own sovereign decision on its own timetable, rather than falling into line with an artificial deadline caused by a forthcoming UN meeting. Although Albanese, like Penny Wong from Labor’s notional left, has traditionally leaned towards Palestine, he has been playing the game very slowly and cautiously, anxious not to upset opinion among Australian Jews, the Murdoch press (which has become hysterically pro-Israel,) and, probably, Donald Trump. Yet the outcome seems inevitable. Israel will have to face a fresh challenge to its policies, in the face of determination by some former allies that it will not be able to delay, debate and dither yet again.

Palestinians will have direct agency in the outcome. And Palestinian rights will not be brokered by Arab nations with their own agendas, but by people with direct and bloody experience of the forces with which they are reckoning. It won’t be a gathering of friends.

Republished from The Canberra Times. July 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.