The divides within Israel over the war in Gaza

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest serving prime minister and by far the dominant force in its politics, has not budged from what he believes is the essential truth about the war in Gaza.

He has given Israel – and the outside world – a consistent message since Hamas attacked Israel almost two years ago. He stated it clearly when he ordered the first big ground offensive of the war into the Gaza Strip on 28 October 2023, three weeks after the attacks, and since then he has repeated the themes many times.

“We will fight to defend our homeland. We will fight and not retreat. We will fight on land, at sea and in the air. We will destroy the enemy above ground and below ground. We will fight and we will win.

“This will be a victory of good over evil, of light over darkness, of life over death. In this war we will stand steadfast, more united than ever, certain in the justice of our cause.”

His speech adopted the cadences of Winston Churchill’s rallying call in June 1940 of “we shall fight on the beaches,” after Britain’s defeat by Germany in northern France and the evacuation of more than 338,000 allied soldiers from Dunkirk.

Before Churchill told the British in his celebrated peroration that “we shall never surrender,” he had not spared them from the truth that they had suffered a “colossal military disaster”.

Hamas inflicted Israel’s worst defeat in a single day on 7 October, and the horror that it could break open the borders, and kill and take so many hostages, is still very real in Israel. It is a big factor shaping attitudes to the war, the way it is being fought, and how it might end.

Very few Israelis have ever doubted that their cause is just, but Netanyahu’s statement that they would be “more united than ever” could not have been further from the condition of Israel almost two years later.

Israel is as divided now as at any time in its history, and Netanyahu, a deeply divisive figure when Hamas attacked, is presiding over fault lines in Israel that have opened into chasms.

On the edge of the anti-Netanyahu demonstration in Tel Aviv, several hundred Israelis stood silently, each holding a placard with the name of a Palestinian child killed by Israel in Gaza.

Many of the signs had a photograph of a smiling girl or boy, next to the day they were born and the day they were killed. Children who did not have a photo were represented by a drawing of a flower.

The silent demonstrations to stop the killing are getting bigger – some are held outside airbases, where they try to catch the eye of pilots arriving for bombing raids into Gaza – but the demonstrators still hold a minority view.

Timina Peretz, one of the organisers, says they started after Israel broke the last ceasefire with Hamas on 18 March and went back to war.

“We realised how many children died just in the same week. I refuse to stay silent while it’s happening, a genocide and starvation of people…

“On the street, we’re getting a lot of good reactions, like people saying, ‘thank you’. And we have many people cursing us and [getting] really offended and upset from these images.”

I asked if they get called traitors. “Of course, they do a lot of them, they say that if we think the way we think, or we act the way we act, we should just go… to live in Gaza.

“They can’t understand how the basic idea of criticising the state is something that is rooted in democracy.”

Opinion polls taken since the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) went back to war in Gaza in March, breaking the last ceasefire, suggest that a large majority of Jewish Israelis are not troubled by Palestinian suffering in Gaza.

A sample recorded in the last three days of July by the Israeli Democracy Institute says that 78% of Jewish Israelis, who make up four-fifths of the population, believe that given the restrictions of the fighting, Israel “is making substantial efforts to avoid causing unnecessary suffering to Palestinians in Gaza”.

The pollsters also chose a more personal question, asking whether individuals were “troubled or not troubled by the reports of famine and suffering among the Palestinian population in Gaza?”

Some 79% of Jewish Israelis surveyed said they were not troubled. Meanwhile 86% of those in Israel’s Palestinian Arab minority who were asked the same question said they were very or somewhat troubled.

Netanyahu, his ministers and spokespeople insist that Hamas, the United Nations, witnesses, aid workers and foreign governments are telling lies about the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

In a news conference conducted in English for the international media on 10 August, Netanyahu condemned reports of starvation in Gaza. He wanted “to puncture the lies… the only ones that are being starved in Gaza are our hostages”.

He has, for many years, equated criticism of Israel with antisemitism. Accounts of hunger, and IDF soldiers killing Palestinians struggling to find food that have been believed and condemned by Israel’s allies, including Britain, France and Germany, should he said be viewed in the context of the long history of the persecution of Jews in Europe.

“We were said to be spreading vermin to Christian society, we were said to be poisoning the wells, we were said to slaughter Christian children for their blood.

“And as these lies spread around the globe, they were followed by horrific, horrific massacres, pogroms, displacements, finally culminating the worst massacre of them all – the Holocaust.

“Today the Jewish state is being maligned in a similar way.”

Ms Peretz blames the Israeli media for not showing the suffering and deaths of Palestinians.

That subject went closer to the heart of the national conversation when it was raised on a popular Saturday evening television talk show hosted by Eyal Berkovic, the former West Ham United football player.

One of the regular guests was an Israeli journalist called Emmanuelle Elbaz-Phelps. They had been discussing, as they had previously, the suffering of the hostages and their families, and Israeli soldiers who had been killed fighting in Gaza.

Then, she told me, she felt it was her duty as a journalist to mention something that was not often spoken about on Israeli TV.

“I just [said] that the war is also killing a lot of Palestinians in Gaza, which is a very simple statement, no political point of view. There was no patience to listen to it.”

Voices were raised. Eyal Berkovic has made a name for himself as a TV host by not holding back.

Ms Elbaz-Phelps, who also works as a correspondent for French TV, recalled his response. “He said, I do not have to worry about the people in Gaza, they are my enemies. To which I responded, you can let me say that I worry about the horrific images coming out of there.

“And he said, for sure, you can finish your point. This is very representative of the Israeli public opinion.”

She defended the work of Israeli journalists. “I think 95% of what the world knows about Israel’s government and decisions is brought by the Israeli journalists,” she argues.

“But I think there is a huge difference when you talk about something and when you show something, and you will see images of Gaza from above that mainly are going to show the people how IDF is winning the war on the ground.

“You don’t have human stories, you don’t have faces… because Israelis are in pain, and the stories also are happening inside of Israel.”

Ms Elbaz-Phelps believes the reason is that Israelis are still dealing with their trauma, after 7 October.

“The word outside is covering Gaza and talking about the suffering of the population in Gaza. Which is right, but there is not, I think, acknowledgement of how much the Israeli people is living in a trauma.

“We are not in a post-traumatic area. We are in a trauma time. Hostages are dying inside the tunnels of Hamas. [People are] begging the government to find a way and make a hostage deal.

“Only when the hostages will come home, then maybe the healing can start. The pain of the Israeli public, how much they’re still on 7 October, is something that is not completely grasped outside of Israel.”

Around 20 Israeli hostages are still believed to be alive in Gaza. Israelis of all political persuasions were horrified by recent videos posted by their captors showing two badly emaciated young men in tunnels under Gaza.

Their fate is front and centre of the attitudes of most Israelis to the war.

I met the pollster Dahlia Scheindlin, who has often criticised Netanyahu’s conduct of the war in her column in the liberal daily newspaper Haaretz, in “hostage square” next to Israel’s military headquarters in Tel Aviv.

Since October 2023, this has been the centre of the hostage families’ campaign to get their people out of Gaza.

“The reason why the majority of Israelis consistently support ending the war is to get the hostages back,” she says.

Speaking about the lack of concern in Israel for the people in Gaza, she tells me: “It’s because a large portion of Israelis believe that the suffering has been exaggerated or even partly fabricated by Hamas.”

Israelis, she continues, are inclined to believe that the problem is the messaging. “Israelis have been obsessed with PR for a long time. They call it Hasbara.

“That inclination to blame criticism of Israel on poor public communications has gone into overdrive during the war, and [is] on steroids [in] relation to the accusations of starvation.

“The far-right wing calls it the campaign of fabrication. They think [even the way] the Israeli media is starting to cover it is amplifying Hamas’ narrative.

“But I think mainstream Israelis are sort of suppressing it because it’s too hard for them to cope with. This is the kind of thing you hear people say in private conversation.

“They are too consumed with the hostages or their own family members who are fighting in Gaza, and they just can’t handle the sense that Israel might be doing something wrong.”

Outside the secular Israeli mainstream of Tel Aviv and the cities on the Mediterranean coast, I have found few doubts about the justice of Israel’s conduct of the war.

Deep in the occupied West Bank, down a dirt road, is a Jewish settlement called Esh Kodesh, which is part of a complex of small settlements. Just a generation ago these were a collection of caravans on hilltops, but they are now well established.

Aaron Katzoff, a father of seven who is originally from Los Angeles, has created a winery and a bar called “Settlers,” which feels like a small piece of the American west. He labels his wine “liquid prophecy”.

It is a social centre, not just for his community but for an overwhelmingly right-wing and religiously-observant clientele who make special journeys there.

Many of the customers were armed when I visited. A soldier with a dusty uniform sat eating a burger and drinking red wine with his M-16 cradled on his lap. Others had left their assault weapons behind the bar. A woman had a 9mm pistol in a holster strapped on over her flowery dress. The young men at the corner table were, Aaron said, decompressing after a stint in Gaza.

Aaron still does reserve duty as an IDF officer and has fought in Gaza. He has no doubts about the justice of Israel’s actions.

“Come down to a tunnel in Gaza,” he told me. “See what it means not to have oxygen and in the humidity and heat try to fight terrorists that are hiding behind women and children and shoot at you…

“It’s very easy to sit in an air conditioning room and judge people who do that, war is not easy.”

What, I asked him, about ending the war now, as so many Israelis want.

“Sometimes you can’t always get there now… You want everything to be Wonderland… but the world’s not like that.

“Things take time, and it’s sad, but that’s reality.”

In the months leading up to 7 October 2023, thousands of Israelis had been demonstrating in the streets against plans to change the judicial system in what they saw as an assault on democracy.

“This has been an unpopular government since well before the war,” argues Ms Scheindlin.

“Once the war began, by contrast to most other countries where you see a rallying of support for the government, there was a complete collapse of support.”

Enough of Netanyahu’s political base on Israel’s right wing accepts his insistence that the war cannot end until total victory over Hamas, for him to have rebuilt his poll ratings from rock bottom. But he is still trailing opposition parties.

They have pointed to evidence that they say shows he is prolonging the war to stay in office. As a private citizen he would face a national inquiry into the security failures that gave Hamas its opening on 7 October 2023.

His long running trial on corruption charges serious enough to carry a potential prison sentence would also accelerate from its current glacial pace.

Ultranationalists in his coalition, the finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and the national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir have threatened to topple his government if he makes any kind of deal with Hamas.

They want not just the defeat of Hamas, but the annexation of Gaza, the removal of Palestinians and their replacement by Jewish settlers.

The families of the hostages, meanwhile, have appealed to Netanyahu to do a deal with Hamas before the men still being held die.

But the prime minister, doubling down on his theme of a fight until total victory, announced a new offensive that has appalled many hostage families and been condemned by many of Israel’s allies.

Netanyahu’s plans were also opposed by the current leadership of the IDF. Its chief of staff General Eyal Zamir made it known that he opposes the Netanyahu plan for a new offensive in Gaza, reportedly telling the cabinet that it would endanger the hostages and worsen the humanitarian crisis.

Zamir was appointed in March when his predecessor resigned after falling out with the prime minister over the conduct of the war.

Now the Israeli media is speculating that Netanyahu will force Zamir to resign. One report says Zamir is convinced he’s been “marked for dismissal” for challenging Netanyahu’s plan.

The war has also widened Israel’s most bitter division, between the secular population and the religious right. Shuttling between demonstrations by secular Israelis in Tel Aviv and their religious fellow citizens in Jerusalem can feel like commuting between two different countries.

War is always painful. But for some in Israel’s hardline religious nationalist right wing, it is also an opportunity, even a time of miracles that heralds the coming of the messiah.

Orit Strock, a minister from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, said last summer that the war had turned events in their direction. “From my point of view, this is like a miracle period,” she said.

Some see an opening granted by God to transform Israel into a state ruled by the Torah, the law of God as revealed to Moses and laid out in the five books of the Hebrew scriptures.

War also can speed up their desire to change the map. They believe God gave all the land between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan to the Jews.

No space can be allowed for the shrinking number of Palestinians who still believe it might be possible to make peace with Israel by creating an independent state in Gaza and the West Bank, with a capital in east Jerusalem.

Smotrich has said the Jewish state should be on both sides of the river Jordan, taking in Jordan and stretching up to Damascus, the Syrian capital.

Extending religious law is not government policy, nor is expanding Israel’s borders across the River Jordan. But blocking a Palestinian state is a cornerstone of the Netanyahu coalition.

And the coalition can only stay in government as long as Smotrich and Ben-Gvir agree to support it. That gives them a disproportionate influence over the prime minister.

On 6 May Smotrich laid out his vision for Gaza and the West Bank, which Palestinians want for a state. Most western governments, including the United Kingdom, see Palestinian statehood alongside Israel as the only way to escape a conflict that has lasted more than a century for control of the land Arabs and Jews both want.

Instead, Smotrich said that within six months Gaza’s population would be confined to a narrow piece of land. The rest of the territory would be “totally destroyed” and “empty”.

Palestinians in Gaza would be “totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places”.

In the occupied old city of Jerusalem on Sunday 3 August, many Palestinians shut shops and businesses and stayed off the streets as Israeli Jews marked Tisha B’Av.

It is a day of mourning for the destruction by the Babylonians of Jerusalem’s first Jewish Temple and of its second one by the Romans.

The area where the Temples stood later became the third holiest place for Muslims, now dominated by al-Aqsa mosque where Muslims believe the prophet Muhammad ended his night journey from Mecca, and the golden rotunda of the Dome of the Rock where he ascended to heaven.

To try to keep the peace in an area that is a religious and national symbol for Israelis and Palestinians, a set of laws and customs, known as the status quo, is supposed to be observed.

One rule bans Jewish prayer within al-Aqsa compound, known by Palestinians as the Noble Sanctuary. It has been flouted in recent years with the encouragement of Ben-Gvir.

On Tisha B’Av he went there himself to lead prayers, an action that in the fragile and tense holy city was seen by some as a provocative political move.

Dozens of his followers – and heavily armed police that he commands as national security minister – followed as he strode through the narrow street of the Old City, through the gates of the place Israelis call the Temple Mount.

As well as praying, he made a speech linking his presence and prayers in Jerusalem to the war in Gaza and the way he wants to change Israel.

The videos of the two starving Israeli hostages were, he said, an attempt to put the state of Israel under pressure, which had to be resisted.

“From Temple Mount – the place where we proved that sovereignty and governance can be done – from here of all places we should send a message and make sure that today itself we conquer the whole of Gaza Strip, announce sovereignty of the whole of Gaza Strip, take down every Hamas man and encourage voluntary emigration.

“Only this way will we return the hostages and win the war.”

After Ben-Gvir had left, a big crowd of his young religious supporters stayed on to pray in a long, covered arcade.

The sound of their prayers echoed off the vaulted stone roof. Two young women, Ateret and Tamar, sad about the religious commemoration but seemingly excited by the future, explained why they believed the Temple Mount was the heart of Judaism.

Ateret said the destruction of the Temples meant, “it’s like having a body, but your heart is not there.

“We just want to say that we want our hostages back. We want everybody to have peace. This is the heart of the whole world, not only our hearts. When God will be here the world will have peace.”

They explained they prayed every day for the construction of a third Temple on the site. “This is our house for thousands of years, and now we’re back here, we want our house.”

When I asked what would happen to the Muslim holy places that stand there now, they said they didn’t know.

Ateret and Tamar seemed to be gentle souls, suffused with religious fervour.

According to senior diplomatic sources, the nightmare for security services in both Israel and its Arab neighbours is that a violent Jewish extremist might try to damage al-Aqsa mosque to bring on the third temple, an act that would risk igniting the region.

On the other end of the political spectrum is Avrum Burg, a writer and strong critic of Netanyahu, who used to be one of Israel’s most prominent centre-left politicians. He was speaker of the Knesset, the parliament, from 1999 to 2003 and before that he chaired the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organisation, two venerable Zionist institutions.

Today, he is among those who do not see the war as a miraculous chance to transform the country.

Israelis, Mr Burg reflects, are “somewhere between religious excitement and psychological despair”.

There is no middle ground, he argues. “A few Israelis, a majority of government, believe that we’re living in a miraculous time. It’s an opportunity. It’s God given. It is a once in a lifetime opening in order to realign, reorganise, re-something with history.

“And so many Israelis feel and sense – what for? What does that mean? Why do I have to pay the price? It’s a meaningless war. In between, there is no Israel. Israel is a fragmented, broken, torn apart social fabric.”

That psychological despair – and anger – at Israel’s government can be found at the regular demonstrations calling for Netanyahu’s resignation.

At one, on a hot and humid night in Tel Aviv, secular opponents of the government waved the blue and white Star of David flag, chanted and banged drums until they stood silent for the national anthem.

After, they listened to speeches from retired veteran commanders of the army and the police demanding a ceasefire.

Backstage, Nava Rosalio, the organiser of many mass rallies against the Netanyahu government, spelled out their position.

“We wish to replace Netanyahu’s government, but specifically to bring back all hostages in a deal at once, ending Netanyahu’s war in Gaza, which at this point has become completely political and serving nothing but his own political survival, of Netanyahu and his partners.”

I suggested some might accuse her of repeating the Hamas position. (For more than a year Hamas negotiators have offered to return all the hostages if the IDF pulled out of Gaza and the US and others guaranteed that the Israel would not go back to war once it had its people back. Israel, however, insists that Hamas must be fully disarmed, play no future role in Gaza and that Israel would retain security control in Gaza with the freedom to decide what comes next.)

But Ms Rosalio dismissed the suggestion that a ceasefire deal could be any kind of a win for Hamas. “That’s for propaganda. We have a great army… which can stay outside of the Gaza Strip and just protect the border.

“There is no reason to stay either, unless they imagine or wish to conquer Gaza and to transfer the people of Gaza.

“We just don’t believe the excuse of we’re protecting you, the people of Israel. If you wish to protect us, you would have ended this war to allow the people of Israel to rehabilitate, for society to recover.

“We are torn from inside.”

In the last three weeks I have travelled between the two sides of Israel, from leftists in Tel Aviv silently protesting the killing of Palestinian children, displaying the “psychological despair” described by Avrum Burg, the former speaker of parliament.

But on the other side of Israel, I have witnessed an overwhelming sense that Israel should ignore the mounting pressure and condemnation by some of its allies as well as its enemies, a feeling that its actions are justified by everything Hamas did on 7 October and the continued imprisonment of Israeli hostages in brutal conditions in tunnels.

Israel’s prime minister, still backed in public by US President Donald Trump despite murmurings that he is becoming exasperated by Netanyahu’s refusal to make a hostage deal possible, is planning another offensive and accuses Israel’s allies of deep seated antisemitism.

Messianic religious Zionists who support him believe God is with them and granting miracles.

Deep in the West Bank, overlooking the Jordan Valley, Aaron Katzoff and his friends in the Settlers wine bar believe they are fulfilling the prophecies of the scriptures, as they drink wine from grapes he says proudly were grown using the methods of Biblical times.

His relaxed and happy customers believe the secular liberals protesting against Netanyahu in Tel Aviv are yesterday’s Israelis. Now, the future of their state is in their hands, and in God’s – and they are confident it will all end well.

Lead image: AFP via Getty Images

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