Israel is choosing to inflict misery on Gaza

Contributing Columnist
Jay Michaelson
May 9, 2025

When Israel’s military operations in Gaza began in October, 2023, I defended them — several times, in fact, in this newspaper. But now, 19 months later, I am horrified, filled with rage and despair, and alienated from many of my friends who now openly support extreme cruelty and even ethnic cleansing. The Netanyahu regime has made me, and liberal Zionists like me, look like the worst thing any Israeli can call another: a freier. A sucker. A fool.

In my anecdotal experience, most American Jews are no longer following the Gaza War. There are threats closer to home, and anyway we have long since sorted ourselves into competing camps: supporting Israel and focusing endlessly on the two dozen remaining hostages held by Hamas terrorists; opposing Israel in stark, often anti-Zionist, terms; and, well, the rest of us, who surveys say remain the numerical majority in American Judaism but who have long since given up talking about the entire horrific catastrophe.

We truly are the silent majority — some of us out of despair and hopelessness, others of us silenced by the McCarthyist policies of the Trump regime and its pseudo-journalistic enablers, who punish anyone who criticizes Israeli policies, including rabbis, Zionists and Israelis.

We vary in our degrees of opposition to Netanyahu and the war. Some of us would align with the Likud on security matters, but are outraged at how the Israeli Prime Minister has ousted rational security hawks, kowtowed to the far right ministers who keep him in power, and rejected ceasefire deals that would end the war. (Yes, Hamas has rejected deals too.) Others of us still cling to the dream of a two-state solution, since no matter how far-off it seems, coexistence remains the only viable option for survival. And still others are more fiercely critical of Israeli policies, but remain committed to the idea of a Jewish state, albeit one radically different from Israel of 2025.

I’ve also seen many of “us” leave the Zionist camp entirely, following figures like Peter Beinart or Avraham Burg in an exodus from Jewish nationalism. I can’t blame them;  Zionism in theory may be defensible, but look what Zionism in practice has wrought.

What has it wrought lately? A two-month suspension of humanitarian aid, which has, in the words of an Israeli-American memo, caused Gazans to “endur[e] extreme deprivation,” and now an announcement that when aid resumes, it will serve only 1.2 million of Gaza’s 2 million people. The other 800,000 are literally just supposed to starve.

This is obviously not some unfortunate side-effect of Israeli military strategy. It is Israeli military strategy: to starve the population, to reoccupy much of the Gaza strip and level much of the rest of it, to force a million innocent human beings to leave or die.

None of these policies are justified by the moral and strategic imperative to rescue the remaining hostages. On the contrary, as numerous Israeli hostage-families have said, they prolong their captivity, as well as inflict misery on hundreds of thousands of innocent people.

Yes, innocent. Israeli bombs do not distinguish between Hamas supporters and the thousands of Palestinians in Gaza who have turned out to protest Hamas. And the use of mass starvation as a military tactic?

This is beyond inhuman. It is genocide.

On Oct. 20, 2023, I pushed back against the use of this term to describe Israeli actions at the time. ‘Genocide’ is a legal term, after all, and it has a specific meaning, set forth in the 1948 Genocide Convention. Looking back, I still believe I was correct then — and am still struck by how quickly some of Israel’s critics leapt to the most incendiary and extreme characterization of its military operations in the wake of Hamas’s brutal massacres, rapes, and invasion of Israel. Those broken bonds may never be repaired.

But May 2025 is not October 2023.

The crucial element of the Genocide Convention is that the acts that constitute genocide must be “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Was this true in October, 2023? I still see no evidence that that was the case. Israel may or may not have responded with disproportionate force; that debate will likely never be resolved. But there were warnings of bombing attacks, there were systems in place for humanitarian aid, and there was an obvious, and I would say compelling, military objective.

This was even true in the Spring of 2024, as the devastation increased but the strategic goals and humanitarian assistance remained. The International Court of Justice was correct that there was “plausible” evidence that the Genocide Convention had been violated, but not yet compelling evidence.

But today?

Israel’s current actions are, to cite the Convention, “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Unlike in 2023, there are now ample statements by Israeli ministers, military leaders, and former military leaders, that the strategic aim of the continued destruction of Gaza is, simply, to destroy Gaza and force much of its population to leave. This is ethnic cleansing, and this is genocide – an act committed to destroy, in part, a national group.

Nineteen months in, we’re long past Israel’s legitimate security needs; this is now a war of choice, not a war of necessity. Not only that, but it is a choice to eradicate or extirpate the population of Gaza, to exact revenge, to ‘solve this problem once and for all.’ I have heard this from politicians, military leaders, and even some acquaintances of mine. Israelis are sick of the Palestinians. It’s time for them to go.

But that sentiment is genocidal. That’s what the law means by the term ‘genocide.’ And that’s why it’s a crime under international law.

Now I wonder: Was this true all along? Were my anti-Zionist friends right from the start? Was I willfully deluding myself? I don’t know anymore, and maybe that’s a good thing. Because everyone who seems sure of themselves is wrong. Many morally certain pro-Palestine activists were and are wrong about Zionism, about Israel, and often about Jews. Many morally certain pro-Israel voices were and are wrong about Palestinians, about antisemitism, and often about Jewish values. My despairing un-knowledge may be a cop-out, or it may be wisdom. I don’t know about that either.

I haven’t fundamentally changed my beliefs, hopes, and dreams about a just future for Israel and Palestine. But the Israeli government’s strategies and tactics have changed. Hundreds of thousands of people are starving in Gaza because of the avoidable, unnecessary, and genocidal actions of the Jewish state. What a terrible, morally repugnant tragedy.

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