May 9th, 2024 - 19th Report: Tipping Point?

 

May 9th, 2024

Dear family and friends,

Report number 19: tipping point?

 

This may be my final installment in this series of reports from Israel during our war with Hamas. I’ve reached a point where I no longer wish to defend Israel to non-Israelis, in English, and need to turn to explaining ourselves to my fellow Israelis, in Hebrew. That’s the point we’ve reached.

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Reuma Kedem is a popular clothes designer, I’m told. She’s also a bereaved mother. Her daughter, son in law, and three grandchildren were all murdered on October 7^th. (You hope they were all murdered in a single hail-fire of bullets, but it was probably worse than that). Today there’s a two-minute film ricocheting around our WhatsApp lists in which she’s sitting on the ground next to Einav Tsangauker, surrounded by other family members of hostages, damning us for our passivity. Tsangauker, a life-long Likud voter, has since the abduction of her son Matan become one of our government’s harshest critics, but I haven’t heard even her be so jarring. Kedem cried, literally, about her loss and her anguish and despair, but then turned to us: “Why isn’t EVERYONE here? Don’t you all see what’s happening? How can you stay in the comfort of your homes, sitting in front of your televisions, while our hostages are being abandoned by their country? Why are you being silent?”

I have no good answer. She’s right. I personally have been on the streets all along, and this week I’ve been out with the families almost every evening, but that’s irrelevant. Israeli society knows how to pour onto the streets in its hundreds of thousands and stay there until its government backs down, as I described earlier in this series. If we did it then – not long ago – and we’re not doing it now, well, that’s a decision. That’s the taking of an action.

A small section of Israelis have always assumed that freeing the hostages and beating Hamas are two contradictory goals. If you were in that small camp you also doubted from the beginning that destroying Hamas was a reasonable goal at all. I’ve just gone back and re-read what I’ve been writing here since October 9^th, and I’m embarrassed to say that in real time even I wasn’t clear enough on that. I think I never believed in the ability of our military, or any military, to uproot Hamas’ power and remove it from the scene, but in those early reports even I preferred to write about how justified our war against them was. And it indeed was. Hamas deserved and still deserves to be destroyed. But in the sad real world in which we live, the only realistic goal would have been to hit Hamas hard, and then begin building a credible alternative. In December at the very latest, we should have ended the war and negotiated the return of the hostages.

Instead, we’re in the eighth month of war, there’s no achievable military victory in sight, many or most of the hostages are dead, and the reason there’s no agreement to free them is that Hamas says, as it’s been saying for months, that they won’t free them until after the war. Not to mention – though it must be mentioned – that we’re about to kill many thousands of additional civilians and children in Rafa, that we’re in the worst clash ever with the American government and other allies, that the International Criminal Court is probably preparing to call for the arrest of our leadership for war crimes, and the International Court of Justice just happens to be deliberating whether Israel is committing genocide.

(There’s also the matter of thousands of university students acting out on campuses across the US. This is not my issue to interpret, though seen from afar it looks like a poisonous stew of historical ignorance, ideological foolishness, childishness by people who in other lands would be regarded as adults, and a degree of good old antisemitism intertwined in disgust at our brutality in Gaza. With the exception of that final item, the rest are not really Israel’s issue to deal with. Also, what’s the story of teenagers wearing covid masks in the open air in 2024? That simply seems like supreme silliness).

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I have been a patriotic critic of Israeli actions for decades. Now, for the first time ever, I have lost the will to defend us, even while insisting it’s still us, not some undefined them.

For the past few weeks, the public opinion polls have shown a majority of Israelis prefer freeing the hostages to conquering Rafa; indeed, something like 54-56% think it’s time to end the war if that’s the price. Only some 20-30% still actively support the war. That’s a very far cry from the nigh-total demand for the destruction of Hamas at almost any price to the Gazans, which was the national position in October and November. The government, however, is made up of Jewish supremacists and messianic settlers who believe in violence, and a significant block who fear any step towards recognition of Palestinian national rights will spell Israel’s end. For those voters, Netanyahu remains the Defender of Israel who alone is capable of preventing the calamity. If that means sacrifying the poor hostages, so as to carry on with the killing, so be it.

I have no expectations from those sections of us. But I do expect more from all the rest. So far, my expectations are being dashed. Perhaps the clarity of the situation – war and international opprobrium vs freeing the hostages – will focus our communal mind. Right now it doesn’t look so.

For a few years now I’ve been sitting on a pile of information about our history that most Israelis don’t know much about, mostly for not caring to know. The information is to be found in thousands of archival files which the archivists only recently opened, when the team I was part of insisted. I need to sit down and write what’s in there, and it needs to be in Hebrew. If the millions pour into the streets to force the hand of our government, or to rid us of it, I may return to report. Or not.

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I appreciate your having read what I’ve been writing here; the forwarding on to others; and the many thoughtful responses you’ve been sending me. My gratitude also to Hinrich in Hamburg who has been translating these reports into German. I’ve now put all of the reports on a website, titled Yaacov Lozowick’s Gaza War Journal. If I eventually write any additional dispatches, I’ll add them there, also.

Yaacov