20th Report - May 2nd, 2025: A Year Later

Report number twenty: A year later

It’s been a year since I last wrote, and things have largely gotten worse. Not everything, mind you. Iran’s Ring of Fire around us is mostly gone, and that’s good. Yet if our internal strife doesn’t get resolved somehow, I’m no longer convinced our long-term existence is assured.

The other day Ronen Bar, the chief of the Shabak, sort of Israel’s counterpart to the FBI, submitted a sworn affidavit to the supreme court explaining why Netanyahu’s attempt to fire him should be blocked, even as Bar admits that he must soon resign because of his failure to warn and protect us on October 7^th. The affidavit may be the most troubling document ever produced by an Israeli official – and I’ve seen tens of thousands of official records. Bar describes how Netanyahu has been trying to subvert Israeli democracy; and use the secret police to harm his political opponents and also to short-circuit his own criminal trial; and hamper freedom of the press; and obstruct investigations into criminal activities in Netanyahu’s own circle; and inflame public discourse by fanning conspiracy theories about the origins of the war – and also, he’s has been lying to the public about the negotiations to free the Hamas-held hostages. Or to not free them, Bar implied. We read it with a growing sense of resigned horror, understanding that the reality is worse than our suppositions. Meanwhile, millions of other Israelis brushed the whole thing aside, seeing it as yet another attempt by the weaklings to harm their leader, or block the chance to finally solve the Palestinian question.

Anyway. I’m writing this in English, and Hinrich in Hamburg assures me he’ll translate it to German, like the previous installments. So let’s focus on the parts of the story more likely to interest non-Israeli readers.

The other day one of our news channels broadcast an hour-long documentary about the war. Its premise was that there must be an independent commission of inquiry, but Netanyahu will never allow it, so we’ve spent six months researching and interviewing relevant folks (all of them men), and here’s our tentative draft of what might be uncovered by such a commission. For me the main finding was that no-one’s telling the truth, and until a full-fledged independent commission sees all the classified materials and gives us its findings, we’re damned to be mired in political spin. Each of us will choose which narrative we’d like to be true, and insist it is. So take my description with a cup of salt. My position at the moment is to the Left of 90% of Israeli Jews.

Much of what I’ve got to say is critical of my country, so let’s balance the criticism. I once read that patriots love their country, while chauvinists hate another country. I was reminded of this yesterday while listening to the story of Nimrod Eliraz, a young lieutenant who was one of the few survivors of the doomed battle at Nir Oz on October 7^th. By mid-morning he and three comrades knew their commanders were all dead, and there were only four of them still fighting in their section of the base. A settler from Kiryat Arba, a soldier from banal middle-of-the-road Nes Ziona, a Bedouin scout, and himself, a farmer. They decided to die protecting the unarmed young women spotters huddling in the command post. Nimrod recorded a message for his family, another for his girlfriend, then threw away his phone so it wouldn’t threaten his determination. The other three were killed, while he spent months in the hospital, eventually returning to his unit wracked by survivor’s guilt. A nation that creates thousands of such heroes, and hundreds of thousands eager to stand with them, must have something extraordinary about it. So, there’s clarity.

Another bit of necessary clarity is about Hamas. Hamas is a terror organization of genocidal fanatics who believe God wants them to kill the Jews. They’re fine with tens of thousands of dead Palestinians and eternal war, if that’s what destroying Israel takes. The Palestinians have real reasons to hate Israel, but none of them justify Hamas, its ideology or its cruelty and bloodlust. The long-term outcome of the war must include its disappearance.

The thing is, there’s only one entity who can truly rid us of Hamas, and that’s the Palestinians. There’s no military force, not even Israel, who can extirpate the Hamas beliefs from the Palestinian polity, nor prevent it returning to power, other than the Palestinians themselves. Given Hamas’ murderousness against Palestinian rivals on the one hand, and Israel’s determination not to reach any peaceful accommodation with the Palestinians on the other hand, Hamas’ rule, at least in Gaza, seems secure. Israel killing more than 50,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, has done nothing to dislodge Hamas control over the population of Gaza.

This fundamental understanding seems to have been the guiding principle of the Biden administration’s hapless efforts. Support Israel in its determination to degrade the military capacities of Hamas after October 7^th, then turn to a regional and international effort to build something better, founded on an agreement to slowly and carefully move towards Palestinian statehood. The Saudis were willing to bless and support such a process, and with them most of the Sunni Arab world.

Nothing was further from the mind of Israeli society on October 8^th, nor from the agenda of this government, ever.

Cool heads, had there been any in Israel, should have stopped to think. Even in the evening of October 7^th, as the military situation slowly came into focus. (That it took 8-10 hours before our military and political leaders understood what was going on, is one of the many colossal failures of that day). Leaders aren’t paid to be led by braying mobs. The fact most Israelis were braying for harsh retribution and vengeance, was all too human. Everywhere people were calling for the eradication of Gaza, a call formulated in the chilling slogan “There are no innocents in Gaza”.  There was some public pushback, even on October 8^th, and that’s important for our moral future, but no-one in the government stood up and explained that legitimate military targets need to be destroyed, but not the populace of Gaza. On the contrary. Some months later the prosecutor at the International Criminal Court (ICJ) prepared an indictment of Israel’s war, and he had no problem finding Cabinet ministers who’d called for what are crimes against humanity. Also, no rebuttals from the top: Prime Minster Netanyahu or the Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, say.

The initial actions of the military weren’t reassuring. The Military spokesman was on prime-time television every evening, and the chief of staff was on camera almost every day. They (unlike the government) insisted the IDF operates according to the internationally defined laws of war. By October 8^th these claims were not convincing.

The IDF didn’t have war plans for a full-scale invasion of Gaza. It’s said that years ago a draft plan was presented to Netanyahu, who scoffed, said it was a 20^th-century idea, and it was never developed. There were many legitimate military targets in Gaza that night, and an urgent need to hit them: The entire command and control system of Hamas. Its fighters. Its rocket launchers. Its military industry, which was busy demonstrating how efficient it had become in producing rockets. All of them embedded in the civilian population.  That’s the reason the leadership – political and military – needed to take a deep breath and figure out what to do, and what – not. Instead, the airforce launched a bombing campaign that killed thousands, most of them not legitimate military targets. For lack of detailed military intelligence about Hamas – which the IDF clearly didn’t have – we deployed a combination of snazzy new Artificial Intelligence systems, and integrated them into the decision process of choosing targets. Software was participating in killing people.

The basic distinction about collateral damage – killing civilians – in the laws of war is proportionality. Not the relation between casualties each side inflicts on the other, but the degree to which the harm being inflicted is necessary in order to achieve a legitimate military goal. We had a whole raft of legitimate goals, but were our means justified? Were we achieving the goals? Were there alternative methods? I had serious doubts about our actions, but in the Israel of those dark days, that was a lonely position.

It took us three weeks before launching ground forces. Launching the bombing campaign had been immediate, but clearly our leaders had taken their time here. The invasion – we never ever called it an invasion – was initially surprisingly successful. We were taking painful casualties, but fewer than expected. The first bombing campaign largely ended, to be replaced by air support for the troops on the ground and a decline in civilian deaths. Most of the fighting was taking place in areas most of the civilians had left, so they weren’t there to be killed. I heard stories from returning reservists about their new technologies – drones, communications and so on – which really were enabling us to kill people who needed to be killed, in surprisingly precise ways and with limited casualties to our troops. Hamas was still shooting rockets at our civilians, but fewer.

In late November President Biden twisted some arms and we had a temporary ceasefire. About one hundred hostages were freed, in return for some three hundred low-level Palestinians we were holding. Our politicians, Hamas, and everyone else each had their own spin on the story: was it our military pressure that broke Hamas? Their own discomfort in the eyes of the Muslim world at holding grandmothers, mothers and small children? Some other version? I have no idea. I do know that the far-right parties in the government objected to the hostage deal because they were against any form of ceasefire, and any freeing of Palestinian prisoners. Bin Gvir’s faction voted against the deal, while Smotrich’s reluctantly agreed, on the condition that the official Cabinet Decision would ensure no exchanges beyond the 10^th day. In the event, on the 9^th day Hamas claimed it no longer had 10 mothers or children, and instead offered the bodies of Shiri Bibas and her two murdered sons, along with seven living elderly men. This wasn’t enough for us, so we resumed the fighting. So far as we know (our government isn’t good at imparting information), most of the seven elderly men, or perhaps all, eventually died. Additional living women who might have been freed on the 10th day later died in captivity (some), or spent another 14 months there and will suffer the consequences forever.

The next months were confusing. Everyone: IDF, government, Americans, Egyptians, Qataris and anyone who knew what was going on, purposefully tailored their messaging to achieve whatever their goals were. Lacking the documentation – which won’t be open for decades – I assume none of them were telling the full truth.

What we do know is that the fighting was slowing. Hamas was hardly firing rockets. Food was entering Gaza only to the degree America forced us. We were still killing civilians, at a slower rate. What were our goals, and were they achievable? I couldn’t say. This was the period when Netanyahu peddled his slogan about “Total Victory”, without ever defining it, and we couldn’t reach it anyway. More and more families of hostages decided that trusting the government to bring them home was a fool’s errand, since the government had no such intention. Reservists in this period assured me their efforts were worth it, because “every day we destroy additional tunnels”. In early 2025 the IDF would admit it doesn’t know how many tunnels are still there, but probably it’s about 75%. So their commanders and our leaders had been lying to us on that, also.

There were lots of reports outside Israel about the suffering in Gaza. Israeli society resolutely looked the other way, while the government damned the antisemites for supporting Hamas and bad-mouthing us. Its supporters also damned the Americans for being softies and preventing us from “finishing the job” through more bombing and less food. Yet eventually even our own media began showing the vast scope of destruction. We claimed, perhaps correctly, that the extent of Hamas embedding itself, with anti-tank missiles in children’s bedrooms and tunnels under most homes, had been the reason for this destruction. Yet as time went by, this became less relevant. We could have gone in and destroyed, then retreated and allowed some non-Israeli coalition to move in and rebuild. No?

No. Because the longer the war went on, the clearer it was that our government didn’t want it to end. Not yet, perhaps not ever. There were two main reasons for this. Netanyahu’s reason, and the far-right’s reasons.

Netanyahu took a tremendous political blow at the beginning of the war. For a while he was a political dead man walking. Even parts of his own Likud party were turning against him. But then he began turning the tide. Though evil, he is by far the canniest political operator we’ve ever had. By the time he was able to portray himself as having personally destroyed Iran’s Ring of Fire, he had won back the entire hard-core base of his supporters and beyond. But there’s a catch. Two thirds of Israelis think after the war should be a time of reckoning. Part of that will be the creation of an independent commission of inquiry. Netanyahu has never allowed any commission to investigate anything about him, and this time the danger is clear as day. Ergo, the war can’t end.

The right-wing of his coalition – Ben Gvir’s racists, Smotrich’s messianic settlers, and swathes of his own Likud party who are both racist and settlers, see historical opportunity. As Orit Struck, Smotrich’s right-hand woman and the minister of settlements said a few months into the war: “We’re living in an era of miracles”, because we have the chance to clear the population out of Gaza and to build Israeli settlements instead. This sentiment is shared by a quarter of Israelis, many of whom are orthodox Jews whose reading of the Bible teaches them the worst possible lessons. We’re in the latest iteration of the eternal war between good and evil. God commanded the total destruction of Amalek; the Nazis were Amalek; and Hamas and all their followers and the children of their followers are all Nazis. So when we kill tens of thousands of civilians in Gaza we’re following a divine plan, and the deaths don’t diminish our position of Good battling Evil.

This thinking reached a climatic frenzy on February 4^th 2025 when President Trump launched his idea of clearing out Gaza and developing a riviera. It fits right into an ancient eschatological strand of Jewish thought that believes that God sometimes uses non-Jewish leaders to achieve his Israel-related goals.  Ever since, Netanyahu and allies say we can’t end the war until we’ve “fulfilled the program of President Trump”, even though Trump himself seems to have dropped the idea.

The determination to continue the war until the Palestinians are gone is most obvious in the matter of freeing the hostages. There was always tension between the demand to free them and the determination to fight until the other side’s end. A recording was recently published of some colonel talking to his troops late on October 7^th: “We’ve got to regard the hundred or so kidnapped Israeli hostages as if they’re already dead”, he said. To us they’re dead, and soon they’ll truly be dead, he seemed to be saying, and their fates can’t inform our next steps. Too bad, but that’s the way it needs to be.

It turned out there were 251 hostages, not 100, but you get the idea. After we ended the exchanges in December 2023, Hamas raised their demands. The remaining hostages would be freed in return for an end to the war, Israel’s retreat to the border, and lots of high-profile Palestinians, including mass murders from the 2^nd Intifada would need to be freed. Our government has been consistently clear: these are unacceptable terms. We’ll never agree to them, even if the hostages rot in tunnels under Gaza, and their bodies are never brought to burial. Of course, until recently Netanyahu was never quite explicit, master of weasel-words as he is. Ben Gvir and Smotrich have been saying this all along; but on May 1^st, Independence Day 2025, Netanyahu finally said it clearly. It’s been his policy all along. He can’t afford an end to the war, he can’t gamble on his coalition partners bringing down his government, and after all, in wars folks die, and it’s regrettable and all that, but that’s life.

Between December 2023 and January 2025 there was a long slog of war, on-and-off blockading of Gaza, bad-faith negotiations about the hostages, lots of death and destruction, but no real campaign to achieve anything. We’d drop leaflets ordering people in a designated area to move. They’d pack their meagre belongings and move a few miles; the local Hamas fighters among them. Then we’d attack, destroy more buildings and some tunnels, killing locals who hadn’t moved, Hamas or others. Some IDF troops would also die. As far as we can tell, some locally-held hostages also die, at the hands of their captors, from our bombs, or succumbing to starvation. Then we leave, because unlike the far-right, even Netanyahu doesn’t want to rule most of Gaza. We’d turn our military attention elsewhere, and the displaced populace would wearily trudge back along with the Hamas fighters. There are areas in Gaza we’ve already conquered four or five times. Two million Gazans are living in hell with no expectation of improvement, and Hamas recruitment is booming. Even our military admits the number of Hamas fighters in 2025 is similar to what it was in 2023. Occasionally – rarely – the Gazan populace somewhere demonstrates against Hamas for a day or two; the local Hamas murderers shoot some of the demonstrators, and everything goes back to “normal”.

This ghastly state of affairs has been accompanied by a slow, halting and still-partial awakening of a slowly-growing segment of Israeli society. The public vanguard were the families of hostages, some of whom had been vocal all along, others who had come to realize their patient silence was merely enabling the government not to negotiate in good faith. As time dragged on they began to demand their family member return even at the cost of ending the war; eventually they reformulated that to damn the government for intentionally prolonging the war. Parallel to the changing stance of the hostage family members there was a growing awareness in the general public that the war wasn’t what we’d been promised. At first this was muted, then less so. Killing tens of thousands of Gazans in October 2023 was acceptable to most Israelis; killing thousands in 2024 when the military goals were undefined and unrealistic, less so. The military backbone of Hamas had been broken, it’s basic existence couldn’t be, so perhaps it was time to move to some form of diplomatic resolution and free the hostages, no?

As greater numbers of reservists trickled home, there were ever more stories about irregularities. A brigadier-general had ordered his troops to demolish an entire university compound with no authorization. Another Brigadier brought in his colonel brother and a team of unidentified characters and a bulldozer, and they were systematically destroying buildings, just because they could. Soldiers glorifying in the death and destruction they were wreaking “on the Hamas-Nazis”. On December 15^th 2023 three hostages managed to escape their captors and approach nearby IDF troops. They explained who they were, came out of the rubble without shirts and waving their white undershirts, and were killed by an IDF sniper. If we’re killing our own hostages, many of us asked, what are we doing to civilians who happen to cross our gunsights with no-one to investigate? There were the stories in the foreign media about killings, always denied but then proving true. Too many of these stories began to be attributed to ideologically-motivated soldiers and junior officers.

In the summer of 2024 Reserve-colonel Asaf Hazoni came home from the headquarters of a division fighting in Gaza. The grandson of a religion cabinet minister who promoted the early settlements in the 1970s, in his day-job he’s a professor of anthropology. While mobilized he kept an anthropologist’s diary. Recently published, it’s apparently the first book analyzing the IDF in this war. He describes an army in disarray, with private initiatives by mid-level officers, widespread unruliness and indiscipline. His central motif, in my reading, was the soldiers and officers who had “looked at the Gorgons”, the mythological Greek monsters who turned anyone looking at them to stone. The soldiers who had looked at the Gorgons, in his description, were those who lost themselves by seeing the depravity of Hamas. He quotes a colonel who hadn’t lost his moral compass: “I’ve taken care not to look at the Gorgon”, the colonel tells him.

At the end of August troops found six young hostages, whose names we all recognized, deep in a tunnel. They had been beaten and starved, then shot as the IDF approached. After ten months of being assured by our leaders that military pressure would free the hostages, it had killed them. There was an explosion of protests – more than 500,000 demonstrators, or 5% of the population. Netanyahu’s office, shocked by the rage, leaked a doctored Hamas document to the German Bild Magazine, “proving” that Hamas was the sole obstacle to negotiations, and that it was gleeful over the protests. The security agencies opened an investigation into the leaking and doctoring of the document. It uncovered a can of worms in Netanyahu’s office, and is the background to his current attempt to fire Shabak Chief Ronen Bar.

But that’s now. At the time Netanyahu’s misinformation campaign against his own citizens succeeded, the demonstrations were muted, and his government stuck to its policy of eternal war and never agreeing to pay for hostages.

In September we turned to Hizballah. Our campaign was partially brilliant, mostly effective, the inevitable collateral damage was limited and proportionate, and many of our goals were achieved. It helped that there’s no real constituency for building settlements in Lebanon, and Netanyahu felt no need to make impossible claims about total victory. When Trump was elected and said he wanted the war over, we ended it the reasonable way: with a diplomatic solution. It was the opposite of the Gaza campaign in all aspects.

Trump also said he wanted the war in Gaza to end. A week before his inauguration his envoy Steve Witkoff came to Jerusalem and ordered Netanyahu to sign the hostage agreement that had been on the table since April. Netanyahu signed.

But there was a caveat. The agreement was for a ceasefire, a freeing of all the hostages for lots of jailed terrorists, the end of the war, Israel’s retreat, and the reconstruction of Gaza – in three stages. The first stage saw 33 hostages freed (25 of them alive), a thousand Palestinians freed, and the IDF retreat from the most of the parts of Gaza we were holding. Then we broke the agreement, and stopped. We also broke the ceasefire, with great fanfare and jubilation of our far-right.

Sort of. This is the stage we’re in as I write, so we don’t know what comes next, but it’s a new stage.

The returning hostages were emaciated, exhausted, and profoundly scarred. We don’t know their medical details, of course, but they’re clear in their stories: We were tortured, starved, chained and shackled in narrow dank and black tunnels. We never saw sunlight. We were terrified and terrorized. We left friends behind us (in one case, two brothers were separated), and while it may take years to recover, we’re can’t even begin the process till they’re all home.

You’d think no democratic government would abandon its citizens to such torture and slow death, especially when a large majority of voters wants them home even at the price of not winning. You’d be wrong. The government prefers more fighting.

That clarity is one aspect of this chapter of the war. The other appears to be that the government has finally lost the reserve army, or at least a crucial segment of it. In October 23, 120% of reservists in most units mobilized. By Spring 2024 it was more like 80-90%. These days it’s about 50-60%. Attrition, exhaustion, disruption of life, crises of marriages and families, all are playing a role. The determination of the government to shield 15% of the population, the ultra-orthodox who refuse to enlist, lest their parties bolt the government, has made matters worse. So for all the fanfare, the military has been applying ground forces only hesitantly. Most of the action is by the airforce. The bombings appear to be killing dozens or hundreds of civilians in each attack, and the army is denying this until it can’t be denied – and the pilots and operators are finally revolting. Or at least, threatening to. There’s been a series of events which tell of high tension within the airforce, and between the airforce and the other branches which collect information and allocate targets. Two weeks ago some 150,000 Israelis, most of them reservists or former reservists such as I, signed open letters to the government criticizing the determination to fight for the longevity of the government at the cost of the hostages and civilians’ lives in Gaza. The cost to Gazans has finally made it into mainstream public discourse.

As I write, the army insists it’s re-mobilizing some reserve units, but it’s not clear who’ll come and if there’ll be enough of them to launch large-scale actions. And if so, what for. I have no idea what happens next in Gaza.

***

 

 

How about what Israel’s future?

With the exception of one Likud-associated pollster, all polls have been telling the same story since early 2024: The government holds the allegiance of 35-40% of the electorate no matter what it does, and everyone else is against it. Against the refusal to set up an independent Commission of Inquiry; the refusal to free the hostages; the refusal to mobilize the ultra-orthodox; the insistence on weakening the courts and generally to re-order Israel’s constitutional systems; against the pervasive corruption and crass sectoral preferences at the cost of national good – and, more recently, against the never-ending war. 76-year-old Netanyahu is a genius campaigner and past master at political machinations, and even as he’s visibly aging and showing early signs of decline (yesterday he forgot his own son’s name in the middle of a speech, for example), only a fool would write him off. Our quagmire of political formations always re-orders itself late in each political campaign, and there’s currently no definite candidate to topple him, though recent polls put Naftali Bennet far ahead of him. Whatever the results of the next election will be, they won’t be what today’s polls say they’ll be.

It does seem likely the current coalition will be thrashed, in October 2026 at the latest. Netanyahu hasn’t gone into an election with such poor polls in twenty years. Which raises the frightening but utter serious question: will he allow them to be free elections at all? No-one would ever have uttered such a question in the past; many of us now do.

If there are free elections, or if Netanyahu fiddles with them but still loses to vast public opprobrium, Israel will have a government with a strong mandate to fix itself from the foundation up: a second revolutionary government in a row, grimly informed by the attempts of its predecessor. This is the scenario that buoys us on bad days. There are many bad days.

I’ll finish this long essay on a personal note. There has been much in these past two and a half years, and especially in 18 months of war, to test a humanist patriot. I doubt I’ve ever written anything in English as critical of Israel. Yet I’m still a patriot. The project of maintaining a Jewish and democratic state remains crucial in the long tale of the Jews. We need to be clarify our definitions of Jewish, and Democratic. We need to face down our demons, many of whom have been stalking us. We mustn’t forget the demons of our neighbors, even while seeking honorable peace with them. For all of my discomfort and discord with many Israelis, the many hundreds of demonstrations I’ve been at never fail to remind me that I still have many fellow citizens who share my hopes for a better country, and are willing to stand up and be counted in the efforts to build it.