Netanyahu has led Israel to the edge of the moral abyss

More than 3,700 years ago, a king of ancient Babylon composed one of the world’s first recorded set of laws. The Code of Hammurabi, a collection of 282 laws etched in cuneiform on a 2-metre-tall black basalt stele, excavated in 1901 and now in the Louvre in Paris, established the principle of proportional, reciprocal justice ­— “an eye for an eye.”

This remarkable exercise in the judicious restraint of power was a watershed moment in the development of humankind’s moral compass.

The golden thread of proportionality that ran through the code was later echoed in the Book of Exodus in the Hebrew Bible, as one of the laws that guides all the followers of the Jewish faith and underpins the self-proclaimed moral righteousness of the state of Israel — its destinate duty, as was often expressed by its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, to be a “light unto the nations.”

Over the past eight decades, as it has fought to hold on to the land its European founders colonized in 1948, Israel has stumbled repeatedly from such a path of righteousness. As the events of the past nine months have demonstrated with shocking clarity, Israel has finally surrendered the moral high ground altogether and forsaken any claim to righteousness.

Israel has finally surrendered the moral high ground altogether and forsaken any claim to righteousness.

Jonathan Gornall

Despite Israel’s characterization of the Israel-Palestine conflict as an existential struggle for its survival, that “struggle” has always been terribly one-sided. Between 2008 and the eve of the Hamas attack in October last year, 6,417 Palestinians were killed, more than half of whom were civilians. In the same period, a total of 310 Israelis, including 178 civilians, died.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas and other groups killed 1,068 Israelis and 71 foreigners. Since then, as of July 17, Israel has killed 38,794 Palestinians in Gaza, including 7,800 children and 5,000 women, for the price of just 326 of its soldiers. Put another way, in the current conflict, 119 Palestinians have died for every single Israeli soldier killed.

This extraordinarily one-sided death toll, to say nothing of the catastrophic destruction of property and infrastructure, has shaken even Israel’s most ardent supporters, including the US, who have urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to exercise restraint.

On Friday, the UN’s International Court of Justice ordered Israel to end its unlawful occupation of the Palestinian territories, halt the building of settlements immediately and make full reparations for its “internationally wrongful acts.”
These calls have been calculatedly dismissed by a domestically controversial and unpopular leader who knows his political survival is likely to last only as long as the killing in Gaza continues.

Netanyahu, focused on retaining the support of the religious extremists in his own Cabinet and of their supporters among the dangerous and influential illegal settler movement, has even remained unmoved by the recent application for his arrest on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.
It is clear that Israel’s right wing, which yearns for Gaza to be reoccupied, resettled and purged of Palestinians, thirsts only for blood and for the war to continue.

Even as sensitive stop-start talks to end the Gaza conflict continue, Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s far-right national security minister and an ultranationalist settler leader, last week made another of his provocative visits to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound. He was, he said, “praying and working hard” to ensure Netanyahu resisted international pressure to sign a ceasefire deal.

Ben-Gvir’s visit followed a particularly evil series of attacks that appeared to serve no purpose other than to reassure Israel’s religious fanatics that the slaughter of the innocents will continue unabated.

On July 13, an airstrike on a tent camp for displaced people, in an area designated a “humanitarian zone” by Israel, killed 29 and injured dozens more, while failing to kill its supposed target, Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif. This was the fourth and worst attack in the space of four days carried out on or near schools, a shocking series of war crimes condemned by Germany and the EU, among others.

One does not have to be much of a cynic to see these attacks as part of a deliberate strategy designed to provoke Hamas, derail peace talks and escalate the war.

Not all Israelis support Netanyahu and the continuation of his self-serving war — far from it. A poll on July 12 found that 64 percent of Israelis favored a hostage-ceasefire deal and that 44 percent wanted the prime minister to resign immediately.

In the US, tens of thousands of Jews, horrified by events in Gaza, have flocked to join Jewish Voice for Peace, a national organization working toward Palestinian freedom and a vision of “Judaism beyond Zionism,” which it opposes as “an explicitly colonial ideology.” The organization unflinchingly condemns Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide” — not a word uttered casually by descendants of the victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

Netanyahu was due to address the US Congress in Washington on Wednesday, an invitation he described as an opportunity to “present the truth about our just war against those who seek to destroy us.”

The truth of that “just war” is to be found in the grotesque casualty statistics, which are evidence of a ruthless and inexcusable disproportionality that will be as harshly judged by history as it would have been by Hammurabi.

Whether or not, as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken optimistically hopes, Netanyahu can be persuaded while in Washington to bring the peace talks “over the finish line,” his legacy, written in blood, is sealed.

This war will end, and Netanyahu’s reign will end with it. To his successor will fall the herculean task of pulling Israel back from the edge of the moral abyss to which he has led it.
 

• Jonathan Gornall is a British journalist, formerly with The Times, who has lived and worked in the Middle East and is now based in the UK.