The True Purpose of this War

Things are shifting in Israel right now. Netanyahu has said, explicitly, that he intends to re-occupy Gaza, and in a cabinet meeting today, the government is expected to approve his plan. This, notwithstanding his military Chief of Staff’s strong and loud opposition, for fear that it will result in the deaths of soldiers and—even more likely—the remaining hostages. 

Simultaneously, the media discourse in Israel is shifting. Just a few days ago, Israel’s most-watched television network, Channel 12, ran a full segment on starvation in Gaza—the upshot? There is no way to do “hasbara” for what is happening; Gazan children are starving, and it is in no small part the result of failed—and failing—Israeli policy. 

For American audiences, and certainly for those of us at the New Israel Fund, this is not breaking news. But for mainstream Israeli audiences, the segment hit hard. A new kind of conversation is beginning to take place in Israel, and cracks are forming in the layers of defensiveness and denialism. 

Most of all, Israelis do not want this war to continue; polling shows that 74% of all Israelis want to end the war and to bring the hostages home. They argue now, with increasing frequency, that this war has no purpose. Three former IDF chiefs of staff, four former Shin Bet directors, three former Mossad chiefs, five former police commissioners, and four former heads of military intelligence have said out loud that this began as a just war, but it ceased to be long ago. They said that any military purpose it may have had was accomplished long ago. In their words:

“Today’s war is a war of deception;” “The IDF with all its capabilities cannot make real the fantasy of someone who sits in the cabinet believes that he can achieve;” “It is time to end this war.”

They are fully correct. There is no real military reason to continue the war in Gaza. The IDF Chief of Staff said today that the military had already “met and even exceeded the operation’s objectives” in Gaza. But all this does not mean that the war does not have a purpose. It has a purpose. You just have to listen to the extremists in the government, who say it out loud. 

Last week, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich put the purpose of the war on the table, explicitly, in a conference in the Knesset that he titled (if you can believe it) “The Gaza Riviera–From Vision to Reality.” There, he openly discussed expelling 2.5 million Palestinians from Gaza and replacing them with Israeli Jews. This—this—has become the true purpose of this war.

If it sounds hard to believe, look at the facts: starvation, population concentration, the division of Gaza into sections. And the hostages? They are simply not a factor. Now, Netanyahu is threatening to fully occupy Gaza—exactly as the settlers have demanded he do, since October 8 of 2023, so that they could “resettle” it.  And now, Netanyahu’s announcement that he intends to reoccupy the Strip in its entirety. 

When a sitting cabinet minister says, “All of Gaza will be Jewish” or that the Strip must be “erased”—those are not slips of the tongue. They are warnings.

Brave voices inside Israel are raising the alarm. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called the so-called “humanitarian city” plan a “concentration camp” and warned of ethnic cleansing. Former Defense Minister Moshe “Bogi” Ya’alon warned that Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi is exposing soldiers to potential war crimes charges. Tens of thousands of Israelis are in the streets demanding an end to this war. And at NIF we continue to speak out and organize, working with the momentum of the moment to explain the real purpose of the war. Its deeper goals. The motivation behind the policy.  

Because we know that the cost of this war on Israel is measured not only by the amount of destruction in Gaza, the number of soldiers killed, the fate of the hostages, and the trauma inflicted on the families of the kidnapped. There is also a moral cost—a stain left by actions that may rightly be judged as war crimes. That stain won’t wash out. It will mark this generation and mark us all for decades. 

Every Israeli—and every single one of us who cares about Israel—must look, must try to understand what is happening. And then we must ask whether we are willing to accept it. And, if not, we must decide what action we will take to stop it. 

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