When considering the fate of Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu wants Israelis to look to their scripture. “You must remember what Amalek has done to you,” he said during a recent press conference, referring to a biblical directive to “utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.”
That Netanyahu would equate the Palestinian militant group Hamas—and by extension the Palestinians of Gaza—with an enemy of the ancient Hebrews, is not entirely surprising. The Israeli prime minister has a long history of ahistorical distortion, expediently twisting it to fit Zionist ideology or serve political objectives—like the oft-repeated canard that a Palestinian was responsible for giving Adolf Hitler the idea to exterminate the Jews of Europe.
Yet in the current moment, in which Israeli bombs have reduced more than half of Gaza to smoldering rubble and wiped entire extended families from the earth, such exhortations take on far darker tones. Netanyahu is not alone, either. Across Israel’s political and media landscape in the month since Hamas militants killed around 1,200 Israelis and captured around 240 more, a zeitgeist of merciless retribution has gripped the country and calls for sweeping violence against Palestinians have become commonplace.
Israel’s supposedly left-leaning president, Isaac Herzog, put the onus for Hamas’ surprise attack on all Palestinians, saying, “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible.” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant called them “human animals,” and said, “Gaza will not return to what it was before, we will eliminate everything.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, said “To be clear, when we say that Hamas should be destroyed, it also means those who celebrate, those who support, and those who hand out candy—they’re all terrorists and they should all be destroyed.” Cabinet security minister and former head of internal security agency Shin Bet, Avi Dichter, added, “we are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba…that’s how it’ll end,” referring to the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948.
Such statements should not be confused solely as the outcries of an emotional political class. Since October 7, the sober rationalizing of mass atrocities has also been present. In the first days of the campaign, Israel’s Ministry of Intelligence prepared a 10-page document outlining various options for Israeli strategy in Gaza, arguing that the military should adopt a plan to depopulate the territory’s 2.3 million residents and force them into Egypt, eventually establishing permanent cities deep in the Sinai desert. An influential think tank closely associated with the prime minister and headed by his former national security advisor, Meir Ben Shabbat, published a paper on October 17 emphasizing: “There is at the moment a unique and rare opportunity to evacuate the whole Gaza Strip in coordination with the Egyptian government,” and calling for the “relocation and final settlement of the entire Gaza population.”
Accordingly, Netanyahu has reportedly been lobbying world leaders to pressure Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi to admit the people of Gaza, and proposed for the World Bank to forgive Egypt’s staggering national debt as incentive. So far, Egypt has not complied, but Palestinians everywhere have been left fearing that Israel is determined on using October 7 as a pretext for their national destruction—a fear that stretches beyond Gaza to the rest of Palestine.
In the first three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, more children were killed than in all global conflicts over the past three years combined, according to international NGO Save the Children, with many more killed since. Entire neighborhoods have been carpet bombed, all while Israel has imposed a total blockade of food, water, fuel, electricity and medicine. Hunger, thirst and disease now threaten a lethality far greater than the bombs. This combination of gross dehumanization, plans for forcible expulsion, and clear violations of international humanitarian law in Israel’s prosecution of its military campaign in Gaza, has left many experts describing Israel’s response to October 7 as an unfolding act of genocide—or at least having genocidal intent.
On October 13, the Israeli scholar of modern genocide, Raz Segal, described Israel’s onslaught of Gaza in Jewish Currents as “a textbook case of genocide.” Two days later, more than 800 scholars and practitioners of international law and conflict, including prominent scholars of the Holocaust, released a joint statement warning of the potential for genocide through Israel’s actions and citing years of troubling buildup to this moment. On October 28, the director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights resigned citing the failure in stopping “a genocide unfolding before our eyes.” On November 2, a group of United Nations experts released a statement saying, “We remain convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide.” Demands are now growing for the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel for the crime and to issue arrest warrants for officials, including Netanyahu himself.
A logic of extremes
Beyond the statements from decision-makers to “flatten” Gaza that could indicate genocidal intent, Israel is operating from a radical, two-fold logic that makes the wholescale destruction of Gaza plausible. The immediate rationale is that Israel is seeking a total paradigm shift away from the status quo ante of October 7. From 2007 until that day, the Israeli government relied on Hamas to govern the territory in lieu of its direct military occupation, much like it relies on the Palestinian Authority to administer and police Palestinian population centers in the West Bank as part of the Oslo Accords. If Israel is to eliminate Hamas, as it has vowed to do, who will govern in Hamas’ place? In the absence of a clear answer, Israel appears ready to simply excise Gaza from the map and eliminate it as a factor in its future political and security calculations. In real terms, this means making life in Gaza impossible through mass destruction, killing and deprivation so as to induce the entire population to flee.
Nothing so far from Israeli decision-makers has dispelled this possibility from becoming a reality. On October 20, Defense Minister Gallant laid out a vague, three phase plan for the campaign in Gaza, including “the creation of a new security regime in the Gaza Strip, the removal of Israel’s responsibility for day-to-day life in the Gaza Strip, and the creation of a new security reality for the citizens of Israel and the residents of the [area surrounding Gaza].” On November 6, Netanyahu said Israel would take “indefinite security responsibility” for Gaza. Notably, neither of these mention the Palestinian residents, only the territory itself—leaving the possibility open for a “new security reality” that excludes them entirely. While some have inferred that Israel intends to reoccupy Gaza, it is highly improbable that after the immense suffering and death Israel has inflicted on its people, that it will put its soldiers at risk through a prolonged occupation in which it must police the angry population and provide services to them. The military may stay in Gaza, but not govern.
Biden Administration officials are starting to express growing discomfort with Israel’s unwillingness to disclose a clear end game—having hitched their wagon to the Netanyahu government during its brutal offensive—and now appear to be scrambling for a viable option that does not implicate them in crimes against humanity. During a recent visit to Ramallah, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas that the PA should play a central role in what comes next in Gaza. This option, however, ignores the profound weakness of the PA, even in the West Bank where it is firmly established, and its near-total lack of legitimacy among its own public. Abbas and the PA cannot simply return to Gaza on the back of an Israeli tank without an even greater loss of credibility, and they have openly admitted as much. For Israel, moreover, a PA-run Gaza Strip would be far from stable or secure, while reuniting the occupied Palestinian territories under a singular leadership—something the government has spent years preventing.
A third option that has been floated is the establishment of an international trusteeship for Gaza, secured by peacekeeping forces. While this may not be easy or quick to mobilize, it is likely the best option as it would put an end to the Israeli blockade, allow for international reconstruction efforts, and bring a semblance of stability to Gaza’s surviving residents. However, from an Israeli standpoint a trusteeship would reduce its ability to tightly control Gaza, as it has done for 56 years, and has said it wants to maintain going forward. And in fact, with Hamas no longer an obstacle, there could emerge greater impetus to pressure Israel to address the underlying political questions over Gaza and the West Bank’s future.
This, in fact, points to the second, deeper rationale, which does not stop at the border of Gaza. Beyond the immediate issue of governance is the longstanding dilemma of politics and demography that has plagued Israeli decision-makers since the early days of the Zionist movement, and has taken on particular urgency in recent years as Israeli policies have foreclosed the possibility of a two-state solution.
When ideology reduces options
It is important to remember that the political agenda of Israel’s rightwing leadership is to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and extend Israeli sovereignty over all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Yet this annexationist approach has put Israel on a collision course with the demographic reality of a single state in which Jews are a minority—according to Israel’s own military, the Palestinian population outstripped the Jewish one in 2018. Because Israel’s ethnonationalist ideology also precludes the idea of equality in one state, Palestinians are trapped in political limbo, denied their basic rights and liberty under permanent Israeli subjugation. (For years, Israel has unsuccessfully tried to remove Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians from that calculation, something it is now seems to be trying in the most extreme way possible.)
While many people, including former leaders of Netanyahu’s Likud party, have warned that this annexationist approach would lead Israel to eventually be viewed as an apartheid state, Netanyahu insisted during the past 15 years of his rule that the situation could be managed indefinitely through manipulation of the economic and security levers at Israel’s disposal. Furthermore, Netanyahu pursued a vigorous relationship-building campaign in Africa, Asia and, most importantly, the Middle East—with the Abraham Accords a crowning achievement—arguing that the Palestinian cause could be undermined and marginalized by coopting its long-established support base.
Nonetheless, Netanyahu and his cohort were never able to effectively show how permanent Israeli rule could be reconciled with avoiding apartheid. Both the political right and center-left could only offer half-measures aimed at “managing the conflict” or “separation without sovereignty.” All the while the pressure of demography and the resonance of the apartheid framework continued to build, while lawmakers took steps to insulate the polity from its own democratic-liberalism by passing legislation like the 2018 Nation State Law, which reserved the right of self-determination exclusively for the Jewish people.
Yet long before the events of October 7 exposed the delusion that Palestinians could be cordoned off and contained indefinitely without consequence, the Israeli far right was gaining steam with their extremist message of expelling Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens. This vision was encapsulated by the current Minister of Finance, Bezalel Smotrich, who in 2017 published a seminal paper called “Israel’s Decisive Plan.” In it, Smotrich—who also holds a special mandate for the West Bank within the Defense Ministry—calls for full Israeli annexation of the West Bank and offers Palestinians what one Israeli journalist at the time termed a “surrender-or-transfer ultimatum.” In other words, Palestinians can either agree to live without equal rights to their Jewish overlords or they can leave their homeland voluntarily or by force.
This position has gradually entered the mainstream discourse in Israel as a way to secure its future as a Jewish state. When October 7 burst the bubble on the Netanyahu approach, it appears that the reaction was to veer further to the right and adopt the extreme.
A looming catastrophe beyond Gaza
The threat of what is happening Gaza extending to the West Bank—and inside Israel—is growing by the day. Nearly 200 Palestinians have been killed there since October 7, with thousands more injured and arrested. It is the deadliest violence since the Second Intifada. In addition to the Israeli military, armed Jewish settlers have been ramping up attacks on Palestinian villagers and farmers with the support of government officials and the protection of soldiers. Leaflets have been distributed in villages warning villagers it is “their last chance to flee to Jordan in an orderly fashion before we forcefully expel you from our holy lands bequeathed to us by God.” Sixteen Palestinian communities in the South Hebron Hills have already been forced to flee their homes.
In December 2022, the most fanatical elements of Israeli society gained representation and power in the ruling government through Jewish supremacist parties like Jewish Power. Its leader, Itamar Ben Gvir, a convicted criminal for inciting hatred of Arabs and an advocate of mass deportations, was already busy organizing Jewish militias to operate in so-called mixed cities in Israel before coming to power. In April, he secured the mandate to form a “national guard” under his control as minister of national security, and has already been seen since October 7 distributing assault rifles to his extremist followers at political rallies.
For zealots like Ben Gvir and Smotrich, products of Israel’s most militant settlements in the West Bank, Netanyahu’s call to remember Amalek resonates acutely. There, all Palestinians are referred to as Amalekites, and the “Mitzvah of Genocide” against them, as one prominent Israeli rabbi put it years ago, is clearly understood. In this context, such biblical references seem less like eyebrow-raising distortions of history and more like a call-to-arms.
