Obviously it's difficult to find any bright spots in the war between Hamas and Israel. I summed up my attitude toward the war in a post on my Church of the Churchless blog, Religion plays a large role in the horrible Hamas-Israel war.
Though I'm an atheist, I recognize that wars often don't involve religion to a significant degree. But sometimes they do, which means that rather than being a force for good in the world, religion encourages death and destruction.
Politically, my goal is to be an open-minded progressive. So I embrace the notion being espoused by many liberals on social media that it is possible, and indeed desirable, to simultaneously hold three views about the current war between Hamas and Israel.
(1) Hamas engaged in unforgivable terrorism when its fighters attacked Israeli citizens, killing women and children, decapitating infants, slaughtering young people at a music festival, and taking an estimated 150 people hostage. Now Israel is justified in fighting back against Hamas.
(2) Israel has fanned the flames of Islamic resentment in the Middle East by treating Palestinians in the occupied territories badly and showing little to no recent interest in pursuing a two-state solution to the longstanding conflict. The current right-wing administration of Benjamin Netanyahu has made a bad situation in the West Bank even worse through its oppressive policies.
(3) Most of the two million people living in Gaza aren't Hamas fighters. Israel should do everything possible to protect them during its war against Hamas. This entails complying with generally accepted rules of war to the greatest extent possible.
It's impossible to separate out the role of religion here because Israel is a Jewish nation and Hamas embraces a form of radical Islam. That said, many Israeli Jews are opposed to fundamentalist Judaism, just as many Muslims in Gaza reject fundamentalist Islam.
This weekend it was encouraging to see that more attention is being paid to the plight of ordinary residents of Gaza. A million or so have been told to evacuate the northern part of Gaza for the southern part, to avoid the relentless bombing of Gaza city in advance of a seemingly certain Israeli invasion.
Since Israel has cut off water, food, electricity, and medical supplies to Gaza, there's an urgent need for humanitarian relief efforts. And Israel needs to recognize that not everyone in the northern part of Gaza can relocate. This includes hospital patients, such as children on respirators and life support equipment.
I suspect that given the suffering in Gaza caused by Israel's justified retaliation against the killings, abductions, and other atrocities committed by Hamas terrorists against Israelites, support for Hamas among Gaza citizens has nosedived.
The same is true in Israel.
Credible reports are that Israeli citizens have lost confidence in their government, which already had a shaky popularity after Prime Minister Netanyahu and his cronies attempted to weaken the powers of the independent judiciary through "reforms" that seemed aimed at making Israel into a right-wing authoritarian regime -- or at least strong movement in that direction.
I see this as good news. The ease with which Hamas was able to attack Israel, with apparently no advance warning by Israeli intelligence agencies, has shown the citizens of Israel that the Netanyahu administration lacks basic competence.
Netanyahu strikes me as being a lot like Donald Trump. He lacks the ability to competently govern his country because his loyalty is to right-wing extremists rather than what is best for his country as a whole.
Here's some quotes from recent stories about Israelis losing confidence in their government.
The New York Times: "Israelis gird for a deeper war amid a crisis of trust in the government."
On the ninth day after Hamas overran more than 20 Israeli pastoral communities and army bases, killing more than 1,300 people and taking 150 hostages back to Gaza, Israel was a country on edge.
Israelis were girding with grim determination for what they widely see as a war of no choice after the attack on Oct. 7 — the deadliest day for Jews in Israel’s 75-year history and, officials say, since the Holocaust. They were awaiting an imminent ground invasion into the Palestinian enclave controlled by Hamas even as tensions escalated on the northern border with Lebanon, threatening a long and devastating conflict on several fronts.
All this is happening amid a total breakdown of trust between the citizens and the state of Israel, and a collapse of everything Israelis believed in and relied on. Initial assessments point to an Israeli intelligence failure before the surprise attack, the failure of a sophisticated border barrier, the military’s slow initial response and a government that seems to have busied itself with the wrong things and now appears largely absent and dysfunctional.
“We have woken to a terrible sobriety about whose hands we put our fate in,” said Dorit Rabinyan, an author in Tel Aviv, Israel. “All the time you said to yourself, ‘I am paying half of what I earn in taxes, but it is for security, national security, at least that.’”
“We thought we had military superiority, but there’s a feeling that someone up there forgot why he is there,” she added, referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
New York Magazine: "Netanyahu is losing the war at home. Incompetence against Hamas and indifference to Israeli suffering has the public boiling over."
The screech of an air-raid siren punctured the silence at the Tel Aviv–area grave site of Yinon Shay, a 21-year-old soldier killed while fighting Hamas during its bloody invasion. After pausing to allow the interruption, his brother Ophir was unsparing:
“The bunch of imbeciles leading the country we live in, the country where my beloved little brother was killed protecting the homeland that forgot us — not because it was inevitable but because this disgraceful government is involved in everything it should not be involved in. My beloved brother was murdered by hate-filled terrorists, but those who disgracefully opened the door for them are the Israeli government, from the minister of national security and his messianic friends — clowns who busy themselves creating violent, idiotic slogans — to the prime minister, who is doing everything in his power to disintegrate the State of Israel.”
Shay was referring to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government’s minister of national security, Itamar Ben-Gvir, a racist provocateur elevated to high office with several other extremists to cobble together a government after the last election. That government is facing a growing chorus of criticism from all corners of Israeli society since Hamas’s surprise attack with the military caught off guard and taking hours to reach towns where terrorists massacred over 1,200 people.
...The prime minister’s approval rating hovered at about 27 percent before the bloodshed. Apparently aware that he does not have the public legitimacy to lead Israel into war, Netanyahu late on Wednesday night established an emergency war cabinet with Benny Gantz, a former IDF chief of staff who leads a center-right opposition party.
...Many Netanyahu allies believe he is a dead man walking, politically. Amit Segal, a journalist considered very close to the prime minister, said on a radio panel that “it is hard to see how he can survive this.”
Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York and adviser to several prime ministers — and no fan of Netanyahu’s — predicted the protests will return and “morph into toppling him for this war.”
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