Israelis wereShattered on October 7, can they recover?

Moses, the Matzav, and the Land of the Dead: When Israel Comes to a Land of Hamas and Refugees

That is a point that will have to be considered when analyzing the Jewish state’s situation. The conflict doesn’t have the majority of military power. Even though innocent lives will be lost in this war, Israel wants to defeat Hamas so as to keep it from becoming the main power in Gaza. But Hamas’s goal is only secondarily political. Fundamentally, it’s homicidal: to end Israel as a state by slaughtering every Jew within it. How can critics of Israel’s policy insist on a cease-fire if they can’t give a realistic answer to the Israeli question: how can we go on like this?

The idea of moving the entire population of the Gaza Strip to the Sinai Peninsula was reportedly floated by the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence. The extreme right-wing elements in the government celebrate the war as an opportunity to remove Palestinians from the country. This month, a videotape emerged on social media of Capt. According to the rabbi, it was now clear to the soldiers that this land was theirs, as well as Gaza and Lebanon. The troops were thrilled that his conduct doesn’t align with the values of the military.

Going to the camp meant going from a military checkpoint to a checkpoint at high speed and tailing an Israeli army vehicle on the sandy roads around a field burned to ash by rockets. The camp had a bunch of concrete bunkers and hundreds of shells from October 7 strewn around outside.

The lieutenant colonel looks a lot older than he is, with his careworn face. He told me that he was preparing for the ground invasion, which would begin a few days later.

In this case, it means the matzav, in which Israelis now find themselves. He lives in Tel Aviv, where his wife was trying to hold things together while schools were closed and the kids were home. But he grew up in Nir Oz. One of his cousins there, he says, is “alive by pure chance,” having been barricaded with her family for hours. “I want to look in her face and say, you can go back to your house.” Two of his uncles and one of his best friends are among the hostages.

Israel’s internally displaced people are unimportant in most news accounts. But it’s central to the way in which Israelis perceive the war. There are now more than 150,000 Israelis — proportionately the equivalent of about 5.3 million Americans — who were forced out of their homes by the attacks of Oct. 7. Small cities like Sderot, near Gaza, and Kiryat Shmona, near Lebanon, are now mostly ghost towns and will remain that way if the government can’t secure its borders.

Should that happen, sizable parts of Israel’s already minuscule territory would become essentially uninhabitable. That, in turn, would mean the failure of the Jewish state to maintain a safe homeland, presaging the end of Zionism itself. It’s why Israelis think of this war as existential and why they’re willing to put aside their fury at Benjamin Netanyahu and his ministers, for a while, to win the war.

Taken together, these statements could easily be construed as indicating a genocidal intent. But is genocide actually occurring? Israeli military commanders say that they are trying to limit civilian casualties, while blaming the large number of dead and wounded Palestinians on Hamas tactics of using civilians as human shields and place their command centers under hospitals.

To prove that genocide is happening we need to show that destructive action is being taken against a particular group and that the intent is to destroy. Genocide as a legal concept differs from ethnic cleansing in that the latter, which has not been recognized as its own crime under international law, aims to remove a population from a territory, often violently, whereas genocide aims at destroying that population wherever it is. In reality, any of these situations — and especially ethnic cleansing — may escalate into genocide, as happened in the Holocaust, which began with an intention to remove the Jews from German-controlled territories and transformed into the intention of their physical extermination.

What we had warned about — that it would be impossible to ignore the occupation and oppression of millions for 56 years, and the siege of Gaza for 16 years, without consequences — exploded in our faces on Oct. 7. Following Hamas’s massacre of innocent Jewish civilians, our same group issued a second petition denouncing the crimes committed by Hamas and calling upon the Israeli government to desist from perpetrating mass violence and killings upon innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza in response to the crisis. We wrote that the only way to end the cycles of violence is to have a political compromise with the Palestinians, and to end the occupation.

While we cannot say the military is targeting the Palestinian civilians, we may be watching an ethnic cleansing campaign that could lead to genocide, as has happened in the past.

If we truly believe that the lesson of the Holocaust is that we have the duty to protect ourselves and others, it is time to stand up and raise our voices.

I urge such venerable institutions as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and Yad Vashem in Jerusalem to step in now and stand at the forefront of those warning against war crimes, crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing and the crime of all crimes, genocide.