The deliberate destruction of Gaza continues unabated as I write these lines. Belatedly, a few Israelis have begun decrying the starvation and killings that their army—a people’s army—has perpetrated since October 2023. These acts, supported by the majority of the country’s Jews, exceed in cruelty and brutality the violence that the IDF routinely used against Palestinians since before the unilateral declaration of independence in 1948. Dispossession, deportation, and death have been their tragic fate.

The difference this time is not only in the degree of violence. Israeli leaders no longer hide behind diplomatic discourse and euphemisms. Their plan is clear: cleanse Greater Israel of the Palestinians. Residents of Gaza and the West Bank are being forced to leave their land and move elsewhere. This plan has long been discreetly envisaged by successive Israeli governments, but the fear of international sanctions prevented them from acting it out. Today, 82% of Israelis support the definitive expulsion of the Palestinians. However, consistent American and Israeli efforts to bribe countries to accept the exiled Palestinians have so far not borne fruit.

One can’t help recalling the Evian international conference of 1938, convened in order to resettle European Jews being expelled by the Nazis. Western delegates expressed sympathy for the Jews, but only the Dominican Republic agreed to accept 100,000 people (in practice, no more than a few hundred could actually reach the distant island in the Caribbean). With no country willing to take in Jews, Nazi authorities devised plans for “the final solution of the Jewish problem.” Millions of European Jews, alongside other “inferior” people, were systematically murdered between 1941 and 1945.

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Royal Hotel [fr] in Évian-les-Bains, where the conference took place (pictured 2012) (Licensed under CC BY 3.0)

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The enthusiastic adherents of National Judaism (dati-leumi in Hebrew) lead other strata of Israeli citizenry to believe they can get rid of the Palestinians. This relatively small segment of the Israeli population, whose core consists of settlers in the West Bank, has become the most dynamic and unswerving actor in the making of Israel’s Palestinian policy. More and more of these “wearers of knitted kippahs” occupy key positions in the Israeli state. The tail is successfully wagging the dog.

Most Israelis continue to enjoy life, go to the gym, attend meetings of Weight Watchers, and otherwise take care of themselves. The starvation and death of tens of thousands of civilians—mostly women and children—in Gaza, and of hundreds of people in the West Bank leave many Israelis indifferent, and quite a few proud and happy. Israel has dehumanized and demonized the Palestinians for decades, and this dehumanization has become brazen in the wake of the Hamas raid in October 2023.

Max Blumenthal recently characterized Israeli society as “satanic”. But Israelis must one day wake up from their moral slumber and realize that Palestinians are human. Since the utter destruction of Gaza by Israel makes it impossible to house the two million survivors in their former homes turned in “a demolition site”, Israelis—in an act of collective repentance—should take them in. They should treat them as fellow humans and help them cure the terrible traumas caused by the Zionist enterprise. They should compensate Palestinians for lost property, allowing them to stand on their own feet rather than depend on charity. This long-overdue act of repentance should create a society where everyone—from the river to the sea—will enjoy equal rights.

This re-humanization is a challenge, but it is the only scenario that would free both the oppressed and the oppressors from the vicious cycle of violence. Quite a few people will qualify the proposed act of repentance as suicidal. Peter Beinart, in his recent book Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza, points to other historical examples—Ireland, the American South, and, of course, South Africa—and acknowledges that the rulers often perceive equality as an existential threat: “White South Africans were just as afraid of being thrown into the sea as Israeli Jews are now.” Yet, he argues, according to numerous studies, oppression fuels violence, whereas equal rights and the possibility of political change mitigate it.

Since the late 19th century, Jewish intellectuals saw that the hubris and chutzpah of the Zionist settlers would create a death trap for the colonizers and the colonized alike. Ahad Ha-Am was an icon of cultural Zionism, as opposed to its political variety that has replaced all others. He published the following warning in 1891:

“I recently came to the Land of Israel and saw with my own eyes that we did not find an empty land here, but a nation full of life, dwelling in it, and loving the Land of Israel no less than we do. … We are accustomed to thinking that the Arab is a wild Ishmaelite… and we fail to notice that the Arab, too, is a human being, with feelings, and he senses very well that his land is being taken from him by force.”

Critical voices both inside and outside of Israel portray the Zionist experiment as a tragic mistake. The sooner it is ended, the better for all humanity. In practice, this would mean guaranteeing equality for all inhabitants and transforming the existing discriminatory regime into a state of all its citizens. But Israeli society is conditioned to see such projects as an existential threat and a rejection of Israel’s “right to exist.” The sacrifice of tens of thousands of civilian lives to ensure this right has not shaken this ideological mantra.  Beinart observes that

“In most of the Jewish world today, rejecting Jewish statehood is a greater heresy than rejecting Judaism itself. … We have built an altar and thrown an entire [Palestinian] society on the flames.”

True, Beinart in New York and the author of these lines in Montreal can afford to indulge in dreams of equality. We are not the ones to face the consequences. But there are more and more people in Israel who see the moral and practical dead end of continuing the oppression and dispossession.

Jewish tradition teaches that it is never too late to change course, to repent, and to make amends. Of course, such a sharp turn requires courage. A well-known Jewish insight is quite clear about it:

“Who is the greatest of all heroes? He who turns an enemy into a friend.”

Most people in Israel vehemently reject as “exilic” this traditional Jewish wisdom that upholds peace as the supreme value. They see in it only “comfort of the weaklings.” But, in fact, this is what real heroism is all about.

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This article was originally published on The Times of Israel.

Yakov M. Rabkin is Professor Emeritus of History at the Université of Montréal. His publications include over 300 articles and a few books: Science between Superpowers, Interactions between Jewish and Scientific Cultures, A Threat from Within: a Century of Jewish Opposition to Zionism, What is Modern Israel?, Demodernization: A Future in the Past and Judaïsme, islam et modernité. He did consulting work for, inter alia, OECD, NATO, UNESCO and the World Bank. 

Featured image: B’Tselem says Israeli forces arrested five Palestinian children in the West Bank (2021) (B’Tselem/Twitter)

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