Last week, Israeli forces killed Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas, and the man who orchestrated the October 7th attacks, in which Hamas fighters killed some twelve hundred Israelis. President Biden responded to the news of Sinwar’s demise by expressing hope that the realization of this particular Israeli war aim would lead to a durable ceasefire in Gaza, where more than forty-two thousand Palestinians have been killed. But Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has given no sign that he will allow the war to end, despite the humanitarian toll; Israel is also engaged in an invasion of Lebanon, where its forces are battling Hezbollah.
Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, and the author of the best-selling book “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor.” He served in the Israel Defense Forces, in the nineteen-eighties, including in Gaza. (Halevi and I were colleagues at The New Republic a decade ago, but have never met.) I wanted to talk with him about the way that many liberal Americans have come to see the war differently than even opponents of Netanyahu in Israel have, and whether Israelis are getting an accurate picture of the way the war is being fought. Our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, is below. We also discuss how the trauma of October 7th played out in Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza, whether Israeli centrists and liberals are placing too much faith in Netanyahu, and whether Halevi believes the military is targeting civilians in Gaza.
You recently told the New York Times, “This last year has been a slow and painful and essential attempt to reclaim the Zionist promise of Jewish self-defense. For me, the death of Sinwar is a culminating moment in that process.” What did you mean by that?
What we lost on October 7th were two foundational elements of the Israeli ethos. The first is that we would be able to defend ourselves. This is a country that sent commandos halfway across Africa in 1976 to rescue a hundred Israeli hostages, and we couldn’t save twelve hundred Israelis within the sovereign borders of the state of Israel. The second thing that we lost was the Zionist promise to the Jewish people that we would create a safe refuge here. Israel on October 7th and since has become the most dangerous place in the world to be a Jew. And so what this war is about for me is reclaiming the credibility of these two essential elements of the Israeli ethos.
By “culminating moment,” did you mean that you hope the war now ends?
I hope that the part of the war that’s being fought in Gaza ends with the release of the hostages. My sense is that once we killed the man who was the symbol of October 7th, even those like Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his supporters—who prioritized victory over Hamas to releasing the hostages—will now have a ladder to climb down from. The priority needs to be saving the hostages. And that goes back to what I said a moment ago about restoring our credibility as a refuge for the Jewish people. The dilemma of the hostages for Israel was that it pitted these two really non-negotiable elements of our ethos against each other: self-defense and safe refuge. The symbol of the war has gone, and the fighting has largely shifted to the north, which is where I think it should have been focussed all along, beginning on October 8th, by going straight to Hezbollah and, for that matter, Iran, and left Hamas alone until the end. Now I think that we should be winding down in Gaza.
You recently wrote a piece in which you argued, “Effectively countering evil requires uncompromising resolve.” You also wrote that, after October 7th, Israel had to decide to “pursue Hamas operatives wherever they were based, including hospitals and mosques. The terrible result has been Israel’s most brutal war—and one of its most necessary.” Are you saying that all of this could be done within the laws of war and so on? Or are you saying that Israel really needs to respond overwhelmingly, and collateral damage, to use a euphemism, be damned?
Look, from the beginning the question was: What would constitute too many civilian deaths? The obvious answer is one is too many. But if you’ve determined that the future of Israel depends on removing from our border these genocidal regimes, like Hezbollah and Hamas, then the question of proportionality shifts. My understanding of the laws of proportionality is that the number of civilian casualties needs to be proportional to the military goal. In the past, Israel had limited military goals in Gaza. After October 7th, the ground rules changed, and the goal changed. Once you’ve defined a total goal, the question of proportionality adjusts. Look, it’s a brutal thing to say and it’s an unbearable thing to say, but if you believe that you are fighting an existential war, and I believe we are, then I don’t think we have a choice.
The way I understand proportionality is that military actors need to take account of the military advantage and weigh that against what will happen to civilians. It doesn’t mean that, if you define your enemy as totalitarian, then you can do whatever you want in fighting in a war.
Absolutely. And, according to the laws of proportionality, each incident, each military decision, needs to be weighed on its own merit. There is no blanket permission to destroy Hamas at any cost. I’m certainly not convinced that every decision we took would pass the measure of proportionality, but I do believe that on the whole the way we have fought this war is really the only way that you can fight a war with this goal.
One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, a Jew who was born in America and then moved to Israel, is that it does feel that there’s a difference between the way that many American liberals or progressives see the war and the way that Israeli liberals, or at least Israeli opponents of Netanyahu, like yourself, see this war. I don’t know if you consider yourself a liberal.
Liberal in the decidedly non-progressive sense.
O.K., fair enough. You are very skeptical of Netanyahu. It’s not clear to me whether this war is just being fought right now to prolong his political career. And so talking about these military objectives seems a little bit beside the point.
There’ve been lots of demonstrations in Israel over the last year: protests to bring the government down, protests to prioritize the hostages. Some of those demonstrations have been quite massive. Hundreds of thousands of people have come out. But this is really the first of Israel’s major asymmetrical wars that has not created an antiwar movement. What that tells me is that, no matter who would be in power, no matter what party, you would basically see the same conduct in this war, whether it was Benny Gantz, or even Yair Golan, formerly of the Labor Party. So there is really a disconnect in the way that many people abroad—you mentioned American Jews, in particular—see the legitimacy of this war and how Israelis almost across the spectrum see this war.