The Politics of WAR

The world is repulsed by the slaughter in Gaza and the belief is growing stronger that Netanyahu's days as prime minister are numbered

- Prem Shankar Jha

A month ago, on Saturday October 28, Israel's President Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Israel had opened a "new phase" in the war against Hamas by sending ground forces into Gaza and expanding its attacks from the ground, air and sea. It's "very clear objective" he said, was to destroy Hamas once and for all. A past master at depicting every Israeli act of oppression as defence, he linked Hamas' October 7 attack to the Holocaust and roared, "We always said, 'Never again'. Never again is now." Only those for whom Israel can do no wrong will fail to recognise what Netanyahu had actually declared. This was that the ethnic cleansing of Gaza had begun.

Four weeks later, this has been brutally confirmed. By then the Israeli army had killed 14,000 civilians in Gaza, including 9,000 women and children. Another estimated 2,000 or more persons had been entombed in the basements of multi-storeyed buildings brought down upon them by Israel's relentless bombing, and are now almost certainly dead. Israel has lost 398 soldiers so far, whom Netanyahu's government is calling "martyrs".

This is a high price to pay for a country whose people came there to escape the persecution they had suffered for close to two millennia in the Western world. But this war has cost Israel something else, something intangible but immeasurably more valuable. This is the last remnant of the vast reservoir of sympathy for Jews that had been generated in the West by the Holocaust.