A first warning, of a historical nature.
Israel was not born in sin; it was not merely a refuge from antisemitic racism culminating in the aberration of the Shoah. Nor is it a “colonialist” state in the classical sense of Europe and its colonial conquests in Africa or Asia and the slavery imposed on indigenous peoples. The Jewish people have historically maintained a profound emotional, cultural, identity-based, and even physical bond with that tiny strip of land called Israel. The modern State of Israel was created legally through the partition plan voted by the United Nations in 1947 and through the war of independence against the armies of the Arab countries that rejected that decision.
A second peculiarity:
Since its birth, Israel has lived in a permanent state of war, interrupted by periods of truce, facing the age-old hostility of the surrounding Arab world. The absence of a Palestinian state certainly reflects Israel’s “fault,” but also the responsibility of the Arab world, the Palestinian leadership, and the international community.
A third caution concerns the principle of reality.
Israelis do not and never have lived in daily peace. They suffer from a hostility that has historically taken the form of war and the infamous form of terrorism. The current, bitter debate about whether Israel is committing crimes against humanity or even genocide neglects the fact that if Hamas had released the hostages in its hands, the destructive war underway—and with it the devastation of Gaza and the collective livelihood of its people—would long ago have ended. Israel is indeed guilty of the immense suffering imposed on the people of Gaza, but Hamas bears a political responsibility for it as well. On October 7, 2023, Hamas knew the Israeli response would be harsh and deliberately, cynically abandoned the population of the Strip to that fate. It still refuses to release the surviving hostages. In March, 22 member states of the Arab League recognized this reality by calling for the disarmament of Hamas.
A fourth cause for concern regards calls in the West to boycott Israelis simply for being Israelis, and the often conspicuous and irritating ostracism in the cultural and academic fields against Israeli institutions. This amounts to racism, plain and simple. In this respect, as in others, criticism of Israel dangerously overlaps with antisemitism. There is often in current rhetoric a lexical and philosophical slippage into the old stereotype of victims and perpetrators. This translates into an essentialist conception of human history whereby today’s Israelis, all undistinguished, are seen as something collective, a people sick in its metaphysical entirety, the children, grandchildren, heirs of the Jews of 80 years ago—once victims of mass extermination, now turned into perpetrators. This is a blatant falsehood, as shown by the painful debate dividing Israeli society between democratic opinion and opposing fundamentalist and authoritarian streams. It is also an easy mechanism of self-absolution for Europe, guilty for centuries of Christian anti-Judaism and antisemitic racism. We have seen this mechanism at work, especially around Holocaust Remembrance Day in the last two years e.g in Italy, but it is also clearly visible in articles, opinion polls, and public demonstrations.
What constructive attitude should the rest of the world take?
The masses of Israelis fighting for their democracy and against the warmongering government should be warmly and actively supported. Likewise, Palestinians demanding a reformed Palestinian Authority in place of Hamas should be supported by Israel and by the rest of the world. Gaza must be rebuilt in order to create a sustainable Palestinian state, unifying Gaza and the West Bank and capable of coexisting peacefully with Israel. If the Netanyahu government pursues the permanent occupation of Gaza and the de facto annexation of significant parts of the West Bank, sanctions could become an appropriate response.
The trauma of these tragic events will reveal to Israel’s conscience how illusory it is to believe that the conflict can be resolved without ending the occupation and the conviction that Palestinian aspirations to a state worthy of the name can be suppressed. Or perhaps, on the contrary, it will harden even more those Israelis convinced that all Palestinians are like Hamas and that a state stretching along the 500 km border with Israel would be a lethal danger. In any case, the trauma has cast doubt on two key elements of the country’s self-image: confidence in the power of arms and in its moral legitimacy recognized by world public opinion. Both are now gravely compromised.
Israel’s security cannot be based solely on military strength. A Jewish state does not automatically mean physical security for its inhabitants, nor the removal of the precarious condition historically associated with being Jewish. On the contrary, the immense trauma of recent days has heightened the sense of insecurity, the anguish of a country that is strong but also weak, occupying but also besieged. The severity of the trauma, the panic that followed, and the failures in preventing Hamas’s massacre all contributed to triggering massive retaliation. Security requires the defeat of Hamas, but also the conviction among the Palestinian population that from nonviolent action and negotiation a decent future can emerge. It is therefore in Israel’s paramount interest to act in ways that dissociate Palestinian society from violence. Military action at most acts as a short-term deterrent, but it claims civilian victims, strengthens the appeal of extremists, and isolates Israel from the community of nations because of its excessive violence against civilians, even while exercising its right to self-defense.
As Amos Oz, one of Israel’s most renowned writers, once said, the war between Israel and the Palestinians actually conceals two wars being fought simultaneously: one, “unjust,” waged by Hamas’s fundamentalist terrorism against Israel in order to create an Islamic state across all of Palestine; the other, “just,” waged by the Palestinian people aspiring to a state worthy of the name. Similarly, Israel too is fighting two wars: one, “just,” to defend its right to exist as a people and a state; the other, “unjust,” to perpetuate the occupation of the territories and the Jewish settlements established there.
The principle that should guide us in these dramatic circumstances is that of “dual loyalty”: instead of assigning blame or inflicting punishment, our task is to build bridges, to push the warring parties toward dialogue, to return to the logic of the Oslo Accords of 1993 when mutual recognition of rights opened a glimpse of hope: reconciling Israel’s right to peace and security with the Palestinians’ right to an independent state. Above all, it is essential—as the commitment of civil society in “bottom-up” support for the “top-down” work of diplomacy—to affirm the illegitimacy of violence against civilians on both sides; to reject the dehumanization of the “enemy”; and to recognize, however painfully, the legitimacy of the other’s claims.
Giorgio Gomel
Giorgio Gomel is an Italian economist, formerly Chief International Economist at the Bank of Italy. He is one of the founders of JCall Europe – an association of European Jews committed to end the occupation and come to a 2-state solution. He currently also serves as president of Alliance for Middle East Peace Europe (www.allmep.org)
source Times of Israel Aug 27, 2025
