Mass Protest By the Morally Blind

Almost one hundred thousand people (according to organizers) poured into the streets of Tel Aviv yesterday to demand an end to Israel's invasion of the Gaza Strip  and to urge the Netanyahu government to negotiate the return of 49 Israeli hostages still said to be in the hands of Hamas, of whom twenty-seven are believed to have already been killed by Israel's indiscriminate bombing attacks on Palestinian territory. An Israeli demonstration of comparable size has not been seen since the early days of Israel's wholesale massacre of Gazans in October 2023, and was provoked by the Netanyahu administration's announced proposal to take total control of Gaza, an initiative that is opposed not just by a broad sector of the Israeli public but also by Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces Eyal Zamir, who warned that a total occupation of Gaza will trap Israeli soldiers in a prolonged conflict, otherwise known as a forever war.

Days before that disastrous plan was announced, 550 ex-leaders of espionage, military affairs, police, and diplomacy, all members of the movement Commanders For Israeli Security, sent a letter to President Donald Trump urging him to pressure Netanyahu to end the military offensive in Gaza. These ex-functionaries, among whom are counted three former directors of the Israeli spy agency Mossad, five ex-leaders of Shin Bet (internal security), and three former chiefs of the Army, agree that everything achievable by force already has been achieved, while insisting that the remaining hostages can only be brought home via negotiated settlement. 

The announced intention to occupy Gaza City and reinforce colonial subjugation of Palestine is so outrageous that it forced even the most obsequious flatterers of Israeli security policy, up to now unable to credit the evidence of their own eyes that a mass extermination is taking place, to finally draw a line in the sand. German Prime Minster Friedrich Merz, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, and head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen, all have called for Israel to back away from the reckless folly of fully occupying Gaza.

Incredibly, these politicians, the former heads of Israeli security (read Jewish supremacy), and nearly the whole of Israeli society do not even make passing mention of the thousands of Palestinians daily put at risk of massacre by Israeli soldiers and settlers, or of the five million Palestinians in permanent exile, but rather, confine their objections to the risks ongoing extermination policy poses to the lives of a couple of dozen of Jewish hostages. This moral obtuseness extends across both U.S. and Israeli society, including academia, the mass media, and the wealthy and governing classes. 

Netanyahu brags about the fact that all of the Hamas operatives who planned and carried out the October 7 attacks have long since been killed, depriving Israel of even a pretense of justification for the ongoing massacres of Palestinians who had nothing to do with those attacks. 

But of course it was never about Hamas. It's about making Palestine into a land without a people for a self-chosen master race of people without a land, a goal that long predates Hamas's appearance on the scene.

Source:  "Netanyahu: Perpetuating Oppression," La Jornada (Spanish), August 10, 2025