‘Just Darkness’

“This moment is a test,” Isaac Herzog said, appealing to the Israeli public during a special evening address on Sunday. “We will not break nor blink.”

Herzog’s speech was actually a plea. Israel should avoid a return to the domestic political rancor that prevailed on the eve of October 7.  “I want to caution that anyone who seeks to bring us back to the discourse of October 6 is harming the war effort and the security the citizens of the country,” he said.

Although Herzog was emphatic that debate and discussion are “perfectly allowed” (thanks for that), he implored Israelis to “Hold off [on] the campaigns and the political messages.”

It goes without saying that Benjamin Netanyahu will face a public reckoning when the war’s over. That much is clear, and it seems likely that voters will seek the resignation of senior intelligence and defense officials too. I can’t speak for everyday Israelis, but if the Second Intifada permanently undercut the Israeli left, then October 7 surely marked a similarly devastating moment for the far-right: Their policies didn’t make Israel safer. Quite the opposite.

I’m not sure where that leaves Israel politically, but Herzog’s exhortation for Israelis to avoid political debate lest they should harm “our children on the frontlines” was discomfiting. The pre-war divisions in Israel were in no small part a backlash against Netanyahu’s anti-democratic leanings, but putting that aside, it’s precisely during times of crisis when debate and discussion are needed most.

If the “rally around the flag” phenomenon manifests organically (and it usually does, it’s just a matter of how long it lasts before the public becomes disenchanted), then so be it, but to stifle discussion, or to openly exhort the public to cease and desist from political debate at a moment when so many lives are at stake, is perilous.

Against a near universal international consensus around the imperative of an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, Netanyahu over the weekend outlined an intensification of the Israeli military campaign. The IDF said it targeted some 200 sites in just 24 hours.

In the Maghazi refugee camp in central Gaza, almost 70 people were killed, including at least a dozen women and a handful of children, in what locals said was one of those 200 IDF strikes. Israel said it’s investigating.

“We were all targeted,” a survivor, whose daughter and grandson were killed, told the AP. “Our kids are in a state of unimaginable fear,” another survivor told The New York Times, adding, “It’s terrifying in every sense of the word.” Videos posted online showed piles of bodies in white plastic bags arranged in rows at a nearby hospital.

17 Israeli soldiers were killed in less than 72 hours, government figures and separate reports indicated. The Israeli economy is seen contracting fairly sharply this quarter, according to the Taub Center for Social Policy Studies, whose analysis was cited by the Times and other media over the weekend.

Netanyahu, addressing his cabinet, said he told The White House that Israel would “fight until absolute victory, however long that takes.”

The question is how Israel defines “absolute victory.” It was Herzog who said, in October, that “It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible. It’s not true this rhetoric about civilians were not aware, not involved.”

Pressed for context, Herzog conceded that there are innocents in Gaza. Sort of. “But unfortunately in their homes, there are missiles,” he went on, at the same press conference. “With all due respect, when you have a missile in your goddamn kitchen and you want to shoot it at me, am I allowed to defend myself?”

In his December 24 address to the country, Herzog called the war, which has killed one out of every 100 Gazans, “moral.”

On Christmas eve, a Franciscan monk described the scene in Bethlehem, in the West Bank. “This year, without the Christmas tree and without lights, there’s just darkness,” he said.