Opinion Keep Our Mouths Shut and Salute? It's Not the Time for Israelis to Keep Quiet

[Nanjeanne]

Written by Zehava Galon - an Israeli politician, the president of the research institute ZULAT for Equality and Human Rights and former leader of Meretz.

On October 7, in wake of the terrible massacre and war crimes committed by Hamas, the diplomatic and security conceptions of the Israeli governments over the past two decades collapsed. If all we learn from this is, once more, "Quiet, we're shooting," then we haven't learned anything. The conceptions that fell apart here did not belong solely to Benjamin Netanyahu, their progenitor. They were also taken for granted by politicians and military officials and commentators. We held entire election campaigns as though there were no Palestinian question at all. Naftali Bennett, who is currently warming up on the sidelines, referred to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a "piece of shrapnel in the ass."

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Three months into the fighting in Gaza, more than 500 soldiers have been killed and thousands wounded. Estimates from Gaza say that more than 20,000 Palestinians have been killed, 70 percent of them women and children. These are not numbers that we've seen in the past, in any previous operations or previous ground incursions. Is it a consequence of imprecise bombings, as the Americans claimed, and as did some of the released Israeli hostages, who said they feared for their lives from the bombardments? Must we really be discussing proposals like the one to starve out the Gazans, even at the cost of thousands more dead, even at the cost of starving the Israeli hostages? Isn't it time that we discuss the need to bring more humanitarian aid into Gaza, and not because the United States is pressuring us to do so?

It is the government that sets our policy in Gaza. There is no reason for us to just accept it as the gospel from on high. We don't need easy talk about unity, we need an intelligent discussion supported by facts. And we need it now, for one thing because the way we fight in Gaza directly affects the lives of the Israeli hostages there, the lives of thousands of Gazans who didn't do anything, our international legitimacy to carry on fighting, and the solutions that will be possible to implement once the fighting ends.

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