Opinion | This Israeli Government Is Not Our Ally

Addressing a conference on May 5 sponsored by the religious Zionist newspaper B’Sheva, Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far right finance minister, spoke like a man who couldn’t care less what you think: “We’re occupying Gaza to stay,” he said. “There will be no more entering and leaving.” The local population will be squeezed into a less than a quarter of the Gaza Strip.

As the Haaretz military expert Amos Harel noted: “Since the army will try to minimize casualties, analysts expect it to use particularly aggressive force that will lead to extensive damage to Gaza’s remaining civilian infrastructure. The displacement of the population to the areas of the humanitarian camps, combined with the ongoing shortage of food and medicine, could lead to further mass deaths of civilians. … More Israeli leaders and officers could face personal legal proceedings against them.”

Indeed, this strategy, if executed, may not only trigger more war crime accusations against Israel, but will also inevitably threaten the stability of Jordan and the stability of Egypt. Those two pillars of America’s Middle East alliance structure both fear that Netanyahu aims to drive Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank into their countries, which would surely foment instability that would spill over their borders even if Palestinians themselves did not.

This hurts us in other ways. As Hans Wechsel, a former senior policy adviser to U.S. Central Command, put it to me: “The more hopeless things seem for Palestinian aspirations, the less readiness there will be in the region to expand the U.S.-Arab-Israeli security integration that could have nailed down long-term advantages over Iran and China — and without requiring nearly as many U.S. military resources in the region to sustain.”

On the Middle East, you have some good independent instincts, Mr. President. Follow them. Otherwise you need to prepare yourself for this looming reality: Your Jewish grandchildren will be the first generation of Jewish children who will grow up in a world where the Jewish state is a pariah state.

I will leave you with the words of the May 7 Haaretz editorial:

“On Tuesday, the Israel Air Force killed nine children, between the ages of 3 and 14. …The Israeli military said that the target was a ‘Hamas command and control center’ and that ‘steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming uninvolved civilians.’… We can continue to ignore the number of Palestinians in the Strip who have been killed — more than 52,000, including around 18,000 children; to question the credibility of the figures, to use all of the mechanisms of repression, denial, apathy, distancing, normalization and justification. None of this will change the bitter fact: Israel killed them. Our hands did this. We must not avert our eyes. We must wake up and cry out loudly: Stop the war.”