On Aug. 1, about 600 prominent Israelis who had retired from senior positions in Israel’s military and intelligence services signed an open letter to President Donald Trump, calling on him to stop the war in Gaza. The signatories, who include former Shin Bet director Ami Ayalon and former Mossad director Tamir Pardo, call themselves “Commanders for Israel’s Security.” They wrote that, while Israel had initiated the war on Oct. 8, 2023 for legitimate reasons of national defense, the war now had no military merit: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s insistence that it must continue was based only on his desire to survive politically by placating the far-right members of his governing coalition.
According to these senior commanders, Israel has already dismantled both Hamas’ military capability and its ability to govern. “It is our professional judgment that Hamas no longer poses a strategic threat to Israel, and our experience tells us that Israel has all it takes to deal with its residual terror capabilities, remotely or otherwise,” they wrote. For this reason, they asserted, Israel must now sign a deal to end the war and return the hostages. They added that the remaining senior Hamas leaders “can be chased later.”
The letter made headlines all over the world, with major networks like the BBC and CNN interviewing some of its most prominent signatories. The international media’s guiding assumption seemed to be that these former senior leaders, with their name recognition and professional credibility, had influence over Israel’s policy. Yet in Israel, the letter barely registered as news.
This is not surprising. The liberal wing of the Israeli discourse has, since the army initiated its military campaign in Gaza nearly two years ago, been characterized by a powerful cognitive dissonance that is wholly focused on Netanyahu. On the one hand, his numerous detractors believed the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, 2023, should have served as the final nail in his political coffin. The prime minister was (and still is) widely perceived as corrupt and inept, controlled by various nefarious actors, occupied exclusively with his own political survival and the dismantling of Israel’s state institutions.
On the other hand, most of those anti-Netanyahu Israelis support the most important policy Netanyahu has ever enacted — the genocide in Gaza. Even calls to “end the war” or “make a deal” are usually followed by the disclaimer that “we’ll finish the job once the hostages are home.” The anti-Netanyahu camp condemns the prime minister at weekly mass demonstrations for his refusal to negotiate a ceasefire in return for the release of the hostages, but those same protesters are effectively endorsing the genocide in their daily actions; certainly they have failed to condemn it. The message of “Commanders for Israel’s Security” reverberates immediately with these anti-Netanyahu Israelis: Netanyahu must go, and the right people must deal with the task at hand, which has always been the “Palestinian problem,” in whatever ways are necessary. They might accept continuing the occupation, the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank and the genocide in Gaza. The only thing that matters is to get the right people, “our people,” the veteran institutionalists of middle Israel, back in charge.
This dissonance occurs only within liberal Israel. There are numerous Israelis (it is impossible to say decisively who holds a majority) who consider Netanyahu a personal savior, the only leader who has ever shown the liberal elites who is really in charge, the only leader to celebrate Jewish power and force the Palestinians and the rest of the Middle East to bow before this power. For other Israelis, most prominently those on the national religious right — of which the settler movement is emblematic — with its vision of a Jewish supremacist empire, Netanyahu is a useful tool for realizing their goals. They are happy to apply all of their political capital in a concentrated attempt to occupy and settle both Gaza and the West Bank, ethnically cleansing (or killing) all Palestinian residents as they do so. Their vision is also one of a more religious and less democratic Israel, which is significantly more isolated. As far as both groups described above are concerned, the commanders are completely irrelevant. These commanders, who have a long tradition of coming out as leftists after their tenure ends (consider Dror Moreh’s jarring documentary “The Gatekeepers,” in which every living former Shin Bet director says the occupation is a huge mistake), are seen as reflexively opposing anything Netanyahu says. The pro-Netanyahu camp sees the liberal elite as opponents of Judaism, tradition and anything that undermines their privilege.
Why did the commanders address their letter to Trump? One could reasonably assume that, in an attempt to shape Israeli policy and discourse, they might deign to speak directly to the Israeli public or to the prime minister himself. The truthful answer is that these commanders are concerned, not unlike Netanyahu, almost exclusively with Israeli domestic politics and not at all with the genocide in Gaza. Even the few commanders brave enough to utter the G-word were quick to say that “the war” had started out as a just one, but had escalated because it was taken over by Netanyahu and his fanatic associates. The commanders are aligning themselves with Jewish-Israeli liberal opinion in an attempt to cast themselves as the obvious leaders of the liberal bloc’s challenge to Netanyahu. Addressing their letter to Trump demonstrates their faith in the axiomatic creed of the anti-Netanyahu camp: He is corrupt/debauched/mad/all of the above, must go and is beyond the pale for Israelis who want their country back. Placing their faith in Trump is a classic trope, immediately highlighting their difference with the MIGA (“Make Israel Great Again”) crowd, the far right and the religious nationalist settlers described above. They are appealing to a “higher power,” one aligned with the “true” security needs of Israel. After all, Trump saved us from the Iranian nuclear program, did he not? (He did not.) One might even say they are being as Jewish as their opponents, but they are appealing to a secular power rather than a divine one.
What these commanders are trying to do is restore order. While Israel might have committed crimes in Gaza, there was a reason. Israel went to war. War is hospitable to agents of chaos, especially Netanyahu and the settlers. They took advantage of the peace-loving nature of “normal” Israelis, commandeered the country and have not looked back since. The only conflict that matters in a conceptual universe anchored by Israeli impunity is the conflict within Israel. Trump should serve as the adjudicator in this conflict alone. In any case, once it is settled, all other conflicts will resolve themselves. When they do, the helm will be manned by those who should have been there all along – the honest ones, the moderate ones, the ones who have their fingers in all the proper pies. The basic agreement among the MIGAs — that the Palestinian problem persists — is as moderate as it is extreme. The only thing that matters is that it remains in Israeli hands.
The disdain for Netanyahu is also an attempt to regain control of the security services. The army, the national police, the Mossad and the Shin Bet are now thoroughly infiltrated by the religious nationalists. The senior ranks (majors to brigadiers) have changed profoundly over the past several years and even more profoundly since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, from centrist secular to far-right religious nationalist. If the former senior commanders are asked, they will tell you that their services have been hijacked (just like the war) by Kahanists, a reference to the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, infamous for his overtly militant, violent religious Jewish nationalism. This would be another attempt to portray the Israeli story as one of “moderates” fighting “extremists.” The generals would be restoring order not just to the country but to their professional homes as well.
I would like to offer a less appealing interpretation.
Every Israeli operating in an official capacity would be considered an extremist by any liberal standard that exists outside Israel. Israeli officials defend a policy of starvation, cancel anyone who dares to compare the suffering of Israelis to that of the Palestinians and outdo each other in gregarious oaths of loyalty to the state and its forever war. None of this would be happening were it not for an environment that was generated, maintained and expanded by the very same senior commanders who are now appealing to Trump to stop a war that has “robbed Israel of its identity and values.” They were the ones who backed Netanyahu’s support for Hamas as part of the “differentiation” strategy meant to divide and rule the Palestinians by supporting Hamas, the enemies of the Palestinian Authority and its leader, President Mahmoud Abbas. Perhaps most importantly, these senior commanders are the backbone of the Israeli occupation. They planned and executed countless measures meant to oppress the Palestinians. They were charged with keeping the occupation “discreet,” maintaining a system that reached into every aspect of Palestinian life and was thus able to dismantle Palestinian politics and most attempts at armed resistance. Palestinian extremism, in other words, is directly linked to the vigorous efforts expended by these commanders in attempting to annihilate the Palestinian middle.
Israel’s national police has certainly grown more violent under the leadership of Itamar Ben-Gvir as Minister for National Security. The army’s operational echelons are dominated by religious officers, often settlers, who have promoted genocidal agendas in Gaza. Even the Mossad, Israel’s famed foreign intelligence service, has turned more and more frequently to assassinations and violent, lethal offensives (consider the first 48 hours of Israel’s war with Iran and the “pager attack” in Lebanon) than to espionage. The Shin Bet has always been the most directly repressive organ of Israeli national security, charged as it is with maintaining the occupation. But all this violence is and can only be the rotten fruit of a rotten tree. Decades of selective enforcement and violence, decades of transformation into a policing (rather than a fighting) military, decades of assuming full impunity and violating international norms and laws, decades of repression running the gamut from blackmailing gay Palestinians to holding relatives of wanted Palestinians captive without trials — what result could these have had, given a trigger event as intense as the Oct. 7 massacre? Today’s visible violence, like the July 28 shooting murder of Palestinian activist Awdah Hathaleen in Masafer Yatta, which a notorious settler committed in broad daylight, on video, could only have occurred if its perpetrators were profoundly confident in the support of the military, the judiciary and intelligence organizations. And indeed, the settler who shot Hathaleen was briefly detained by police but has been released, while Hathaleen’s own relatives were arrested and are still in police custody. This profound confidence is the direct result of policies implemented and led by the same senior commanders who are now asking Trump to stop a genocide that simmered quietly under their leadership for decades.
Is there a conclusion? The only one that seems to present itself is that nothing has actually changed in the collective Israeli psyche. The rise in extremism that Israeli liberals are now decrying appears to be more about degrees of entrenchment than about a new direction for Israeli politics. The only debate in Israel remains the one about Netanyahu. Did you read what he said and did? Did you read what his son said? Did you hear what his wife did? How could they? How could they not? Both sides continue to kill Palestinians every day by starvation, bombing and gunfire from land and sea. In the words of Ecclesiastes: “The wind blows to the south and turns to the north, round and round it goes, ever returning on its course. … All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eyes never have enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing. What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; There is nothing new under the sun.” Nothing is more lethal than a hollow society.
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