The situation in Gaza is detreating and the international community has every right to intervene, but anyone who criticizes Israel’s warfare can’t be taken seriously unless they also have a serious suggestion as to how to protect Israeli citizens from another massacre by the genocidal wing of the Palestinian national movement.
Published in Swedish in Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet: https://www.svd.se/a/Xj17Vr/gor-inte-gaza-till-svensk-inrikespolitik
Israel’s new ground offensive in Gaza is raising stark Swedish reactions, as always. The left is denouncing Israel as a genocidal power indiscriminately killing Palestinians. The right is slightly more restrained, but it too claims that Israel is going too far. These reactions are understandable considering the horrifying images from Gaza shown on Swedish TV. But it’s more than that. Horrifying scenes are taking place all over the world, but Gaza, unlike other conflicts, has a unique role in Swedish politics. It’s an issue of interest but also a source of easily-won political points. The Swedish Left Party, Vänsterpartiet, uses it to show its electoral base how pro-Palestinian it is, so as not to lose votes to radical breakaway fractions, while The Social Democratic Party leaders use it to show their loyalty to old-school “humanitarian super power” policies. On the other side of the political spectrum, while Right Wing populist party, Sverige Demokraterna, continues marketing itself as “Sweden’s most pro-Israel party” as an alibi against accusations of antisemitism, Moderaterna, the ruling center-right party, is trying to maintain a responsible image, aligning itself with EU allies and international law, by presenting a moderate critical policy towards Israel. Sweden’s Gaza discourse, it seems, is more about domestic politics than the reality in Israel and Gaza.
But there is an Israeli reality which isn’t visible to Swedish news followers, one that adds another dimension and shows that Israel is more than just a blood thirsty monstrous state out for revenge. Those who choose to go beyond Swedish headlines, find that there are many Israelis who oppose their government and its Gaza policy. In fact, thousands of them demonstrate against it week after week. These are not only radical left-wingers from the fringes of the political spectrum. Israel is deeply split and even mainstream Zionist political leaders with hundreds of thousands of voters are speaking up against Netanyahu’s government.
A "sane state does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not set goals for itself like the expulsion of a population", said the leader of The Democrats, Israel’s Centre-Left Zionist party who’s also a retired IDF major general. When Netanyahu reacted by claiming that Golan’s statement was “wild incitement”, Golan refused to apologize. “The time has come for us to have a backbone of steel”, he said, “we must stand by our values as a Zionist, Jewish, and democratic state”. He added that the government ministers are corrupt and that the “war must be ended, the hostages returned, and Israel rebuilt”.
But it’s not only the Israeli Left. “What’s the strategy?”, said Yair Lapid, leader of the centrist “Yesh Atid” party, “we all support the elimination of Hamas, but Hamas will not disappear unless an alternative to its rule is presented. Getting the IDF stuck in Gaza for years is a strategic mistake, an economic disaster, and a diplomatic tragedy that will prevent us from being part of the historic change in the Middle East”.
Even some Israeli right-wing politicians oppose Netanyahu’s government. “This war is not a war for security but a war for power”, said Avigdor Liberman, a hardliner who in the past held important ministerial posts under Netanyahu, “this government is willing to pay any price for staying in power — even at the cost of the lives of the hostages and soldiers”. This is a point many in Israel agree on. According to a poll published by Israeli Chanel 12, 61% of the Israeli public prefers a deal which would return all Israeli hostages and end the war in Gaza, compared to only 25% who support expanding the fighting and occupying Gaza.
It seems like one must read news in Hebrew to understand that Israelis are more than just aggressors, just like one must read Arabic in order to understand that Palestinians are more than just victims. For example, anyone following Hamas-affiliated Telegram accounts in Arabic knows that besides images of Palestinian suffering, there are posts with images of suicide bombers standing next to bus wreckages accompanied by texts like "the buses carrying you will become coffins" and “our martyrs are on their way”. This isn’t just a reaction to Israel’s Gaza offensive. It’s been going on for decades. Long before October 7th, official Telegram posts by the al-Aqsa Brigades, a Fatah-aligned armed group, called the “heroes of the West Bank” to “stab, run over, slay and blow up”. “Oh heroes of Jerusalem”, one of them said, “the land is your land, what are you waiting for? The time has come to kill the Jews”. Naturally, Hamas takes it even further. Fathi Hamad, a member of the movement’s political bureau and former minister called on Palestinians to "buy knives for five shekels, sharpen them and decapitate the Jews". Naturally, these quotes are not available in Swedish and are not part of the Swedish discourse.
Still, Swedish politicians have every right to react to events in the Middle-East and in the current reality, there’s plenty of reasons to criticize Israel. There are, however, a few simple ideas which can make the criticism more grounded in reality and more balanced.
First, categorizing Hamas as a terrorist organization is correct, but it has an unwanted side effect. Because it deals with terror, some may assume that it’s a terror organization like others. But it’s not. It’s an army. Some may imagine it as a kind of Baader-Meinhof-like gang of youngsters in red and white keffiyehs squatting in abandoned buildings in down town Rafah and reading texts by Leon Trotsky. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Hamas military machine has brigades, battalions and commando units. It has strict military hierarchies and discipline as well as weapon manufacturing capabilities, a navy, military intelligence, cyber experts, a propaganda machine and thousands of young men to recruit, even during the IDF’s campaign. Hamas is clear about its end game – it’s a barbaric, fascist and fundamentalist movement committed to wipe the Jewish state off the face of the earth. Anyone who criticizes Israel’s war in Gaza can’t be taken seriously unless they also have a serious suggestion as to how to protect Israeli citizens from another massacre by the genocidal wing of the Palestinian national movement.
Second, sometimes one has to be honest even concerning political and military policies. Israeli society is deeply traumatised by a vicious attack which took the lives of more than 1,100 people. Everyone knows someone who was killed, a child who was kidnapped or a woman who was raped. Everyone saw the atrocities – homes burnet to ashes and dead bodies of all ages. Everyone is worried about a relative or a friend on the front lines. Everyone knows a survivor. Everyone is a survivor. The expectation that Israel will react in a calm, moderate and gentle way is absurd. This doesn’t mean that a wild storm of revenge is justifiable. It does mean that swedes would do well to ask themselves modestly and honestly how they react to crises.
Sweden was unaligned for over 200 years. Then a war started over 2,000 km away. Still, Sweden changed its policy almost over-night and joined NATO. In the same way, a handful of problems with integration caused the country which was known for its leaders asking its citizens to “open their hearts” to refugees because “their Europe has no walls”, made a former neo-Nazi party its second largest. It also reversed all of its immigration policies. These dramatic and, anything but calm and moderate changes, happened without one shot being fired at Sweden and without hundreds of Swedes being killed, raped or injured. Israel, on the other hand, apart from the horrors of October 7th, has had, 35,500 rockets fired directly at it in the last year and a half, targeting, displacing and killing civilians. Is Sweden really qualified to lecture it about reacting unproportionally? And finally, criticizing Israel is fine, but it shouldn’t be done according to the propaganda of Sweden’s so-called pro-Palestinian movement. For some reason, this movement has adopted an extremist narrative echoing Hamas propaganda which claims that the Jewish state has no right to exist. The slogan of a “free Palestine from the river to the sea” is a genocidal one, since it implies the elimination of Israel. The slogans calling for an “Intifada” are incitement for violence and the claim that Israelis are settler colonizer is historically ridiculous and politically dangerous. Those who criticizes Israel because they support a just peace and a political compromise in the Middle-East would do well to find better partners – instead of people who scream “crush Zionism” and are just as bad as those who automatically support everything Israel does; they can join hands with moderate Israelis who still believe in peace and are struggling to save their home from a never-ending cycle of violence.
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