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03-06-2025
JERUSALEM: As Israel’s devastating war on Gaza grinds on, pushed forward by a prime minister insistent that a goal of total military victory be met, the divisions within Israeli society are growing increasingly deeper.
In the last few weeks, as Israeli peace activists and antiwar groups have stepped up their campaign against the conflict, supporters of the war have also increased their pressure to continue, whatever it’s humanitarian, political or diplomatic cost.
Members of the military have published open letters protesting the political motivations for continuing the war on Gaza, or claiming that the latest offensive, which is systematically razing Gaza, risks the remaining Israeli captives held in the Palestinian territory.
Another open letter has come from within Israel’s universities and colleges, with its signatories doing a rare thing within Israel since the war began in October 2023; focusing on Palestinian suffering.
Elsewhere, campaigns of protest and refusal of military service have spread, a result of a mixture of pro-peace sentiment and more prevalent anger at the government’s handling of the war, posing a risk to Israel’s war effort, which is reliant upon the active participation of the country’s youth.
The war’s critics say that the man they oppose, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has become reliant upon the extreme right to maintain his coalition and an opposition too cowardly to confront him in the face of mounting international accusations of genocide.
Powerful far right
It is important not to confuse the growing domestic criticism of the Israeli government’s handling of the war with any mass sympathy for the Palestinian people.
A recent poll reported that 82 percent of Jewish Israeli respondents would still like to see Gaza cleared of its Palestinian population, with almost 50 percent also backing what they said was the “mass killing” of civilians in enemy cities occupied by the Israeli army and on Monday, thousands of Israelis led by the country’s far-right 
national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, rampaged through occupied East Jerusalem’s Old City, chanting “death to Arabs” and attacking anyone perceived to be either Palestinian or defending them.
Also addressing the crowd at the “Jerusalem Day” march was the country’s ultranationalist finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who has been vocal in his push for the annexation of the occupied West Bank and the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.
Smotrich asked the crowd; “are we afraid of victory?”; “Are we afraid of the word ‘occupation?’” The crowd, described as “revellers” within parts of Israeli media responded with a resounding “no”.
“There’s a cohort of the extreme right who feel vindicated by a year and a half of war,” the former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas told media. “They think their message that, if you blink you lose; if you pause, you lose; if you waver, you lose, has been borne out.”
Growing dissent
Alongside the intensifying of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, which has now killed more than 54,000 Palestinians, voices of dissent have grown louder. In April, more than 1,000 serving and retired pilots issued an open letter protesting a war they said served “political and personal interests” rather than security ones. Further letters, as well as an organized campaign encouraging young Israelis to refuse to show up for military service, have followed.
