Israel has become impossible for me to defend ...Middle East

The lies are undeniable. Fifteen bodies are discovered, shot and buried in a mass grave. The dead are Palestinian men, most dressed in uniform as Red Crescent paramedics and Civil Defence first responders. The Israel Defence Forces admit the killing, but insist that its soldiers fired only when confronted by ambulances “advancing suspiciously toward IDF troops without headlights or emergency signals”.

Within days, a video of the incident on 23 March proves them wrong. The phone found on one of the dead men contains footage: it shows a convoy of ambulances and emergency vehicles clearly displaying both headlights and emergency flashing signals, as it stops by the side of a road. We see men disembark unarmed in their high-vis paramedic uniforms. We see the IDF open fire. There is no sign of the threatening Palestinian attack suggested by IDF briefings.

Eventually, an anonymous Israeli officer admits that its initial account was “mistaken” and was based on “the testimony of soldiers in the incident”. A spokesman adds only that “all claims, including the documentation circulated about the incident, will be thoroughly and deeply examined to understand the sequence of events and the handling of the situation”.

It is the lie that makes Israel’s military impossible to defend.

It is not the first time individuals serving in the IDF have lied, or been caught lying, about the deaths of civilians. Readers may and should remember the shifting obfuscations that followed the death of Shireen Abu Akleh, a veteran Palestinian-American journalist killed in 2022 while wearing a visible press vest. A New York Times investigation found evidence that the bullet that killed her came from an Israeli military vehicle; the IDF eventually admitted there was a “high possibility that Ms Abu Akleh was accidentally hit by IDF gunfire”. For months it had blamed Palestinian gunmen.

Yet this new lie is the most clear-cut and easily disproven since Israel embarked on its mission to avenge the ethnic and sexual violence that Hamas unleashed on southern Israeli peacebuilding communities on 7 October 2023.

To those of us who are still shaken by the impact of that antisemitic rampage, and who have expended months of energy trying to explain to a hard-hearted world why Israel’s trauma needs to be understood with empathy, it is a moment of bitter frustration. At a certain point, sympathetically explaining the trauma behind a revenge cycle, in which atrocity answers atrocity, begins to feel empty of moral purpose.

This lie by the IDF matters because it undermines a central axiom of Israel’s war on Hamas: that Hamas are Islamist fascists and Israel is a moral democracy, which holds its own soldiers and politicians accountable when they make mistakes.

Those of us who have historically defended Israel do so because we know the first part of this axiom to be true. It is true that Hamas is a barbaric death cult, which suppresses the slightest sign of dissent. A rare smattering of protests against its regime took place last month, emboldened by ordinary Gazans’ sense that Hamas’s hold has weakened under Israel’s assault, only for the protest’s leaders to be kidnapped, viciously tortured to death, then dumped in the street as a warning.

Gazan society under Hamas is one of the most anti-liberal places in the world: the constitution defines women merely as baby-machines for making the next generation of male warriors; to be visibly queer has been authoritatively described as “a death sentence”.

square KATE MALTBY

The 7 October massacre taught Jews, yet again, the world doesn’t care

If we hold Israel to higher standards, it is because Israel claims to be a morally superior entity. By many obvious democratic standards, that claim remains true. Newspapers which oppose Benjamin Netanyahu’s government circulate widely, notably the liberal-left icon Haaretz, while a thriving civil society includes a passionate human rights sector which actively challenges his policies.

Much of the evidence of alleged Israeli military abuses, relied upon by foreign critics to attack the Israeli government, is actually collated by such Israeli organisations. This week, for example, The Guardian relied for an analysis of Israeli military cover-ups on the work of the Yesh Din organisation. Yesh Din is an organisation led by Israeli campaigners committed to Palestinian human rights. Its executive director Ziv Stah is a survivor of the 7 October attacks in the kibbutz of Kfar Aza.

This is the Israeli plurality which gives liberal allies hope. Israel’s defenders point out – rightly – that there is no Gaza Strip equivalent of the Yish Din; no critical Gaza newspaper like Haaretz, able to freely attack the leadership of Hamas.

Day by day, however, Israel’s claims to function as an open and liberal democracy ring more hollow. For the past two years, Netanyahu has been pushing through legislative attempts to take control of the Supreme Court. This November, the Israeli government ordered a boycott of Haaretz, demanding every government official and every citizen working for a government body cease to deal or communicate with the paper.

Netanyahu cares little what Europe’s last tottering liberal democracies think of him. As former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Daily Mail last year – on the paper’s well-informed foreign policy podcast 90 Seconds to Midnight, since rebranded as Apocalypse Now – Netyanhu listens only to his own sense of destiny. “Netanyahu is a captive of his own sense of mission, that he was destined, perhaps by divine providence, to save the Western world from the most radical, extreme fundamentalist, murderous opponents of our civilisation, and these are the Iranians and the Islamic jihad.”

Against such opponents, what is a little issue of human rights standards? Or the respect of the international order? As Olmert added: “He thinks only he is capable of doing it for the Western world. All these other [Western leaders] are newcomers, inexperienced.” Instead of the likes of Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer and Olaf Scholz, Netanyahu has spent years aligning himself with the West’s autocrats: Donald Trump and Viktor Orban.

The problem for liberal Israelis, and for all Jews who consider Israel their ancestral homeland, is that in the eyes of the rest of the world, Netanyahu has aligned not only himself but the entire state of Israel with Trump’s populist and antiliberal values. It will be decades, if ever, before that reputational link between Israel and Trumpism can be decoupled.

Meanwhile, Hamas continues to pump propaganda onto social media, reframing the millennia-long Jewish presence in the land of Israel as a wholesale colonial invasion. To the youngest adult generation of Europeans, raised on such misinformation, it no doubt seems bizarre that those of us who ever believed in human rights could once also believe in Israel.

It may also seem bizarre that the death of 15 men on a roadside, after the deaths of thousands under Israeli bombardment in Gaza, should be the moment where any of us draw a line. Yet when a government pushes a lie about how 15 men were killed, and the lie is proven to be false, we no longer trust them to tell the truth about all the other thousands dead.

That is why this IDF lie is a watershed moment for Israel’s defenders abroad. Israel can either be an enlightened nation fighting Islamist barbarism, or it can be just another place where power executes the powerless and lies to the press. It cannot be both.

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