So what arguments has the pro-war camp put forward? It has quite rightly emphasised the plight of the remaining Israeli hostages being held in Gaza and the need to free them. But as I previously argued, the attempt to free them through military means has comprehensively failed. 3 hostages were freed through the war, one very early on and two in February. 3 hostages were killed by the IDF in a friendly fire incident and there have been reports of more such incidents. While this cannot yet be verified, Hamas has reported that some hostages were killed by Israeli bombs, and former hostages have stated that they were more afraid of the warplanes than their captors. In contrast 105 hostages were released through negotiations and a hostages/prisoner exchange. Thus, it is beyond dispute that hostages have only been freed in significant numbers through negotiations, and that the war has killed at least as many hostages as it has saved. Continuing the war to save the hostages is an example of the traditional definition of insanity, doing the same thing a second time and expecting a different result.

What else? A key argument made is that Israel needs to ‘finish the job’ by invading Rafah. The ‘job’ is fully destroying Hamas, or at least its military wing. Israel says that there are 4 remaining Hamas battalions in Rafah, and thus Hamas will not have been neutralised while they continue to exist. Firstly, I do not see this as a remotely credible goal. Let’s imagine Israel managed to kill or arrest every single Hamas fighter (almost certainly killing living hostages in the process). What then? There would still be plenty of ordinary Hamas members, or Gazans who might come to be Hamas members in the future. You can perhaps destroy an organisation’s military wing, but you can’t permanently crush an idea. But let’s say that Hamas as a party ceased to exist. Another Palestinian Islamist party would soon take its place, almost certainly more extreme than Hamas. Even if Israel managed to push large numbers of Palestinians over the border into Egypt (it is hard to see Egypt accepting this) then militants could launch attacks on Israel from there, just as the PLO did from Lebanon in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

And what of the cost of trying to entirely ‘destroy Hamas’? A recent report from the Israeli/Palestinian website +972 featured anonymous testimonies from soldiers who recently served in Gaza. They revealed the IDF’s modus operandi in Gaza had been to accept the death of 15-20 civilians as collateral damage for the assassination of a low-ranking Hamas operative and more than 100 civilians to a kill a commander. The report suggests that such combatant-civilian ratios were far higher than anything the US military had used in its wars in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. It is ratios like this that explain the enormous death toll in Gaza to some 35,000 (likely a conservative estimate), with around 80,000 injured and vast numbers made homeless. In January, Oxfam calculated that the death rate per day in Gaza was higher than any other 21^st century conflict. While horrendous, the death toll alone does not testify to the scale of destruction that Gaza has suffered, the demolition of all its universities, of archives, of historic buildings, of a large proportion of the built environment. This comes after previous rounds of aerial bombardment since 2007, with normality never fully restored due to the strict limits on goods allowed into Gaza. This is in addition to the growing famine throughout the Gaza strip, which is the biggest threat of all to life and well-being. All of this is going to get still worse if Israel continues and widens its operation in Rafah, as Rafah is where most of the people displaced from the rest of Gaza have been sheltering. All talk of precision attacks cannot disguise the fact that it will lead to many more thousands dying, of which plenty would be civilians. Sometimes supporters of the war argue that it is needed to ‘free Gaza from Hamas’. I hope it is clear by now that nobody in Gaza is asking to be freed like this, and even those Palestinians who oppose Hamas are firmly against this war. You do not liberate people by bombing them.

Another argument made is that Israel needs to ‘restore deterrence’. Essentially the argument is that Palestinians must be hit so hard that they will never again attempt anything like October 7^th. I think this argument misses something about human psychology. Yes, there have been Palestinian writers such as Bashir Abu-Manneh who have pointed out that Hamas was deeply foolish not to predict the scale of the onslaught Israel would inflict upon them after the October 7^th attack. But when someone is bombing you to oblivion, who are you more likely to blame – the people who provoked it or those doing the bombing? And if October 7^th radicalised some Israelis, pushing them to more extreme-right positions, the war on Gaza has radicalised some Palestinians. Inevitably some people who did not support violent resistance to occupation will now do so. It won’t be surprising if a few people who have lost most of their families in time seek to avenge their deaths through violent means.  The argument from restoring deterrence also fails; the war is counterproductive and will in fact create the conditions for the next attack on Israeli civilians.

The deterrence argument is closely related to the argument that Israel needs to finish the war ‘so that October 7^th can never happen again’. This is an understandable desire. The October 7^th massacre was certainly the biggest Palestinian guerrilla attack on Israelis since 1948. But there have been many Palestinian attacks, both against military and civilian targets, since the foundation of the state. Around 700 Israeli civilians were killed during the Second Intifada in the early 2000s. Broadly defined then, there have been ‘October 7ths’ before and there will be again. Because Palestinians harbour deep seated hatred for Jews and seek to murder them en masse? No, because there are underlying injustices that have never been dealt with. Millions of people have been living for decades without national citizenship and without freedom, imposed either from within through direct military occupation or from without through siege and closed borders. Until there is a political process which gives Palestinians rights, whether in a two-state or one-state context, Palestinian resistance to occupation and oppression will continue. We can hope that such resistance will be primarily non-violent – through such forms as BDS and international court cases – but it is inevitable that while injustice continues, so will violence. And however strong your army, however much you try and put down the military resistance, sometimes it will get through and inflict brutal damage.

It is not quite a rational argument, but I don’t think we can rule out revenge for October 7^th as a major motivation for the war. Supporters of the war hint at this when they say that Israel had to respond, had to take action, had to make Hamas pay. Inflicting a certain level of suffering on Hamas, and on the Gazans who supposedly support them, was necessary to restore Israeli self-esteem and confidence. If a person only cares about Israel lives, and think Palestinian ones are expendable it is difficult to argue against this position; it is essentially an amoral stance. But I think we can at least point out that it is a recipe for permanent war. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is nothing if not a cycle of violence, in which every attack from each side represents revenge for a previous one. October 7^th was not the beginning of the conflict, it was in itself a form of revenge for the siege of Gaza, for provocations on the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif, for settler violence in the West Bank, for the shooting of unarmed protestors in the Great Return March in 2018-19. Everything can be explained with relation to a prior cause if you are so inclined, all the way back to the events of 1948. To call for revenge is to create the conditions for future revenge against your own people. The only way to break the cycle is for once not to respond by force.

It is not as if the only choice was between a military response and doing nothing – in the immediate aftermath of Oct 7^th Israel could have criminalised the issue, demanded that the ICC served warrants for the arrest of Hamas militants and that the UN negotiate the release of the hostages. Not only would such an approach have saved many lives it would have garnered Israel a lot more international sympathy. And then they might have restarted the much-stalled peace process. If you want to deter people from supporting from Hamas you need to make a deal with their opponents in the PLO/Fatah, to show that negotiations can bring results where violence cannot. Yet a renewed Palestinian Authority plan for statehood, in which the PA would take control of Gaza as well as the West Bank, has just been vetoed.

Lastly, the argument is made now that to agree a ceasefire would be to grant Hamas a victory. This argument simply doesn’t add up. Hamas has sustained vast damage to its military capabilities, lost thousands of fighters and can barely govern the Gaza strip any more. And how could having lost so many Gazans (plus hundreds of Palestinians killed in the West Bank) count as any kind of Palestinian victory? Moreover, is anyone winning now? With hundreds of Israelis still being held hostages, some 600 hundred Israeli soldiers killed while fighting, and most of the population of Gaza still prevented from returning to their homes, who exactly is winning from the current situation? Except for Netanyahu’s victory in keeping himself in power it seems like a lose-lose situation for everyone.

In the final analysis the pro-war arguments fall. They never stood up to begin with. End the war. Ceasefire now. Free the hostages through a negotiated prisoner exchange – an agreement is there for the taking. Restart a political process for a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is no other way

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