“What Is Israel Supposed To Do?” And Other Stupid Questions

A few years ago, out of nowhere, a friend of mine confessed to a murder.

We’ll call him Izzy.

Izzy and his roommate, Paul, had been friends since they were kids. They and their families lived happily together in an apartment that had more space than they needed, so when some of Izzy’s extended family moved in, Paul didn’t mind.

But when Paul found out they were planning to partition the apartment, evicting him from the areas they controlled, he was furious. Especially because they’d secured most of the nicest rooms for themselves.

Izzy tried to be reasonable, he patiently explained that because he’d lived in the apartment for several years, his relatives from across the world had a god-given right to move in and take over, but Paul wouldn’t listen:

“Whatever the outcome,” said Paul, “I will stick to my offer of equal tenancy for everyone. But if you force us into a fight over the whole apartment, my family and I will drive you out into the street.”

That’s not how it worked out.

Izzy’s relatives “persuaded” the landlord to proceed with the partition, Paul, as promised, fought back, and when the dust settled, Izzy’s family had taken control of the bedrooms, the bathroom, the living room and the kitchen, with Paul’s family relegated to the basement and a little shed in the back garden.

Several years passed like this. More and more of Izzy’s relatives arrived to take over more and more of the apartment, conditions for Paul’s family became increasingly unbearable until finally, perhaps inevitably, one of them snapped. He broke free, radicalised by hate and fury, and killed the first person he could get his hands on.

That person was Izzy’s daughter.

“Oh God, that’s awful,” I said. “So that’s the guy you murdered?”

“Well, not quite,” Izzy explained, “I no idea exactly who did it or how to find him, so I went into the yard, smashed the shed to pieces, and killed dozens of men, women and children with a sledgehammer.”

“Oh, wow…okay, but that was just the shock, right? A flash of blind but understandable rage?”

“Oh, no,” he replied. “I kept it up for over fifteen months! Also, I went into the basement, killed a bunch of people there, even though they didn’t do anything at all, and cleared some more space for more of my relatives.

I even accidentally killed a few of my aunts and cousins while I was swinging my hammer around. But luckily, the biggest, most expensive lawyer in the world will defend me literally no matter what I do.”

“So wait” I said, “you murdered hundreds of innocent people, and even killed some of your relatives, all in the hopes of killing a guy you can’t definitively identify and therefore can’t ever be sure you’ve killed?!”

“Well, yeah,” he shrugged, looking a little confused. “What was I supposed to do?”

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In the fifteen months, between October 7th, 2023 and January 19th, 2025, those of us who criticised Israel’s response to Hamas’ attack spent a lot of time answering questions about what Israel was supposed to do.

What was Israel supposed to do except kill tens of thousands of women and children, flatten hundreds of thousands of homes, and commit such a litany of war crimes that Wikipedia had to create an entire page to keep track of them?

What choice did Israel have, given that Hamas took 251 Israelis hostage, but to drop ~85,000 tonnes of bombs on the same five-by-twenty-five-mile strip of land where those hostages were being held, killing at least 33 of them?

How else was Israel supposed to secure the release of those hostages except through armed raids like the Nuseirat massacre that rescued 4 hostages at the cost of around 270 Palestinian lives, or the Battle of Shuja’iyya where, in a textbook demonstration of the care they take to avoid civilian casualties, IDF soldiers killed three shirtless, white flag-waving, Hebrew-speaking Israeli hostages?

I mean, yes, they could have agreed to the ceasefire deals that the entire international community was pleading with them to accept, deals that secured the bloodshed-free release of 105 hostages in 2023, another 30 in 2025, and would almost certainly have brought them all home if Israel hadn’t resumed the killing.

They could have accepted the almost universally supported peace plan that has been on the floor of the UN since 1988, nearly twenty years before Hamas even took power in Gaza (in the most recent vote, out of 172 countries, 153 voted in favour, ten abstained, and only 9 voted against. The United States and Israel are the only consistent holdouts).

They could simply have chosen to follow the Talmudic passage that states, “anybody who destroys a single life, it is as if he destroyed an entire world,” instead of the one Netanyahu advocated, “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling…”

But sadly, that’s not how it worked out.

After violating the second ceasefire agreement from the day it began, Israel declared over two-thirds of Gaza off-limits to Palestinians, cut off medical supplies, food, and fuel to two million already sick, starving and suffering people, and continued its annexation of the West Bank, killing 835 civilians(none of whom had anything to do with the October 7th attacks or the actions of Hamas) while carrying out the largest seizure of territory in thirty-two years.

Benjamin Netanyahu has never been subtle about his intentions towards the Palestinians. On September 22nd, 2023, two weeks before October 7th, he stood before the UN General Assembly, holding a map of “Greater Israel,” with Gaza and the West Bank completely erased.

And now, thanks to the world’s seemingly limitless willingness to ignore or justify his crimes, he’s closer than ever to achieving his goal.

If only there were some historical precedent that could help us figure out what we’re supposed to do.

On January 9, 1944, the award-winning novelist, Arthur Koestler published, We The Screamers, a 2012 word excoriation of the apathy and cowardice that enabled the Holocaust:

…At present, we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing by hot steam, mass-electrocution, and live burial, of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch.

I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worthwhile. The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and whatnot. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies and that they didn’t believe a word of it.

As to [England], I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops, and their attitude is the same. They don’t believe in concentration camps, they don’t believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock.

In 2025, there’s no need to smuggle photos out of Poland.

Israeli celebritiesand politicians openly state their genocidal intentions. IDF soldiers proudly post war crimes on social media. Journalists, those who are still alive, document the devastation daily and beam it to our phones.

And yet there are still the people who deny or dismiss the images coming out of Gaza, whose mental self-defences filter out the reports of physical and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons, people who assure themselves that the video evidence of IDF troops executing paramedics and the doctors’ firsthand accounts of children shot in the head and chest by snipers are propaganda lies.

Others still claim with a straight face that a fifteen-month military campaign against an occupied people, a campaign that has displaced 95% of the civilian population and has no stated objectives beyond the transparently insincere “free the hostages” and the self-admittedly impossible “destroy Hamas,” isn’t a genocide.

But thankfully, there are still people who understand the lessons of the atrocities that Koestler spent a decade screaming about.

People with the courage to face the truth, even if they don’t like what they see.

People who refuse to accept that violence and hatred are their only options.

People who are willing to fight against dehumanisation, nationalism, and cruelty whenever and wherever it appears.

Because that, for the record, is what all of us are supposed to do.

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