‘I WOULD HAVE DROPPED THREE NUCLEAR BOMBS’

Talking to Israelis about the war in Gaza

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Netzarim Corridor in the Gaza Strip on November 19. / Photo by Maayan Toaf/Israel Government Press Office.

How to explain why Israel does what it does? How to explain the bombing, maiming, and starving of women, children, the elderly, and the infirm in Gaza as if all were active members of Hamas and plotting the next attack? There is history, of course—we all know what history—and it is always present. 

I have an Israeli friend who came to me at a Washington cocktail party thrown in the mid-1980s by the late Milton Viorst, whose New Yorker reports on the Middle East were required reading. My new friend—call him Sammy—told me with a small smile, no wink, that he was a consultant now at work in Washington. We talked about the Arab world—his English was fluent if heavily accented—and I overheard him talking in French and Arabic at the party. Some consultant, I thought.

Always the reporter, I had a few lunches with him and talked a lot about US and Israeli foreign policy. At some point, I invited him to lunch at a wonderful German restaurant near the National Press Building in downtown Washington where I had an office. He was there when I arrived and the German waiter told us the specials. My friend then began a conversation with him in what seemed to be fluent German.

When the waiter left I said, with some annoyance: “German, too. You speak German?” He shrugged: “Do you really think Eichmann was the first?” He was referring to the famed 1960 Israeli apprehension in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Holocaust during World War II. He went on: “I know every side street and back alley of Damascus.” The Syrian capital was long believed to be a major escape destination for senior Nazi officials after the war.

That genocide is always present in Israel. Should it be? is not a question that is asked, especially today, by the Israeli leadership. The past is enough for Israeli prime ministers to justify foreign assassinations and sabotage.

It was no surprise that President-elect Donald Trump would nominate a secretary of state and an ambassador to Israel who are totally committed to the Israeli cause after the Hamas surprise attack on October 7 last year in Israel. Trump made his view clear in his debate in June with an addled President Biden when he said of Israel’s war with Hamas that America should let Israel “finish the job.” 

I have two friends in Israel who share the history of constant turbulence, amid open war—provoked in many cases by Israeli land grabs—with neighbors since Ben-Gurion declared Israel to be a state in 1948 and the US and the United Nations recognized it the same day. They have fought and suffered grievous wounds for their country. They also despise Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his corruption and deceit and believe he should be out of office and in prison for his crimes. Both are educated and readers of history. Both are grandparents of children who have been on and off at war, as reserve members of the Israel Defense Forces, since last fall.

So I asked both recently to tell me what they thought of the horrid endgame—targeted at civilians with the world watching—now going on in Gaza.