Israel at war with itself

Although Hamas said that it had agreed to release all of the remaining Israeli hostages, live and dead, it did not say that it would accept most aspects of a plan presented by US President Donald Trump, including the demand that it disarm.

Kibbutz Nir Oz, Israel: At Kibbutz Nir Oz, time is frozen. The tricycles, dollhouses and washing detergent piled outside charred homes testify to lives that stopped two years ago when a Hamas assault left 117 people dead, kidnapped or missing from this small Israeli farming community near the Gaza Strip border. Wind chimes tinkle over the collapsed swings of absent children.

Of the 384 residents of Kibbutz Nir Oz at the time of the Hamas attack October 7, 2023, a handful have returned, but like Israel as a whole, they find themselves gripped still by a horror that the creation of the Jewish state in 1948 was intended to prevent. "Every conversation ends with the 7th of October," said Ola Metzger, who recently came back with her family.

Her husband, Nir Metzger, whose father was taken hostage by Hamas and killed last year in the southern Gaza city of Khan Younis, is the general secretary of the kibbutz. A big issue confronting him is whether to demolish burned and shattered houses or to preserve them as a memorial.

"It's a heated debate," he said, sitting in the bright kitchen of his newly constructed house. "I say demolish and rebuild. I don't want kids passing incinerated homes. It's time to move forward."

But how? Whether in a divided and more isolated Israel, or in a devastated Gaza, the future is for now shackled by new levels of distrust and hatred. Although Hamas said Friday that it had agreed to release all of the remaining Israeli hostages, live and dead, it did not say that it would accept most aspects of a plan presented by President Donald Trump, including the demand that it disarm. Trump welcomed the statement, and Israel said it would work with him.

The longest war of an endless Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not over yet and has come to challenge Israel's image and understanding of itself. Its military has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, raining down such destruction on every aspect of life in Gaza that much of the world accuses it of genocide. Antisemitism is on the rise. The attack this past week on a synagogue on Yom Kippur in Manchester, England, was only the most recent example.

For Palestinians, a statehood that more countries have recognized of late remains a remote aspiration, at best, and that is the immovable issue at the heart of war after war.

Trump, shrugging off more than a century of failed Western interventions in the Middle East, has proposed a form of tutelage over Gaza that posits prosperity "crafted by well-meaning international groups" as a "pathway" to peace.

It is an ambitious plan for a strip of land where destruction has reached apocalyptic proportions. The proposal was seemingly prepared in part to allow Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to claim victory over Hamas. If the hostages are freed, it would certainly bolster Netanyahu's standing.

But Trump's idea of turning Gaza into a coastal business emporium with "preferred tariff and access rates" and a marginal Palestinian role in governance seems at once demeaning to the people who live there and unlikely to work.

"This plan does not guarantee our rights as human beings with dignity," Riwaa Abu Quta, a young Palestinian woman who has been living in a tent in the coastal area of Muwasi for more than a year, said in a telephone interview. She has lost her home, her job and her hopes since the war began. "It gives us the feeling that displacement will be our identity."

Displacement and the quest for a homeland are, of course, intrinsic to the intertwined fates of Israelis and Palestinians. The Holocaust and the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, in which some 750,000 Palestinians were driven out during Israel's War of Independence, vie for greater weight on the sterile scales of competitive victimhood. By rekindling nightmarish memories of these disasters, the Oct. 7 attack and retaliatory war in Gaza have pushed the two sides deeper into enmity.

"The October 7 slaughter and seizure of hostages reinforced Holocaust associations for Israel, and for many Palestinians in Gaza, the war has been a new Nakba," said Yuval Shany, a professor of international law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. "So narratives feed themselves in an endless loop."

At the two-year mark of the greatest defeat in the country's 77-year history, Israelis find themselves mentally and physically exhausted, and not only the 295,000 reservists who have been called up again and again. About 83,000 Israelis emigrated in 2024, 50% more than the previous year. Seven members of the Israeli military died by suicide in July and August alone.

People either compulsively follow the news or, simply spent, do not follow it at all. They speak of being overloaded. Posters and stickers of hostages and fallen soldiers in Gaza fade and peel on walls and benches. Anger flares at the smallest thing. After repeated ugly brawls over lanes, the beachside Gordon swimming pool in Tel Aviv, established in 1956, sent a letter Aug. 7 urging its members to "avoid any expression of physical or verbal aggression."

Arab neighbors speak of an imperial Israel after Netanyahu's decapitation of Hezbollah in Lebanon and blow to Iran's nuclear program. But in Israel, there is no triumphal sense of regional military ascendancy.

Rather, Israel has found its weakest enemy, Hamas, the most intractable, perhaps because defeating an idea is never easy, and is consumed by doubt. An intensely interconnected society, where the collective, forged in school and through military service, is fundamental, now debates whether it has lost its way and its ideals.

"There is no history, as in America, of the rugged individual in Israel," said Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli author and historian. "The mythology here is of the rugged commune, and it is that sense of shared responsibility that has been shattered."

The two Israels

The former defense minister and chief of staff of the Israeli military, a man once close to Netanyahu, was angry. More than angry, he was shaking with indignation.

"We have lost our way. Eighty years after the Holocaust, we are talking about ethnic cleansing, Jewish supremacy, clearing Gaza City of its inhabitants," Moshe Yaalon said. "Are these the values of the state of Israel?"

Tears welled up, and he had to pause.

"I fought to defend the Jewish, democratic liberal state in the spirit of our Declaration of Independence," he said. "What we have now with this government is a tyrannical, racist, hateful, corrupt and boycotted leadership. That must be the main issue for the next election."

The prime minister's office declined to comment.

Of course, Israel is still a Middle Eastern country that holds elections -- one is due next year -- and where it is possible to say such things, at least as an Israeli Jew, without retribution. Still, Yaalon's fury reflects the widespread conviction that a fundamental compact of Israel's democracy was broken over the past two years and may be hard to repair.

At the heart of that compact is the idea that you never leave a soldier on the field. In allowing the hostages' agony to persist for two years in Gaza, where at least 41 were killed, Netanyahu transgressed against this core national tenet.

Worse, in the view of his critics, he placed his own interests above the nation's, doing everything to put off a commission of inquiry into the Oct. 7 debacle that stemmed in part from his policy of supporting Hamas to ensure that the Palestinian national movement remained divided and ineffectual.

Not so, say Netanyahu's many supporters. They view him as the nation's savior who, through a war of "resurrection," as he calls it, has vanquished Hamas and made Israel safer. The jury will likely be out for a long time, but to suggest that Israel's leader, after a total of 18 years in power, has no political future would be rash.

"Most Israeli prime ministers would probably have made the same decisions as Bibi," said Michael Oren, a former Israeli ambassador to the United States and deputy minister in Netanyahu's office, calling the prime minister by his nickname. "He may have no credibility in the world, but he saw Oct. 7 as a summons to history and stepped up."

The price has been high. Netanyahu has polarized Israelis and incensed the world.

Largely shielded from the extent of the terrible Palestinian suffering in Gaza, or in some cases untroubled by it, Israelis are consumed by their nation's internal fracture. The Oct. 7 attack brought the apotheosis of a long-brewing struggle between two Israels.

The first, a growing Messianic religious movement, now a decisive presence in the government, sees the Oct. 7 massacre of an estimated 1,200 people as a "miraculous moment that forced the Jewish nation to take another step toward redemption," as Daniella Weiss, a prominent leader of the settler movement, said.

That redemption, for Weiss and her many followers, takes the form of Israeli control of all the land of Eretz Israel, bequeathed -- as they see it -- by God to the Jews.

The second Israel, secular, liberal and committed to safeguarding the nation's democracy, sees this rightward drift as a mortal threat to the values embodied in the nation's founding charter. This calls for "complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants, irrespective of religion, race or sex."

That lofty goal has proved unattainable in a Jewish state where 2 million citizens, or 20% of the population, are Arab or Palestinian. But many still believe that abandoning the struggle for its ideals would betray Israel's essential promise.

"Bibi has done terrible things not only to Palestinians, but to us," said Gadi Shamni, a retired major general and a former Israeli military attache in Washington. "He has thrown away our basic values, of sanctifying life and of ethics in war, for which we sometimes paid a heavy price."

Shamni said that, "with ministers demanding that we act as war criminals," officers confronting a shadowy enemy embedded in Gaza's civilian urban fabric had struggled to uphold values considered sacrosanct during his own time in the military.

Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, a man convicted several times of inciting racism, has suggested that not even "a gram of food or aid should get into Gaza," and has called for "the clearing of 1 million people out of there" through "voluntary immigration."

Bezalel Smotrich, the hard-line Israeli finance minister, has called for "total annihilation" in Gaza. "They are to be destroyed, destroyed, destroyed," he said last year.

Such statements have fed the charges of Israeli genocide against Palestinians.

A dream foreclosed

Smotrich and Ben-Gvir reside in the occupied West Bank, where more than a half-million Israelis live. Freed of all constraints since the Oct. 7 attack, the settlers have rapidly stepped up their land grab in an attempt to foreclose the distant possibility of a Palestinian state.

The new Israeli flags that line West Bank highways proclaim a colonization that, 58 years after the 1967 battlefield victory that extended Israeli authority to the Jordan River, seems irreversible.

Across the biblical land Israelis call Judea and Samaria, Bobcats and other earthmovers heave rocks in clouds of dust. They carve dirt roads into terraced hillsides topped by the white caravans of yet another Israeli settlers' outpost.

Cameras are ubiquitous; no Palestinian life goes unwatched. Israeli authorities have installed hundreds of automated yellow gates at the entrances to Palestinian towns and villages. They may slam shut, fencing in their populations, at any hint of disturbance.

In Al Mughayir, a hillside village of about 3,000 people with a view of ancient olive and almond groves, recent Israeli depredations have been exacting. An incident Aug. 21 involving an overturned tractor and an injured settler -- the exact circumstances were never clarified -- led hundreds of Israeli soldiers to swarm into the village, detaining the mayor for nine days and searching more than 500 homes. At the same time, settlers hacked and bulldozed countless olive trees across the villagers' fields.

"I felt they were uprooting my own heart," said Aisha Abu Alia, 53, as she stood in the fields gazing at the devastation.

Later, in her house at the center of the village, wearing a purple headscarf, she sat flanked by several family members, two of them engaged in intricate embroidery. Over the course of her life, Abu Alia said, she had experienced ever greater pressure and humiliation, aimed at "throwing out every Palestinian from this land."

Unmarried, because "I know many people who got married and regretted it," Abu Alia lives in her parents' house. She has one sister and seven brothers, two of them in the United States who have constantly urged her to move there.

"But it's impossible to leave," she said, as if stating an evident truth. "Never."

Her house commands a view of the village and the fields beyond it where settlers bring their sheep to graze, as well as of the main road, and so it has been requisitioned several times by the Israeli military. On June 16, she said, dozens of soldiers burst into her home. An officer explained that she lived in a "terrorist neighborhood."

"Why don't you love Israel?" he asked, as Abu Alia recalled.

"Why don't you love Palestine?" she responded.

"There is no such thing as Palestine," the officer said.

"With God's will, one day there will be a Palestine and no Israel," she said.

This enraged the soldiers. Thirteen years ago, Abu Alia had sewn an elaborate tapestry depicting Palestine on all of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. It gave particular prominence to Al-Aqsa, the sacred mosque compound in Jerusalem that has long been a flash point.

An Israeli soldier hurled the framed tapestry to the floor, breaking the glass, Abu Alia recalled. She indicated the damage and escorted me around the house, pointing to slashed couches, a smashed clock and defaced photographs of her nephews.

I asked her about the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. "I did not celebrate, even if we did not feel anything for the Israeli victims because we have had so many dead," she said. "I knew our lives would be turned upside down."

Her 17-year-old niece, Sara, interjected: "Even if it had not happened, Israel would have done something like this. It just put everything into fast-forward."

"Gaza spilled over," said Samar, Abu Alia's cousin, pausing in her embroidery. "We lost homes, we lost trees, we lost many of our own. There is no law, nothing that stops them any longer. Our children are traumatized."

Her 8-year-old daughter, Nour, wearing a purple T-shirt emblazoned with the words, "Be a Younicorn," smiled bravely, a portrait of innocence. I wondered if the cycle of war would sweep away her life one day or if some almost inconceivable act of statesmanship might protect her.

"I don't see any possibility whatsoever of a two-state solution," said Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister. "There is too much history here now and too little geography."

Israel, hostage

Viki Cohen fondled the charred Rubik's Cube found in the disabled tank from which, on Oct. 7, 2023, her then-19-year-old son Nimrod was dragged by masked Hamas operatives into Gaza. The other three members of his tank crew were killed.

Nimrod Cohen, along with an estimated 20 hostages -- and the corpses of 25 others -- has now been held in Gaza for more than 725 days. He recently turned 21. Every few months, Cohen and her husband, Yehuda, have received "signs of life" communications from the Israeli military. For many other families, a dreaded knock on the door has signaled the slaying of their loved ones.

"He loved the Rubik's Cube," said Cohen, who used to work for a company providing caregivers for the aged, but quit more than a year ago. "All my time goes to bringing Nimrod back home."

Israel, for two years now, has been taken hostage. Whether this nightmare will end with an exchange of the hostages for Palestinian prisoners in the next few days or weeks remains to be seen.

"We hope it's a matter of days," Yehuda Cohen said, after hearing that Hamas had agreed to free all of the hostages. His whole family was gathered Saturday in a state of extreme tension and emotion. He struggled for words, his wife struggled for breath. "I can't talk now, I am counting the minutes and even the seconds," he said. "I have to take care of my son."

The nation is on tenterhooks. Turn on the TV, and there is a discussion about the hostages. Look around, and there are the empty plastic yellow chairs or yellow ribbons that have become their symbol. Listen to anyone, and, at the very least, it seems, some personal bond ties them to the hostage nightmare. Israel can seem very small.

There are live hostages and dead hostages because this is a conflict in which even corpses are used to inflict psychological torment on the enemy and are considered tradable assets.

Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets at different times to demand that the government recognize the nation's anguish and prioritize the hostages' release. Many, including the Cohens, have been protesting for almost three years, first against Netanyahu's attempt to debilitate the Supreme Court as a means to exercise unfettered power, and then against his perceived neglect of the hostages.

In an earlier interview, Yehuda Cohen, an algorithmic engineer in a tech company, wore a black T-shirt with the words, "Ceasefire Hostage Deal Now." Nimrod is a normal child, he said. "He's special to us because he's our son. We're only talking about him because he had the misfortune to be kidnapped, and we're fulfilling our basic responsibility to fight for his release."

His tone was matter-of-fact. This "now needless war" has been going on a long time, far too long in his view. His wife cannot sleep thinking of her son who never sees sunlight.

"We are disgusted, we are frustrated," Yehuda Cohen said. "We see Netanyahu's government as our enemy. He's only prolonged the war so he can survive. My son Nimrod is being held in a tunnel financed by money Netanyahu pushed into Gaza."

He looked at me hard. "Everybody is to blame except him, except Caesar," he said. The only way to end the war, he believes, is for Trump to force Netanyahu to do so.

The Cohens think that if their son survives, he will be one of the last ones out. He is young. He is a soldier. Hamas has every reason to hold on to him. Still, they hope, and now that hope is fervid.

I asked how they feel about their nation, two years into its trauma. "I don't want my country to be a country that rules others," Yehuda Cohen said. "I don't want to live in a country whose international borders are not declared and recognized. I want to live in a normal country."

'The place of funerals'

Over several weeks, I spoke regularly by phone to Riwaa Abu Quta in Gaza. The war has taken her from her home in Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, now largely razed by Israel, to Muwasi, near Khan Younis, where she lives in a tent in a camp with hundreds of other displaced people.

At 30, she has lived through many wars, but none so brutal. She is scared and angry, "as any human being would be." She has tried to care for her younger sister Alaa, who has muscular dystrophy, but the required medicine has long since disappeared.

Her tasks are boring, she said. Finding food of some kind, perhaps canned beans; securing drinkable water; cleaning the tent where her family lives. All the while listening to the hum of Israeli drones or the roar of fighter jets that could deliver more carnage in the rubble.

Sometimes, she puts sand in the pockets of clothes draped over the tent as protection from bullets or shrapnel. She knows it is ridiculous. But so is her crazed situation. There is no safe place. Her nightmares begin at daybreak.

She feels history is repeating itself. Her forebears were driven out of a village near Jerusalem. In a way, she said, she is losing that village again.

Her voice is always calm. It is also full of pain. She has lost countless friends. Gaza, she said, has become "the place of funerals." More than 66,000, according to Gaza health authorities, who do not distinguish between combatants and civilians.

She had a world: an online job with an educational company, an application for a scholarship to study in Britain, her gym, her home. That is gone. All she has now is sand.

She blames Israel above all for killing the innocent; Hamas for bringing disaster on the Palestinian people; and a feckless world that chooses this moment to recognize a Palestinian state when the step is "too late and so small compared to the destruction we live."

Mutating rage

At Kibbutz Nir Oz, the demolition of charred and damaged houses began Aug. 31. Backhoes were used to break down the "safe rooms," the hardest to tear down, even if in many cases they proved anything but safe. It was grim work, but perhaps a signal of a new beginning.

Some houses will be left untouched, at least for now, including the remains of the home of the Bibas family, whose suffering was spread over three generations.

Yarden Bibas and his wife, Shiri, and their two young children, ages 5 and 9 months, were taken by Hamas as hostages. Shiri was killed in captivity and her corpse returned after 505 days, one day after the bodies of her children. Yarden was released alive after 484 days. Shiri's parents, Yossi and Margit Silverman, were burned alive in their Nir Oz home.

"Yarden, we're glad you're back. Sorry, forgive us," says a message on the ruin that was his home.

Such slaughter revived Holocaust memories, mocked the "Never Again" embodied in Israel's very creation, and so roused the country to a deep rage. The lesson of docile death learned over centuries was that Israel hits back, always. If this fury was disturbing to some, it was also understandable to many, at least for a few weeks, when much of the world rallied to Israel's side.

That sympathy, after Gaza's obliteration, has generally vanished. Israel is isolated, as was illustrated last month when Netanyahu was left to detail what he considers his war's successes to a nearly empty meeting of the U.N. General Assembly. Representatives from around the world walked out.

In Israel, anger over Oct. 7 persists, redoubled by what is seen as the Hamas attack's rapid relegation to a small detail of the war, and by the conviction that fervid anti-Zionism around the world has crossed a line into resurgent antisemitism. "After the Holocaust, it was unsavory to hate Jews," said Oren, the former Israeli ambassador. "But that period has ended, and the world has reverted to form."

There is also a strong feeling, however, that the way Netanyahu prosecuted the war led Israel to a sustained brutality in Gaza that will haunt the nation for many years. Netanyahu denies the charge that he persisted in the war in order to remain in power and evade taking responsibility for a disaster, but the charge seems unlikely to abate.

Gorenberg, the Israeli historian, rejected the accusation against Israel of "genocide," noting that the term was first used in the very early weeks of the war when Hamas missiles were raining down on Tel Aviv, and so was evidently stained from the start with "an unjustifiable animus."

However, he added, "There have been horrible, reprehensible war crimes in a war that at some point, I would say early 2024, ceased serving the purpose of defending Israel."

This long war has transformed young Israelis from the TikTok generation to a cohort forged in a crucible of violence that has known few restraints. How the experience will affect them, and what trauma they will carry, is as yet unclear, but it will bear heavily on the direction that Israel takes.

The same may be said of the Palestinians, many killed, displaced, wounded, their national aspirations in tatters despite all the pious words of support from an indignant world.

"Enough of blood and tears. Enough," Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel declared on the White House lawn 32 years ago in the time of hope that was the close of the 20th century. But this century's thirst for blood has so far proved unquenchable.