Yes, How We Defend Ourselves Matters

Most Israelis want innocent Palestinian lives to be protected. Our leaders should take note and ensure our policies reflect our values

Photo by Jaber Jehad Badwan, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

In the months following Hamas’s horrific attack on October 7, 2023, as Israel launched its military campaign against the terrorist group in Gaza, American leaders issued a steady refrain: Israel has the right to defend itself — but how it does matters.

“We stand strongly for the proposition that Israel has not only the right but the obligation to defend itself and to do everything possible to make sure that this October 7 can never happen again,” then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken said standing alongside President Isaac Herzog in Tel Aviv on November 3.

“We’ve been clear that as Israel conducts its campaign to defeat Hamas, how it does so matters,” he said. “It matters because it’s the right and lawful thing to do.”

Vice President Kamala Harris used the same language following her meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on July 24, 2024.

“I’ve said it many times, but it bears repeating: Israel has a right to defend itself, and how it does so matters,” said Harris, who repeated that line, almost verbatim, in her televised debate against President Donald Trump in September of that year

At the time, the statements struck some as preachy and somewhat patronizing.

But Israelis, it turns out, largely agree.

According to a new survey by the Jewish People Policy Institute, nearly two-thirds of Israelis — 64% — say that it is at least somewhat important to them that Israel avoid harming uninvolved Palestinian civilians as it conducts military operations in Gaza. A large plurality, 41%, say that it is very important to them. Only 16% say it is not important to them at all.

“For the State of Israel — and, of course, for me personally — innocent civilians are not considered targets in any way whatsoever,” said President Herzog on January 28, 2024, speaking for many of his fellow Israelis.

“There are also innocent Palestinians in Gaza,” he continued. “I am deeply sorry for the tragedy they are going through. From the first day of the war right until today, I call and am working for humanitarian aid for them, and only for them. This is part of our values as a country.”

I have found myself thinking about that survey data and about Herzog’s statement on our national values as the debate over the humanitarian situation in Gaza has reached a fever pitch in recent days.

I am familiar with the arguments of those who claim that the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza has been exaggerated and that further humanitarian efforts are unnecessary at best and detrimental to Israel’s war aims at worst. They point to Palestinian civilians’ complicity in and support for October 7, to Hamas’s disinformation efforts, and to manufactured or manipulated evidence of Palestinian suffering. They also note Israel’s exceptional efforts to protect Palestinian civilians — often at the cost of operational objectives — and Hamas’s dual practices of both endangering innocent Palestinians stealing humanitarian aid to feed its fighters and pad its pockets.

It is true that many Palestinian civilians — including young people and the elderly — participated in the atrocities of October 7, murdering innocent Israelis, looting their homes, and taunting and beating Israeli hostages as they were paraded through Gaza’s streets. It is also true that many such civilians held Israeli hostages captive in their homes under deplorable and inhumane conditions for many months on end and that most Palestinians supported the October 7 attack at the time.

Yes, Hamas consistently fabricates and inflates civilian casualty counts — as it did in the case of the Al-Ahli Hospital massacre that never happened and in countless other instances — and yes, too many in the international media have parroted its lies. Numerous gut-wrenching images have later been traced to other conflicts, and some emaciated children were found to suffer from awful but unrelated preexisting conditions.

Israel has gone to unprecedented lengths to spare civilian lives — far further, according to Western military officials, than their own countries would have under similar circumstances — and Hamas has been both deliberately putting innocent Palestinian’ lives at risk and stealing humanitarian aid for years, at least as far back as 2009 and as recently as this past week, hoarding basic goods for its own purposes and selling any leftovers to desperate civilians at tremendous markups.

Yet true as all this is, it pales in the face of the human tragedy now unfolding in Gaza.

While Israeli officials say that there is no widespread starvation in Gaza at this time, noting that aid has continued to enter the territory, they acknowledge that the situation has become “difficult.” The admirable efforts of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which has distributed more than 97 million meals to Palestinian civilians in Gaza, have proven insufficient, and have been accompanied by terrible loss of life on the part of both civilians and aid workers. The prices of basic food items have skyrocketed, suggesting that the scarcity is becoming more acute and that a full-scale humanitarian collapse could be imminent. The front pages of major international newspapers have been filled with images of Palestinian suffering and deprivation and scathing criticism of Israel is soaring to heights seldom seen before.

The images are, indeed, heartbreaking. And we cannot avert our eyes.

Many actors share responsibility for this dreadful situation, including the United Nations, which has adamantly refused to cooperate with the GHF despite its offers to distribute UN aid for free, leaving hundreds of trucks of aid untouched; Egypt, which largely kept its border sealed; and, above all, Hamas itself, which not only actively endangers Palestinians and steals their aid, but could immediately ease their suffering by releasing the hostages, laying down its weapons, and relinquishing its iron grip on Gaza.

But perhaps it is incumbent upon us to ask what role our own actions may have played in getting us to this point.

In early March, Prime Minister Netanyahu announced that aid shipments would be halted in order to pressure Hamas into agreeing to a ceasefire and releasing hostages. Nearly four months later, there is no ceasefire, no further hostages have been released (with the exception of American-Israeli dual national Edan Alexander, who was freed by the terrorist group in May as a “gesture” to the U.S. administration), and it is Israel that is feeling the heat. Hamas is reportedly counting on a wave of global outrage — fueled by images and accounts of hungry Palestinians — to force Israel to capitulate to its demands, which appear to be growing more extreme by the day, all the while continuing to enrich itself by selling scarce goods to Palestinian civilians at exorbitant prices.

Amid mounting international pressure and deteriorating conditions in Gaza, Israel has now begun to reverse course, airdropping large quantities of aid into the territory — a practice it has enabled other countries to utilize in order to get aid to Palestinian civilians but has thus far refrained from employing itself — creating humanitarian corridors to enable the distribution of UN aid, and pausing combat operations for ten hours a day in order to facilitate humanitarian efforts in population centers. This will not only alleviate the plight of ordinary Palestinians — it will also cause the prices of basic goods to plummet, at once denying Hamas both an invaluable source of propaganda and a critical revenue stream. Military experts are saying this is the right thing to do.

At the same time, U.S. and Israeli officials are now hinting at “alternative” pathways to secure the release of the hostages, rumored to include pressing Hamas’s patrons in Qatar, Turkey, and Egypt to expel the group’s leaders; killing Hamas leaders abroad; and seizing territory permanently if the hostages aren’t freed — all of which would target Hamas while sparing Palestinian civilian lives.

But preventing or limiting humanitarian aid to millions of civilians is not only tactically unwise and reputationally disastrous — it is un-Israeli and un-Jewish.

While some Israelis — including several members of the current government, who have loudly protested the latest shift in Israeli policy — have little sympathy for Palestinian civilians and do not wish to see them receive humanitarian aid, they are a small minority. Most Israelis share President Herzog’s sentiment: safeguarding innocent lives is an Israeli national value.

Our pride in the extraordinary measures Israel has taken to protect Palestinian civilians in the midst of active military operations; our support for Israeli organizations like Save A Child’s Heart, which have continued to provide lifesaving medical care to Palestinian children throughout the war; and our responses to pollsters’ questions when asked point-blank where we stand prove, beyond a doubt, that we Israelis see value in innocent Palestinian life and believe it ought to be protected.

In upholding the importance of saving lives even in societies that have been poisoned by hatred and conditioned to embrace violence for decades, we echo our first forefather, who was faced with a similar predicament.

The Book of Genesis recounts Abraham’s intercession with God over the fate of Sodom, the inhabitants of which God deems so evil that the entire city must be destroyed.

“Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked?” Abraham challenges God. “What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it?”

“Far be it from you to do such a thing — to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you!” he exclaims. “Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

God and Abraham engage in a dramatic back-and-forth in which God keeps agreeing to lower the number of righteous Sodom residents necessary to prevent the city’s destruction as Abraham realizes he will struggle to find any at all.

In the end, God agrees that if a mere ten righteous people can be found, the city will not be destroyed, at which point Abraham gives up and goes home.

Many Gazans will need to account for their actions before, on, or after October 7. Hopefully they someday will; our security forces have become quite adept at seeing that they do.

But surely there are at least some — small children, opponents of Hamas’s regime of terror, everyday Palestinians who abhor violence and want merely to live and raise their families in peace — who do not deserve the misery to which they are being subjected. For their sake, we cannot condemn Gaza to oblivion.

Israel’s shift in posture should be made permanent, and the international community should cooperate robustly and in good faith; this is not Israel’s burden to carry alone. The images of crowds clamoring for food, of little boys and girls lifting up pots and metal bowls in desperation, should be relegated to the past. Facilitating humanitarian aid should not be a reluctant, temporary concession, but rather a clear, enduring reflection of our values — showing that we Israelis cherish Palestinian lives, even if their leaders do not.

Now is the time to flood Gaza with aid, press Hamas where it hurts, free the hostages, and bring this war to an end on terms that uphold both our security and our core principles.

Our values demand it. Our allies expect it. And the Israeli people overwhelmingly support it.

We will prevail — not only through force of arms, but also through the values that have defined us from time immemorial.

Because yes — how we defend ourselves matters.

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