After the criminal attack launched by Hamas on October 7, 2023, Israelis walk around with an irreconcilable pain in their chests — for the people we lost, for the possible future that was foreclosed, and for what could have been done to prevent it. A minority of us also feel this pain for what Israel is doing in Gaza, for what we as Israelis have become — or perhaps always were.

The human catastrophe unfolding in Gaza is unprecedented and incomparable to anything that came before it. An ongoing, yearlong war crime with no end in sight, it constitutes one of the worst man-made catastrophes of the twenty-first century and the paramount moral issue of our age. Despite what mainstream English- and German-speaking media often suggest, this catastrophe has perpetrators. Indeed, an entire society is behind this massacre, this eradication of an entire place. Although Hamas certainly bears responsibility for its crimes on October 7, which led to the war, Israel bears the responsibility for what it has done to Gaza.

The societal transformation that enabled these crimes did not begin on October 7. Israel’s gradual slide to the extreme right has played out over at least twenty years, if not longer. Its ideological roots date much further back, and policies of ethnic cleansing and Jewish expansionism have been characteristics of the Zionist project since the beginning of organized Jewish settlement in Palestine in the early twentieth century. Yet if these characteristics were historically contested within Israeli society, perhaps the most striking consequence of October 7 has been the consolidation of an increasingly belligerent pro-war majority.