Two years ago, Hamas carried out a spree of stomach-churning atrocities against mostly Israeli civilians that left the entire world rightly sickened and enraged at the terrorist group, and with enormous reserves of sympathy for Israel. Out of the infinite options available to it, Israel chose to respond by doing exactly what Hamas had just done to earn the world’s disgust, only on a far larger scale, and in many cases — torturing doctors to death, sniping kids in the head and testicles, and burning hospital patients alive, to name a few — committing atrocities even Hamas itself had not carried out.

This is the grisly paradox of the war in Gaza. The crimes of October 7 — killing families and children, kidnapping, sexual violence — were so heinous and beyond the pale, they somehow justified being repeated and inflicted endlessly on a different group of innocent people, week after week for the next two years.

Two years in, those who have been witnessing and documenting the daily horrors in Gaza have run out of words to adequately describe them. It may be easiest just to read what Israeli soldiers themselves have said about the war they’ve been fighting the past twenty-four months:

• “This is pure evil.” (12/18/2024)
• “I felt like, like, like a Nazi . . . it looked exactly like we were actually the Nazis and they were the Jews.” (12/23/2024)
• “It’s permissible to shoot everyone, a young girl, an old woman. . . . every man between the ages of sixteen and fifty is suspected of being a terrorist.” (7/8/2024)
• “I’ve stopped counting kills. I have no idea how many I’ve killed, a lot. Children.” (9/16/2025)
• “We’re not only killing them — we’re killing them, we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs. We’re destroying their houses and pissing on their graves.” (4/7/2025)
• “What we are doing in Gaza is the war of annihilation: indiscriminate, unrestricted, brutal and criminal killing of civilians . . . as a result of a policy dictated by the government, knowingly, intentionally, wickedly, maliciously, promiscuously.” (5/22/2025)
• “The IDF really is fulfilling the public’s wishes, which state: ‘There are no innocents in Gaza’. We’ll show them. People were incriminated [labeled a target by the military] for having bags in their hands.” (4/7/2025)

That last one is not an exaggeration. Surveys have repeatedly found that large majorities of the Israeli public believe no one is innocent in Gaza. That sentiment isn’t just reflected in public polling. It’s also reflected in the unhinged and openly genocidal language that prominent Israeli personalities and media figures have engaged in since the start of the war:

• “As Hitler said ‘I cannot live if one Jew is left,’ we can’t live here if one ‘Islamo-Nazi’ remains in Gaza.” — Moshe Feiglin, June 2024.
• “Lebensraum [Is] Needed for Israel’s Exploding Population.” — Dan Ehrlich, December 2024.
• “We are coming. We are coming to Gaza. We are coming to Lebanon. We will come to Iran. We will come everywhere. . . . Can you imagine how many we are going to kill, how many of you we will slaughter? You will see a number that you have never imagined could be reached.” — Shay Golden, November 2023.
• “I want to kick them out, to exterminate them, every last Palestinian . . . I’ll tell you what I envision; there’s not a single person, not a single tree, nor a single house, and if I could, I’d poison the fish in the sea.” — Avida Bachar, August 2025.
• “The government is racing to erase Gaza. Thank god, we’re erasing this evil, and erasing the population that was raised on Mein Kampf.” — Amihai Eliyahu, July 2025.
• “I will return to Be’eri only when the last Palestinian [in Gaza] is annihilated. I don’t care if it’s children, old people, people on crutches who came to loot. . . .” — Resident of Be’eri, November 2024.

Horrifying as this is, it is, sadly, all too human. It’s not unusual for a grief-stricken person who has seen their loved one murdered to threaten or even seriously plot violent, gruesome retribution. October 7 sent the whole of Israeli society into that same vengeful tailspin. The difference is, when we find out our friend, our neighbor, or our relative is thinking about such retaliatory violence, we don’t put a gun in their hand and encourage them to do it.

This is, in many ways, what marks the past two years as exceptional. Israeli generals themselves thought they would only be allowed to rampage through Gaza for three months at most, like they had with previous wars. The fact that they have been empowered to go on doing this for two years — and make no mistake, despite a ceasefire plan that seems on the verge of being accepted, Israeli forces have kept on killing scores of Palestinians over the past few days — is an indictment of our own political leadership. In the end, this wretched war may say more about us than it says about Israel.

Western governments have given extraordinary, unflinching backing to Israel, even as it has serially disobeyed them, carried out atrocity after atrocity that has shocked the world, and turned their own voting publics vehemently against both the war and, increasingly, against Israel itself. They have parroted with a straight face the increasingly lazy talking points from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. They have resorted to stunningly authoritarian behavior to stifle criticism of its actions, and been supported in this by a media establishment that has at times wildly violated its own professional standards in defense of the war, including handing the Israeli military censors the final cut of their reporting. They have gone to incredible lengths to avoid ending their military support for the war, right down to taking the unprecedented but ultimately meaningless step of recognizing the Palestinian statehood that they were effectively letting Israel snuff out.

It hasn’t just been Western governments. The Arab states that have historically been Palestine’s champions have the past two years served as Israel’s willing enablers.

As the Israeli military has gradually exterminated a fellow Arab population, these states have not just failed to do much of anything in response — sanctioning Israel, for instance, or even just expelling its diplomats — they have actually rewarded it: upping their trade with Israel, deepening military and economic ties, defending it from the consequences of its widening aggression, and serving as key logistical nodes to keep its war on Gaza going, including for the transfer of Western weapons. As with their Western counterparts, they’ve kept a lid on their increasingly irate populations through heavy-handed repression.

Tomorrow’s history books will have damning verdicts on this generation of political leaders, whose publics have watched them cover for and justify a genocide of largely children with the same practiced, straight-faced certainty they use to play down a budget deficit. It will not be surprising if the unseemly sight of the world’s political elite running out the clock on the crime of crimes pushes public trust in political institutions further into the gutter, and it will not be remotely surprising if years from now, the same media that convinced elderly TV viewers that Jewish-led protests against the war were neo-Nazi rallies treats it as a mystery why.

The flip side of this is the astonishing nonviolent mobilization by ordinary citizens that has bubbled and expanded across the globe against the war, bringing sometimes historic numbers of people into the streets. That mobilization has not only been sustained and actually grown, but has seen a remarkable array of tactics employed to force leaders’ hands, spanning the electorally centered “Uncommitted” movement and traditional civil disobedience like campus occupations, to the Global Sumud Flotilla’s nonviolent breaking of the Israeli blockade and a union-led general strike in Italy, with a Europe-wide dockworker rebellion brewing all the while.

When enough time has passed for us to take stock of the last two years, we shouldn’t forget that the stubborn cruelty of our supposed political betters on this war has never been mirrored in the attitudes of their populations, who, generally speaking, have been way ahead on a host of key questions like supporting a ceasefire, defining the war as a genocide, or putting an arms embargo on Israel. So often these days we’re told the antidemocratic story that it’s the untamed passions of the uncredentialed, uninformed masses that are the problem. In the post–October 7 world, the real danger has been our untamed elites.