Across Israel, huge billboards dominate central highways, while large placards have been placed in front of schools, supermarkets and government buildings. They all sport a new slogan: “Together we will win”.
The slogan is short and precise (in Hebrew, it consists of two words, “beyahad nenatzeach”) and has been adopted by large segments of Israel’s Jewish population. Part of its appeal is likely due to its ambiguity, allowing each viewer to interpret the word “win” differently.
Despite varying interpretations of what victory would look like, there appears to be broad consensus among Israelis that victory, whatever it may be, can only be achieved by unleashing deadly violence on Gaza.
How else to explain that when fleeing residents, taking a route that Israel has identified as a “safe route” to the south, are hit by a deadly airstrike, not a single voice in the mainstream media is heard to criticize the assault? Nor do we hear outrage when bombs are dropped in the middle of one of the most populated neighborhoods in the Jabalia refugee camp or when missiles hit an ambulance convoy. For most Israelis, “winning” currently seems to justify almost any violence.
As demonstrated last month, most Israelis appear to have had no qualms that the army dropped 30,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, damaging about 50 percent of all housing units throughout the Gaza Strip and rendering at least 10 percent of them uninhabitable. Nearly 70 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have been forced from their homes due to bombings and raids. Half of hospitals and 62 percent of primary health care centers are effectively out of service and a third of all schools have been damaged and around nine percent are now out of service.
According to many Israeli Jews, this is part of what is necessary to “win” and, as a result, the Palestinians will only have to suffer thousands of civilian casualties, including the deaths of more than 4,000 children killed in this day. They seem to accept that “winning” involves killing an average of six children every hour since October 7 and turning Gaza into a “children’s cemetery”, as UN chief Antonio Guterres put it.
The type of indiscriminate bombing we have seen over the past month is undoubtedly part of Israel’s efforts to assert its deterrence against Hamas, as well as Hezbollah. The message is clear: look at the destruction in Gaza and beware.
Yet even the massive bombardment of Gaza, necessary for this type of deterrence, is not really the end goal. What “winning” ultimately means for most Israeli Jews is the complete annihilation of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Considering that Hamas is an ideology, social movement, and governing apparatus that includes a military wing, the scope and feasibility of this goal are unclear, but it will certainly involve killing thousands of fighters, including their leaders. political and military, and to demolish the tunnel. system created by Hamas and destroy the weapons the group has amassed. And the killing of thousands of civilians, the massive displacement of the population and the massive destruction of civilian sites are considered legitimate “collateral damage”.
But if the destruction of Hamas is the end goal, then “winning” also implies regime change in Gaza as well as the creation of a new reality on the ground where Israel not only controls the borders surrounding the Gaza Strip, but also what happens within these borders. borders.
It is only at this point, however, that the widespread consensus in Israel on the need to wipe out Hamas fractures and the term “win” is interpreted differently depending on which political group one belongs to.
For the religious right, the heinous Hamas massacre is seen as an opportunity to resettle Jewish settlers in the Gaza Strip. Widespread bombings and the displacement of more than a million Palestinians have divided the Gaza Strip into different parts and created Palestinian-free zones where Jewish settlers can seize land and rebuild settlements. The resettlement of the Gaza Strip, however, is part of a larger plan to Judaize the entire region – from the river to the sea. Right now – and under the cover of Israeli violence in the Gaza Strip – settlers belonging to to this political group are expelling Palestinian communities from the hills east of Ramallah, the Jordan Valley and the hills south of Hebron in the West Bank. “Winning” for them means completing the Nakba once and for all by replacing the indigenous population with Jews throughout the biblical land of Israel.
For the Israeli political right and many in the political center, “winning” means turning parts of northern Gaza and a large perimeter around the northern, eastern and southern borders of the Gaza Strip into a no-man’s land. This means the permanent movement of populations from the north to the south and from Gaza’s borders inward, while locking Palestinians in an even smaller prison than the one they have lived in for 16 years. This involves the creation of a puppet government to manage municipal tasks, much like the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, and it means that Israeli soldiers will periodically enter the Gaza Strip to “mow the lawn”, like what the soldiers are doing in Jenin.
The rest of the political center and many liberal Israeli Jews don’t really know what “winning” means beyond engaging in horrific violence to “destroy Hamas.” Trapped in a militaristic and now punitive paradigm, they seem to think that Israelis and Palestinians are locked in a fatalistic zero-sum game where only the application of violence against Palestinians will somehow guarantee security Jews. Not entirely sure what victory means, but wanting that end result, they too support violence.
So, whether the vast majority of Israeli Jews admit it or not, “winning” involves a full-scale eliminationist campaign directed against the Palestinian people and not just Hamas.
Only a tiny part of Israeli Jewish society refuses these forms of “victory” and calls for an immediate ceasefire. For them, winning therefore involves a complete and total paradigm shift, transforming Israel into a single democratic state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, where Jews and Palestinians can live together as equals.
For this group, the “together” in the slogan “together we will win” is not the Jewish exceptionalism that reigns in Israel (and in many places around the world) but a Palestinian Jewish alliance, which today seems ‘far-fetched today. dream. This prophetic vision, however, is the only notion of victory worth fighting for. And our only hope for a peaceful future on this historic land.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Al Jazeera.