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Israel is at an existential pivot point. It never needed to go this far.
Two years after the Oct. 7 massacre, the Middle East is at an absurd pivot point. If Hamas, badly beaten but unbowed, accepts the disarmament element in President Donald Trump’s new peace plan, the region will move toward reconstruction, Gulf-financed normalization, and peace. If it refuses, Israel will likely re-occupy Gaza, miring the region in a ruinous quagmire.
That so much now depends on the whim of a terrorist group is a scandal — the product not only of Hamas’s diabolical strategy and indifference to loss of life, but of American weakness and, crucially, a chain of catastrophically bad choices by Israelis. It did not have to be this way.
The choice between abyss and opportunity is simple in outline and brutal in consequence. One future is endless counterinsurgency in Gaza: Soldiers patrolling hostile alleys and encountering roadside bombs, with Palestinian families under curfew, while Israel’s economy bleeds, its society seethes and its global standing plummets. The other is the disarmament and removal of Hamas, with the hostages returned, Gulf money flowing into reconstruction, and quite possibly dramatic moves toward normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia, and maybe others.
That binary was manufactured, step by avoidable step, by foolishness, arrogance, and weakness from key players:
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- The political opening: Netanyahu’s return. The rightward re-alignment of Israeli politics after repeated elections was caused by splits in the center-left, and an utter lack of focus from Israel’s moderate parties that made Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comeback possible. The coalition he assembled after the November 2022 election, dependent on fanatics and brimming with ex-cons and incompetents, was a disaster waiting to happen. The wait wasn’t long.
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- Judicial overhaul and societal schism. Netanyahu’s drive to neuter the judiciary and establish an illiberal majoritarian semi-democracy, similar to that of nearby Turkey, began within days of his resuming power. It tore Israeli society apart in 2023, provoking mass protests and deepening social polarization — a rupture that the security establishment warned would project weakness and invite attack.
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- Ignoring security warnings and intelligence. Knowing this was their position, Netanyahu refused to meet with the heads of the military, Shin Bet and Mossad in the weeks and months before Oct. 7. For their part, the security chiefs also ignored multiple intelligence indicators of Hamas’ intent for a major attack. The signals were minimized or misread — a classic bureaucratic pattern of cognitive failure. As for Netanyahu, his fabulously misguided position, for many years, was that Hamas ruling Gaza was useful because it weakened the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank — which is threatening to him precisely because it is moderate.
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- Troop diversion to the West Bank. In the run-up to Oct. 7, forces and attention were redirected to the West Bank to manage flashpoints — a political decision tied to coalition pressures to accommodate radical settlers determined to provoke the Palestinians, which left the Gaza boundary defense much thinner than it should have been.
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- Tactical failures on Oct. 7. When the assault began, early military warnings were not acted on, local commanders were confused, communications broke down, and reinforcements arrived too late, often not unless 10 hours later, in a small country.
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- Blundering into war. Israel briefly held the moral high ground as the world recognized Hamas’ act of barbarism. Arab capitals were unusually receptive, and the diplomatic leverage was enormous. That was the moment to demand the release of hostages, insist on Hamas surrendering Gaza’s administration to the Palestinian Authority, and make disarmament a multilateral demand enforced by a regional-Western coalition. If Hamas had refused, the world would have been forced into an explicit test — and come to understand, once and for all, that war was the option Hamas wanted.
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- Ignoring the hostage problem. It was obvious from the start that Israel could not destroy Hamas while the group held hostages in Gaza. The captives were a human shield, ensuring that any attempt at “total victory” would be self-defeating. Netanyahu denied this, promising that annihilation was possible while sending the army in and out of the same ruins two years of an endless cat-and-mouse.
These step-by-step misfires, together, make it clear that at every subsequent juncture, Netanyahu chose to prolong kinetic action. A permanent state of emergency enabled him to argue for deferring accountability and shifting the discussion away from the unwinnable one about his role in Oct. 7.
And the United States showed weakness and complicity with nonsense at key moments.
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- A missed opportunity. In late 2023 and early 2024, then-Secretary of State Antony Blinken was crisscrossing the region to put together a comprehensive plan: return of all hostages, the Palestinian Authority restored to Gaza, normalization with Saudi Arabia. Officials in President Joe Biden’s administration believed it was achievable. Netanyahu refused, knowing his coalition would collapse. Biden, astonishingly, effectively accepted the rebuff — a display of weakness that allowed the war to grind on, and, of course, hurt the Democrats’ chances to retain the American presidency.
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- Biden’s big error. Biden went further, publicly endorsing Netanyahu’s own outline for ending the war in exchange for hostages. Within weeks, Netanyahu reneged, and Biden again let it pass. The cost was counted not only in the lives of Palestinian civilians, but also in those of Israeli soldiers and hostages who might have been saved.
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- And Trump’s. By January, 2025, after 15 months of devastation, a reelected Trump forced Netanyahu to accept what was essentially the same plan as Biden had put forward. But Netanyahu walked away halfway through implementation, without even denying that doing so was a violation of the deal — because Trump allowed him to (and indeed was then advocating for the expulsion of all Gazans in favor of a U.S.-built “riviera”).
Each of these errors compounded the others and cost many lives.
On the Palestinian side, it is widely believed that some 65,000 people are dead, over half of them civilians — although all numbers from Gaza are suspect, as they come from authorities linked to Hamas. According to Israel’s Defense Ministry, 1,152 Israeli soldiers and security personnel have been killed in the course of the war, including several hundred in the Oct. 7 attack itself. Of the 251 people abducted on Oct. 7, the vast majority of them civilians, at least 83 are believed to have been killed — the cost of these decisions to not prioritize their release.
At every pause when Netanyahu prolonged the war he could say “Hamas is not yet destroyed.” People who both wanted Hamas gone and the hostages freed could be manipulated into tolerating continuation of fighting. That line sustained support from about a third of the public.
What are the lessons of this litany of error — other than the obvious one, that Netanyahu must be removed from power at almost any cost?
The big one is that Israel, even if Hamas says no to Trump’s deal, must resist the impulse to push forward militarily. Two years of devastation have made it plain: The war cannot be “won” so long as hostages remain in Hamas’s grip, and every repetition of the cat-and-mouse in Gaza only weakens Israel’s legitimacy and social cohesion, while strengthening Hamas’s narrative.
If Hamas refuses to disarm, the wiser course is to flip the script, and increase pressure on them without further military action.
The priority must be the hostages: Every diplomatic channel and instrument of international pressure should be deployed to secure their release. Humanitarian suffering must be addressed by offering civilians temporary refuge — in Egypt, in the West Bank, or elsewhere — guaranteed by international commitments of return once Hamas is gone.
This is not ethnic cleansing; it is protection, analogous to Ukrainians sheltering in Poland during the Russian assault. Properly framed, it exposes Hamas as the jailer of Gaza’s people.
If Hamas breaks, then excellent: the Trump plan can proceed with a technocratic Palestinian government in Gaza, reforms in the Palestinian Authority, Gulf-financed reconstruction, and normalization with Saudi Arabia and beyond. If Hamas refuses, the world must be made to see that Palestinian misery is not the people’s inevitable fate, but the direct consequence of Hamas’s obstinacy.
The fact that the Middle East’s future now waits on Hamas is not some cosmic inevitability: it is the fruit of a sequence of political, tactical and strategic mistakes. Israel must learn from this disaster, and take steps never to be so exposed in the future.
The post Israel is at an existential pivot point. It never needed to go this far. appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention
(JTA) — Local and national Jewish Democrats say they are sympathetic after Michigan’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel, said she would skip the state Democratic Party’s nominating convention over concerns about antisemitism and harassment.
“I don’t blame AG Nessel for not wanting to go and basically put herself in situations that feel untenable in this moment of time and don’t add any value politically, personally,” Jessica “Decky” Alexander, the Michigan Jewish Democratic caucus chair, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday.
Alexander’s comment came a day after Nessel announced during a televised antisemitism roundtable that she would be skipping the convention next month, where party leaders will finalize the state’s Democratic candidate for Senate following a divisive primary that has focused in part on Israel and antisemitism.
“I don’t feel safe going. I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying,” Nessel said during the roundtable. “And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”
She said she had filed a formal complaint within the party about a party official who had called her a neo-Nazi because of her beliefs. “Why is this person more accepted in our party than me?” she asked without naming the official. Her office responded to a request for comment by referring to the recorded livestream of the antisemitism roundtable.
Nessel’s declaration comes in the final days of the primary between Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel stalwart, and Abdul El-Sayed, a democratic socialist who is deeply critical of Israel. El-Sayed is surging in polls despite a reported $30 million spent against him by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and its supporters, whom he has made a target of criticism from the campaign trail.
Nessel’s comments also follow turmoil at the Michigan Democratic Party’s endorsement convention in April, where Stevens was booed by attendees. A third primary candidate who later dropped out of the race, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, said a convention attendee had targeted her Jewish husband with an antisemitic slur.
The incident has fueled alarm among Jewish Democrats, according to Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
“She’s not alone,” Soifer told JTA about Nessel on Friday. “We’ve heard from other Jewish Democrats who attended the Democratic Party convention earlier this year in Michigan, and there was a sense of discomfort amid what felt like a pro-Palestinian protest [that] may have even blurred the line for some into antisemitic sentiment — and it’s really concerning.”
Nessel has raised the alarm about antisemitism within the party for years, alleging in 2024 that Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a prominent pro-Palestinian voice, had been antisemitic when criticizing charges Nessel filed against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan.
For her part, Alexander said she would be participating in the nominating convention and said she believed the chair of the state Democratic Party, Curtis Hertel, had been “very accessible and very open to making sure that we, including our Jewish elected officials, feel safe in that space.” But she said she understood why Nessel was staying away.
“It would never even occur to me, but I’m not an elected official,” Alexander said. “It’s a different stake for me than it is for Dana. I understand her completely.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention appeared first on The Forward.
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Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’
(JTA) — Every congregational rabbi in Maine has signed onto a statement calling for peace and urging the state’s political leaders to stop using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza, following a Democratic primary in which several candidates used the label for the first time.
But the rabbis also indicated that they, too, were unsatisfied with conditions in the Middle East and called on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to work toward a peaceful future.
“We call upon Maine’s leaders, and particularly its political leaders, to reject the irresponsible usage of the term in describing the Israel-Hamas War,” said the statement released on Friday. “We also call upon Israeli and Palestinian leaders to end the cycle of violence and to create a better world for both Palestinian and Israeli children.”
The statement, titled “A Call for Peace and Responsible Rhetoric,” argues that using the term as a “political slogan does not advance peace in the Middle East.” The term “erases essential moral and legal distinctions, diminishes the meaning of genocide, and inflames hatred for the local Jewish community,” the rabbis say.
“Compassion for Palestinians does not require the adoption of hateful and misleading language,” they continue. “Advocating for peace does not require participation in a ‘Holocaust inversion’ against the Jewish community. And political leadership does not require demonizing one community in the service of another.”
The statement comes days after Troy Jackson, a former logger and state Senate president, secured the Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nomination Saturday at the party’s nominating convention to replace Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic who dropped out of the race earlier this month. Platner faced a sexual assault allegation, which he denies. Jackson now faces Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November’s general election.
Platner’s romp to the primary victory featured routine use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. And ahead of the convention to replace him, Jackson and several other Democratic hopefuls who later exited the race began using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza for the first time, a shift that drew scrutiny from some Jewish leaders and voters in the state.
The use of the term has become a “currency for acquiring power and position in Maine’s Democratic party,” Rabbi Rachel Isaacs, the leader of Beth Israel Congregation in Waterville, who also signed the statement, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“Too many Maine Democrats are cynically willing to trade in that currency at the expense of our safety and dignity,” she said in an emailed statement. “We decided we needed to say something collectively, both about the specious and dangerous nature of the claim, and about how much damage has been done to our families and congregants.”
The statement Friday was spearheaded by the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine and signed by every congregational rabbi in the state, including Rabbi Bill Siemers of the Conservative Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor and Rabbi Erica Asch of the Reform Temple Beth El in Augusta. (Rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement in Maine did not appear on the signatory list.)
Zach Schwartz, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council at the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, said the federation hoped the “unity displayed here in Maine can inspire Jewish communities across the US to also unite against the extremist rhetoric harming our community and our children.”
Rabbi Josh Stanton, the associate vice president of interfaith and intergroup initiatives for Jewish Federations of North America, also hailed the joint statement.
“Maine’s Jewish clergy are setting an important example with their call to put aside inflammatory rhetoric and look to the common good,” Stanton said in an emailed statement. “At a time of rising polarization and declining civil discourse, the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine’s efforts to unify the community around this important message are a mark of true leadership.”
Isaacs told JTA that she hoped Jackson would “support, understand, and advocate for all of Maine’s citizens, including the totality of Maine’s diverse Jewish community.”
“Work with us to figure out how to express outrage and legitimate critique of Israel’s government without succumbing to language that you might not know is an ancient antisemitic trope, or dismissing the security needs of Israel’s citizens,” Isaacs said of her message to Jackson. “Please have the courage to forge your own path, and not follow in the footsteps of Graham Platner, a man who should have never been normalized, endorsed, or empowered.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song
(JTA) — Boy George has withdrawn from his run as King Herod in London’s West End revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” days before he was due to take the stage and 24 hours after releasing “We Will Dance Again,” dedicated to the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the Nova music festival in Israel.
The 80’s pop star was scheduled to appear at London’s Palladium starting Monday as part of the production’s rotating cast playing King Herod, the Judean king who is best known by Jews for his expansion of the Second Temple and to Christians for his efforts to stave off the arrival of a challenger — the story of which is reflected in the rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
Boy George will be replaced by actor Richard Armitage in the London production.
In announcing the cast change, Paul Kelmsley, the singer’s manager, did not directly mention the blowback the former Culture Club frontman was receiving for releasing a pro-Israel song but alluded to it.
“George has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that,” he said. ”In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside, allowing the production to remain the focus, while ensuring everyone involved can move forward with mutual respect and goodwill.”
Boy George is defending his decision to release the song, saying he believes artists should be free to express their views even when they are unpopular. In “We Will Dance Again,” the singer rejects claims of genocide against Israel and proclaims, “If you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.”
Earlier Friday, Boy George lashed back at the vitriol he was getting online. “What is most shocking is the amount of gay folk attacking me, ” he posted on X. “If you support terrorism you can in the words of Divine ‘Take your toolkit and go f—_ a garage,’” he said, referring to a quote attributed to the taboo-breaking transgender artist.
“When I say ‘they want to kill every last one of us’ I am also talking about us queers, not just the Jewish community,” Boy George said. “When will you wake up?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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