Gaza, Israel, and the Inevitable Reckoning

What is the logic behind Israel’s extreme brutality in Gaza? What fuels this unrelenting savagery and merciless cruelty?

What is the logic behind Israel’s extreme brutality in Gaza? What fuels this unrelenting savagery and merciless cruelty? Some argue it stems from a primal thirst for vengeance—a compulsion to punish. Others point to decades of entrenched racism and dehumanization, a disgusting disregard for Palestinian lives, and the desire to one day wake up to a Palestine emptied of its people. To them, Palestinians are an obstacle, a nuisance, a “question” standing in the way of their vision for an ethno-nationalist Jewish state.

These are valid explanations, but I also believe Israel’s leaders and generals operate under the delusion that by inflicting such overwhelming violence, Palestinians can be broken, tamed, and permanently silenced. History, however, proves this logic fundamentally flawed. No amount of brutality has ever crushed the spirit of an oppressed people. Wounds left unhealed only fester beneath layers of neglect and suppression. Brutality breeds brutality, violence spawns violence, and bloodshed inevitably leads to more bloodshed.

This war is devastating Palestinians in Gaza, but it will not break them, nor will it force their submission. Those who have suffered, their descendants, will seek justice—they will remember, they will hold the oppressors accountable. If not today, then tomorrow; if not tomorrow, then in years, decades even, but accountability will come.

And now, as the region unravels further and further, Israel will soon find itself in a context where large-scale quests for justice—the kind that bring down entire regimes, change entire realities, and push for change unprecedented in scale and intensity—are probably going to be a defining feature of the years to come. That reckoning is not a question of “if,” but “when.”