Israel Just Bombed Gaza to Please Extremists and Boost Approval Ratings | Opinion

I can't shake Meral's image from my head. The 6-year-old Palestinian was tucked in bed on Monday night by her mom, then woke up in the front seat of an ambulance at a hospital, where the dead bodies of her parents and sibling were unloaded on blood-covered stretchers in the middle of the night.

"I want my dad. Where is my dad?" she cried.

Her family were the casualties of Israeli strikes on the besieged Gaza Strip on Monday night, launched by 40 U.S.-made fighter jets. The targets were three commanders of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) movement, whom Israel kept under surveillance for weeks. But Israel's choice of timing in the dead of the night meant targeting a multi-story apartment building, resulting in the killing of four children, five women, and a medical doctor, wounding 20 other civilians. A major retaliation is now expected, which could lead to full-scale escalation.

Fear is engulfing my family and loved ones in Gaza, who are terrified of going to bed and becoming the next pieces of "collateral damage"—statistics relegated to the past tense. Gaza's impoverished population hasn't yet recovered from the destruction of the last escalation in August.

Meanwhile, on the other side, Israelis living near the Gaza border are in for sleepless nights running to shelters in anticipation of the PIJ's retaliation.

Bloodshed seems imminent—and all the more indefensible given the logic behind the attack. The far-right government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims the assassinated targets were involved in firing primitive projectiles on Israel last week in retaliation for the death of the hunger striker Khader Adnan in an Israeli prison after an Israeli military judge refused to transfer him to a hospital. Israel also accused one of the targets of transferring money to PIJ members in the West Bank.

But there's plenty of evidence that the motive behind the attack was to please the most extreme elements of Netanyahu's government, to protect his coalition from collapsing, and to boost the government's approval ratings and undermine the ongoing demonstrations and opposition leaders.

Israel's populist far-Right has been calling for targeted assassinations and a major military campaign on Gaza for days to make a grand statement to their constituents. Israel's Security Minister, the convicted racist and terror-supporter – Itamar Ben Gvir, even boycotted cabinet meetings to pressure Netanyahu. He finally got his wish on Monday night.

But this policy of extrajudicial execution to boost polls is isn't just deeply immoral. It always leads to the same result: a more radical and more popular PIJ, with a base more unified around revenge and retaliation. These attacks don't make Israelis more secure; they provide a compelling pretext for an escalation that unleashes the pent-up fury of Gaza's siege and status quo, and thus provide greater legitimacy for armed groups and armed resistance in general.

After Israel assassinated multiple PIJ commanders last August, their replacements were even more militant-minded, and worked to strengthen the PIJ's presence and armed actions in the West Bank.

This week, as in all other cases before it, the heart-wrenching pictures of kids' bodies lying in the morgue killed by Israeli airstrikes provides a recruitment poster for armed groups, fueling more bitterness and rage that will cast a long shadow over the very calm Israel's government purports to be pursuing.

Furthermore, Israel's bombardment of Gaza along with destructive military raids and settler attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank are accelerating the demise and delegitimization of the Palestinian peace camp and pushing the Palestinian discourse to become more hardline and uncompromising.

The greater the death toll and suffering, the weaker and more irrelevant the peace camp becomes.

Since Netanyahu took office, it has been increasingly difficult for Palestinian moderates and advocates of peace to speak up. The immediate pushback to calls for dialogue is "Peace with who? With Ben Gvir or Smotrich and their fanatical camp of Greater Israel?"

If one were to call for a two-state solution these days, they would be asked "Where and how?" Settlements have fragmented the West Bank into small enclaves and destroyed the possibility of Palestinian statehood; the new government has authorized the biggest settlement expansion in years and has advanced annexation both de facto to de jure.

If one argues against the use of armed resistance and calls for non-violence, they are shunned. "Show us one tangible result your advocacy of peaceful action has produced!" people demand. And what is there to say? What does the peace camp have to show for their efforts?

In fact, Israel's government hasn't left us much room for action. International advocacy at the UN is deemed "diplomatic terrorism," boycotts are "economic terrorism," hunger strikes are "terrorism in prison," human rights advocates are "terrorists in suits," building in Area C of the West Bank is "construction terrorism," and even non-violence advocates like Issa Amro are attacked, harassed, and threatened with prison time for their activism.

The truth is, Israel, especially under this radical far-Right government, has a problem with any objection we may have to our own oppression. We are expected to just keep our heads down and take it nicely as we watch our dispossession and replacement. This then lends credence to armed resistance as a mean of exacting revenge.

Even Israel's collaborationist security partner, the Palestinian Authority, is portrayed as "terror supporters" and "inciters of hate." While using the PA, Israel routinely humiliates the Authority and illegally withholds hundreds of millions from its revenues.

A common point raised by Palestinian hardliners is that PA President Mahmoud Abbas has always recognized Israel, renounced terrorism, and opposed and cracked down on armed resistance—yet what does he to show for it except shame and blame?

that advocates for abiding by international law, diplomacy, and negotiations.

President George Bush once strongly denounced Israel's assassination of a top Hamas leader in 2002, slamming it as a "heavy-handed action [that] doesn't contribute to peace" because seven children were killed in that strike. Yet the Biden administration has not said much about Monday's bombardment of Gaza that killed 10 civilians. The U.S. bias in favor of Israel leads us to conclude that we are on our own and must fend for ourselves.

Muhammad Shehada is a writer and civil society activist from the Gaza Strip and a student of development studies at Lund University, Sweden. He was the PR officer for the Gaza office of the Euro-Med Monitor for Human Rights. He is a columnist at the Forward.

The views in this article are the writer's own.