Israelis are famously disputatious, but not on one issue: Iran. A major regional power, whose government is openly sworn to, and invests immense efforts in, Israel’s literal destruction. Unlike the conflict with the Palestinians, Israel’s conflict with Iran is between states — not between peoples, not over independence, and not over territory. Israelis do not see Iran’s people as enemies but rather as a society groaning under a theocratic police state. In fact, Israel’s good relations with Iran before the Revolution are still a living memory. (Israel’s Iranian expats have their own radio station, alongside Israel’s public radio’s daily programme in Farsi.) One of Israel’s most famous singers, Rita, is just one of any number of Iranian-Israeli artists who draw on the Iranian culture they grew up in.

Crucially, Israel and Iran are sovereign states, with all that that entails. Certainly, both see themselves as part of larger, more complicated projects beyond their own territories — Israel as a Jewish and democratic nation-state and Iran as regional successor to the Persian Empire, leader of global Shiism and, hopefully, of Islamism’s theocratic universalism too. But these adjectives jostle on top of a foundational basis that is the hallmark of sovereignty — they both are states which, by Max Weber’s celebrated definition, hold a territory’s monopoly of legitimate violence. It is this lowest common denominator that makes international law among states of wildly differing cultures, religions, world views, because they can justifiably hold one another to account.

Iran, then, is a state, large and powerful, with the avowed aim, and material and political resources, to wage a decades-long campaign for the elimination, pure and simple, of another state. Iran’s target is far away, and so it has for decades made use of skilful proxies — the Assad regime in Syria, and above all Hezbollah and Hamas, and now the Houthis, who, as non-state actors have worked to destabilise the region as a whole and were able in their struggle to adopt the language of resistance and liberation. October 7 made clear to everyone in Israel what this “liberation” means. Nobody can doubt anymore that the armed Islamist groups calling for death to Israel are saying exactly what they mean.

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This fundamental consensus on Iran runs through Israeli society. It also overwhelmingly shapes the approach of its long-running Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and goes a long way towards explaining how a man, so truly despised by so many proud and patriotic Israelis, has stayed in power for so long.

Netanyahu’s signature style is strategic caution and tactical audacity in the service of grim realism. His father Benzion, opponent of the UN Partition Plan of 1947 and historian of the Spanish Inquisition, imparted a stark and pessimistic worldview to his son: that Jews would never be accepted in non-Jewish society and that for Jews, optimism is suicidal.

A keen student of policy and history and astute observer of societal and economic trends, the younger Netanyahu, educated in the US, before and after his military service came to prominence in the Eighties as a government spokesman and UN Ambassador, mixing cosmopolitan eloquence with hardline militancy and ruthless ambition. His mix of caution and volubility has served him well, keeping generations of rivals off-balance and guessing. He has always been reluctant to make large decisions, wage full-fledged wars or pursue diplomatic gambits and their inevitable risks, preferring endlessly to tack between statesmanship and partisanship, making confederates, religious and secular, wealthy and poor, who all agree that he is their man, even if he is never to be trusted. This has been crucial to his remarkable political longevity as time and again he dances to the brink of outright extremism without ever quite stepping over, speaking the languages of diplomacy and rabble-rousing with equal fluency. Outlasting all his rivals and most of his proteges, he has come to see himself as Israel’s indispensable leader, the only one with the Churchillian vision, skill and world-class stature capable of confronting the uniquely existential threat of a nuclear Iran.

Netanyahu is not a religious man. His creed does not teach about redemption, whether religious or socialist, but about apocalypse, and his destiny in trying to forestall it. And that’s clear from his mission, which has an urgency to it: to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon at all costs, a theme of his for decades (as when, in 2009, he stood at the rostrum of the UN, holding up the blueprints for Auschwitz, and castigating Iran’s then-President and chief Holocaust denier, Mahmoud Ahmanadinejad, “have you no shame?” In 2015, he breathtakingly addressed a joint session of Congress urging opposition to the Obama Administration’s Iran Deal from which Trump, with Netanyahu’s support, unilaterally withdrew in 2018. His disenchantment with anyone’s vision of redemption has given him plenty of room to maneuver. The end has for him justified every means. He has made and broken conventions with the religious and the secular, with Left and Right, even flirting with bringing Arabs into a coalition. He has been willing to exploit and abandon supporters and friends, to court dictators from Russia to Qatar, and to tolerate Hamas’s hold on Gaza until October 7. He, alone among the leaders responsible for that day’s catastrophic failure and the decisions leading up to it, has consistently refused to take responsibility; his legendary pettiness, arrogance and grandiosity aside, his chief justification, one openly shared by his fervent followers and tacitly by many others, is that only he was capable of taking on Iran.

His dogged avoidance of big moves and hard decisions has, the truth be told, well-suited an Israeli polity, whose defining dilemmas as a Jewish and democratic state in a treacherous neighborhood, fated to share with Palestinians a tortured past and radically uncertain future, can seem insoluble. And a polity which has become used to being roundly condemned in international fora and opinion for almost anything it does.

Netanyahu was never an idealist, but his early public decades were nonetheless marked by genuine commitment to neo-conservative democratic principles and free market reforms. But these gave way as his legal troubles mounted. Facing multiple charges of corruption, self-dealing in arms purchases and illegally seeking to control the media, he resolved to control the judiciary to make sure he could stay in power unchallenged and unrestrained. He increasingly characterized reasonable debates over necessary judicial reforms as threats to Israeli democracy by fifth columnists, knowing that only the fear of Iran could give such accusations any public traction.

Embracing a turbocharged Israeli version of the populism sweeping the democratic world, stoking resentments while exploiting sentiments of patriotism and self-sacrifice he became a charter member of the post-liberal democratic club, helping Viktor Orbán as well as Donald Trump. Over the years, he built a TV network and army of internet trolls, prominently featuring his Miami-based son, Yair, to hurl accusations of treason and worse against the judiciary, civil service and academia — and the military, intelligence and security services too.

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The last vestiges of his earlier, genuinely held free market beliefs vanished when he aligned himself with the growing ultraorthodox bloc whose overwhelming issue is securing the military exemptions that keep their young men, along with the rest of their constituents in their own carefully insulated educational, social cultural institutions and out of the work-force as whole. Similarly, deeming it necessary for political survival, he gave senior cabinet ministries (International Security and Finance) to fire-breathing religious ultranationalists, Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — the kinds he had avoided being seen or working with for years.

It all came to a head in 2023, well before October 7. His firebrand Justice Minister, Yuval Levin, put forward a stunning array of sweeping legal changes that would give the governing Coalition permanent control over the judiciary and media and much else.

The country was rocked for months by massive demonstrations against this perceived assault on the rule of law. They were attended by former generals, massive numbers of military reservists and even Netanyahu’s own former Likud Party colleagues, who saw him hijacking legal processes and institutions for partisan, personal, authoritarian ends and found themselves, too, denounced as traitors by Netanyahu’s spokesmen. In the days after October 7, Israelis rallied across partisan lines, broadly supporting the war aims of removing Hamas and returning the hostages and enabling civilians driven from the South by terror and the North by Hezbollah’s rockets, to return to their homes. The devil was, however, in the details: removing Hamas would require creating some sort of Palestinian governing authority in Gaza, and returning the hostages would prioritize the lives of individual hostages over a national collective interest which Ben-Gvir and Smotrich define as Judaising Gaza. What’s more, Netanyahu’s ultraorthodox coalition partners demanded legislation that would enshrine their collective draft exemption and state welfare once and for all. Not surprisingly, the prewar protests began to return, featuring exhausted reserve soldiers and the wretched families of hostages — for whom Netanyahu didn’t hide his annoyance and disdain.

In recent months, the country had been shaken even further by revelations that Qatar had been financing not only Hamas, but members of Netanyahu’s staff, including, one deeply knowledgeable observer told me, the same one responsible for creating his legion of trolls. In response, he fired the head of the General Security Services, for putting loyalty to state institutions above his loyalty to him.

What, then, after all this could lead nearly the entire Israeli political spectrum, lead people like me who week after week demonstrated against Netanyahu, who truly see him as a would-be authoritarian and a mortal threat to Israel’s future as Jewish and Democratic state, to support his military campaign in Iran? It is the sheer threat of a nuclear Iran. The measure of the distance how many of us have to travel to say that we support Netanyahu in this war is the measure of the undeniable threat of a nuclear Iran, to Israel, to the Jewish people, and to the world.

Over the past year, the military and intelligence services whose patriotism Netanyahu regularly questioned, effectively disarmed the Syrian Army and Hezbollah, making it possible to turn, in a brief, stunningly successful campaign to turn against their Iranian patron, as the nuclear clock was ticking down.

Netanyahu is perhaps Israel’s greatest living sociologist, and has, for decades, played its politics like a fiddle. Everything that he has done emerges from his utterly sincere conviction that his personal political interest and the Israeli national interest truly are one and the same. And so anything that keeps him in power is justified. His moral justification has been the very real threat of Iran. Whether others could have done the same, or whether he could have done this without tearing Israeli society apart, is something we and historians will be trying to figure out for years to come.

Now that there is a ceasefire, Israel and Iran are licking their wounds and thinking of what comes next. Netanyahu’s sagging poll ratings have been ticking up, though the public still hopes to replace the current government. During the pre-war protests over the judicial overhaul, Israel’s center-left parties and civil society, after years of drift, found their voice, and it was thunderous. If, indeed, the immediate threat of Iran has for now passed, one hopes they will assert themselves and offer a weary public a patriotic, principled alternative. But it won’t be easy.

Netanyahu was in some ways a harbinger and one of the progenitors of the new, post-liberal world taking shape before our eyes. This new dispensation has arisen on the ruins of a liberal order that in many ways lost touch with its own deepest commitments, and its nerve. The proven courage and fortitude of the Israel’s center-left is facing a historic opportunity, and a new test.

Yet amid that nightmare was something miraculous. I saw friends spontaneously arrange accommodation for refugees from the south, people they’d never met. I saw a drama school, converted into a charity centre, filled with clothing, toys, books and nappies. I saw volunteers establishing makeshift schools, babysitting, offering free counselling. 

I saw solidarity: passionate, tenacious, resourceful; solidarity in a free society. Liberality in its oldest King James meaning, of unasked-for generosity, given in freedom. Today’s liberal societies encourage any number of virtues. But truth be told, solidarity is not among them. 

Quite apart from the academic evidence — James Davison Hunter is just one of the scholars to persuasively detail just how depleted American democratic solidarity has become — how could it be otherwise? Isn’t liberalism about individual freedom, even as solidarity involves committing to the other? Doesn’t liberalism take shape around carefully defined rights, while solidarity grows out of deeply subjective feelings? 

Not really. As the Hebrew University political theorist Charles Lesch has explained, liberal societies cannot survive without solidarity. Solidarity helps me see beyond ideology and self-interest. It fosters the empathy and fairness that make me want to ensure others find justice. It saves me from potential tyrannies of family and community by seeing us all as connected. And solidarity helps me develop my own moral self: it isn’t always about me.

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Why, then, do liberal societies have such a hard time grounding their solidarity? Hunter calls for new religiously grounded ideas of hope. To Lesch’s mind, the problem runs even deeper than that: foundational liberal thinkers, from Rousseau to Kant to Habermas, committed to emancipation from traditional religious authority and its many injustices, based themselves on metaphysical ideas of morality that they can’t justify on their own philosophical terms. Abstract ideas like the “general will” or “social contract” or “public reason”— none can spark the lasting social solidarity that pushes us beyond ourselves to the point of sacrifice. None can quite fill the hole left by the pre-modern rootedness of solidarity in the shared humanity of God’s creation and moral laws. 

There is though no easy return to premodern certainties. Lesch’s solution is to draw on the modern Jewish humanist tradition. One lodestar is Emmanuel Levinas. He said that caring for other people, as unknowable as God, is the only way out of an endless, hopeless struggle for power. Martin Buber makes a similar point. Our political and social institutions are shallow human artefacts, working to reflect, but never truly enacting, God’s own standards of justice. Only by relating to others as living, breathing people can we truly live together in the world. It’s by caring for others, in short, that we come to understand our own strengths, and our vulnerabilities too. Solidarity, then, is not just blind loyalty or homogeneity. Rather, it’s a way of life, lived under moral ideals. 

All this was put to the test on October 7. That day, the Israeli state and its institutions failed its people miserably. Yet society pulled together, displaying solidarity at its most profound. How? Two new books offer some insight here, not only into what happened, but what made it possible. 

One Day in October gathers 40 stories of heroism, resourcefulness and self-sacrifice. The editors, Oriya Mevorach and Yair Agmon, took care not to homogenise their examples: we hear the different cadences of troops and civilians, religious and secularists, Arabs and Jews, all featuring in one belief-beggaring, heartbreaking story after another. Taken together it is an unforgettable tapestry of goodness in the very teeth of shocking suffering. Some are first-person tales, others told by those who survive them.  

The ex-Orthodox anarchist who caught and then tossed back seven Hamas grenades before being killed by the eighth; the young father who ran out bare-handed to fight the attackers; the medic who refused to be evacuated so she could stay with the wounded; the eight-year-old girl who refused to be freed if her friend wasn’t saved alongside her; the Bedouin who drove his minivan back and forth under fire to rescue people from harm’s way; the grandfather who, after putting his family in a safe room, sat in his lounge and convinced the terrorists that he was alone, and that only he needed to die — Mevorach and Agmon tell story after story of parents sacrificing themselves for their children, raw conscripts fighting to the death, of civilians rushing into slaughter, never to return. 

Yet not even this epic heroism withstands an overwhelming sense of loss. One member of Zaka, a volunteer ambulance and remains-retrieval organisation composed entirely of Ultraorthodox Haredim, describes the silent dialogues he and his colleagues held with burned, mangled, maimed corpses, promising to keep their dignity even in death, and hearing the dead say “your eyes will be our mouths” in return. 

The heroism here, then, is not triumphal. It’s wrenched from the absurd. A father of two soldiers reflects on how both fought at the same base that day, independent of one another, one dying and saving his brother without even knowing he was there. “So if you want to ask questions,” the father says, “ask, but ask all the questions.” 

Amir Tibon takes a different approach. In The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal  Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands, he tells a story at once more sweeping and finely scaled. A Haaretz writer and editor, he powerfully tells the heart-stopping story of one family on one kibbutz — his own — interweaving it with the larger history that brought them to that morning in October.

That kibbutz, Nahal Oz, on the border with Gaza, was founded in the earliest days of the Israeli state. It grew, with time, into a strangely Israeli Eden: a close-knit community with echoes of democratic socialism, set in beautiful surroundings with a rich cultural life, regularly at the receiving end of mortar attacks and rocket-propelled grenades. The latter became a regular fact of life after Israel’s clumsy withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, aided and abetted by American misjudgments and the Palestinian Authority’s fecklessness, that ultimately led to Hamas’ seizure of power two years later. 

A crucial point of Tibon’s account, and one too often lost in standard press accounts, is the extent to which the communities abutting Gaza were filled with Left-leaning Israelis, who, when seeking affordable housing, chose to live in the country’s far but unquestionably sovereign periphery — rather than the occupied West Bank. They saw themselves as, and often actually were, the descendants of the Left-Labour idealists of Ben-Gurion’s age. Many moved near Gaza precisely to foster Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, and help local Palestinians as best they could, all as committed Zionists fulfilling their democratic principles. 

Tibon very much exemplifies that ethos of Left-Zionist solidarity, which he learned from his father, a retired major general. Like so many others, the elder Tibon grabbed his pistol on October 7 and literally fought his way south, standing alongside soldiers decades younger than himself. Unlike many others, he succeeded in his mission, rescuing his son, his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren from their dark and suffocating shelter.  

The betrayal of Tibon’s title is that of the Israeli government, and in particular of Benjamin Netanyahu, and Tibon’s criticisms of Netanyahu are as deep as the commitment to the Jewish and democratic ethos on which he has staked his life. Netanyahu has built his career on a mix of hardline nationalism delivered in eloquent cadences, and brilliant, if infuriating, tactical manoeuvres. Both are aimed at the same goal: ensuring Israel’s immediate physical and economic security while kicking strategic decisions down the road forever. One such manoeuvre involved facilitating the bounteous flow of Qatari cash to Hamas, so that it’d never need to cede control over Gaza to its internationally recognised rivals in the Palestinian Authority.

Not, of course, that Netanyahu was alone here. Many Israelis convinced themselves that Gaza could be contained. As we now see, the price of confrontation was just too frightful to contemplate. 

And, in fact, even if the Hamas attacks had never happened, 2023 would still have gone down in Israeli history for the massive anti-Netanyahu protests that rocked the country last year in response to his programme to roll back Israel’s judiciary. Those rallies galvanised Israeli civil society in ways not seen for decades. And it was, in part, those very same protest movements that pivoted and turned to the other in those awful post-October 7 days. 

The week before the attack, we held dialogue sessions around the country, making an effort to reach across Israel’s bitter political divide. One thing that clearly emerged in those conversations was tremendous solidarity at the grassroots, thinning out the further we got from on-the-ground problems, and the faster we approached the broader ideological chasms dividing society. No wonder the philosopher Hanoch Ben-Pazi has claimed there now exists a “truly incomprehensible” gap between Israelis and their leaders.

As the war grinds on, much of the intense solidarity of its early days has ebbed. A very real flash point is whether the ultimate war aim is crushing the terrorists or returning the captive hostages and displaced communities to their homes. Another, perhaps inevitably, is what you think of Netanyahu. Much of the Israeli public wishes him gone. Yet his hardline coalition partners know that they have nowhere else to go, and his partisan supporters attack his critics verbally and sometimes physically. The miracle of Israeli solidarity, then, is being put to the test anew.

While neither One Day nor The Gates is about solidarity as such, the idea infuses the pages of both. What, then, makes it happen, and keeps it going? The basic structures of daily life are surely important here: public schools; state-funded nurseries and other family-friendly policies; national health and social insurance; and, of course, mandatory military service with reserve duty later. While Israel is a far more privatised society than before, in short, much of the strong collectivist ethos of its first decades endures. 

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Yet more than the socio-economics, Israel is a state with thick webbings of culture, attachment to place and family, and the Hebrew language, whose renewal as a living, spoken language is itself a kind of miracle. 

Judaism, of course, isn’t the only faith here. Nor is Jewishness the only ethnicity. Yet one striking feature of the civilian response to October 7 was the engagement of Israel’s Arab citizens, Christians and Muslims both. Their own entwinements with the Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank torque their complicated lives all the more. As Rima Farah, a scholar of Israeli Christian history has pointed out, those particular dilemmas offer the most acute test of whether Israeliness, as opposed to Jewishness, can really be a national identity. 

Here as elsewhere, and for all its uniqueness, Israel is also a testing ground for key problems of democracy. Israel is not the apartheid state of caricature — yet the fear that occupation of the West Bank will make it one is much of what drives Tibon and other liberal activists. Resolution of that occupation now seems more distant than ever, and lazy talk of “two states” is wishful thinking. Yet some meaningful path away from the endless grind of military oppression and settler expropriation is key to a decent future. And as October 7 hinted, for just a moment, that future is partly built on solidarity, on people rushing to help their fellow humans without stopping to think of which party they voted for or which language they use at home. More than that, it allows us to honestly ask both ourselves and each other: where did we go wrong?

Once religion ceases to be party political, it can become a way to ground our ties and moral responsibilities to the past, to the future, and to each other. Fortunately, for many Israelis, their faith isn’t merely a matter of spiritual dispensation — but rather a way of anchoring one’s own particular identity in something larger, something which endures once we’re gone. In that way, it is not unlike the caressing solidarities of family. At the same time, and as Levinas and Buber clearly understood, religion hangs an eternal question mark over all our certainties, and all our worldly ambitions, cautioning us against overweening pride, and undercutting the grounds of our cruelty. It makes us at once deeply particular and deeply universal, utterly encased in our particular circumstances and yet entwined with all human beings everywhere, sharing as we do the distinctly human mix of ringing potency and utter vulnerability. It makes possible a kind of solidarity in which we can offer help to others beyond ourselves, without losing ourselves in the process. 

That balance is always there, but it withers and contorts without a welcoming echo. Solidarity is not all sweetness and light. There are solidarities of hatred, enmity, fanaticism and violence, as the last year has terribly shown. But that cautionary knowledge can also guard us from ourselves, guiding us from the seductive lies of “leadership” and towards the tangible, life-giving work of responsibility. 

In recent years, however, the people of Oberammergau have significantly reworked the play; Jesus and the Apostles are now clearly Jewish themselves, the Judaism of Jesus’s time is presented with nuance and understanding, and crucially, Roman imperial power is depicted as pervasively as it was. Yet though Oberammergau has changed, the Passion Play endures — most recently on stage last week at the International Court of Justice, northwest of Bavaria, in the Hague. There, South Africa initiated proceedings against the State of Israel, alleging that it is actively committing genocide in its war in Gaza.

The texts being invoked are no longer the Gospels but treatises of international law; the figure in the dock is not the traditional Jew living by centuries-old laws, but a sovereign, in many ways, secular state, with considerable military and political power. Yet again, the Jews are charged with being the criminal outliers of global society; whether they are, in a devilishly complicated situation, acting wisely or unwisely, proportionally or disproportionately, is beside the point. Their guilt is total and collective.

The magisterial historian Gershom Scholem remarked that one of Zionism’s consequences is that the Jews will no longer have to play the symbol in other people’s myths. Great a scholar as he was, he was wrong.

That Israel’s allegedly genocidal war is a response to a religious terror movement’s gleeful, forthrightly genocidal marauding was largely unmentioned by Israel’s accusers at the Hague. That the terrorists retreated, hostages in hand, to a painstakingly prepared and boobytrapped subterranean city below mosques, hospitals and schools, mentioned even less. Amid these gaping omissions, one can’t but wearily conclude that Israel was bound to be accused of genocide, no matter what it did following October 7, short of bowing its head in surrender.

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Hypocrisy is at work here, of course, but that is almost trivially beside the point. Genocide is more than a justifiably hideous characterisation: as a legal category, as rhetoric and policy framing, it is a doomsday weapon of epic proportions. It is, in its heightening ignominy to the nth degree, almost uniquely totalising.

Under the terms of the Genocide Convention, passed by the United Nations in 1948, states can be called upon “to take such action under the Charter of the United Nations as they consider appropriate for the prevention and suppression of acts of genocide”. In other words, designating something as genocide brings with it a duty to act — and it is the fear of that duty that paradoxically encourages responsible states to desist from using the term and thus draw on its moral and mobilising force.  That is why the US took 40 years to ratify the Genocide Convention and has been so hesitant to invoke it long after it did. When I served in the US State Department we deployed an ensemble of verbal acrobatics — “acts tantamount to genocide”, “acts constituting genocide”, “acts of a genocidal nature” — rather than plain old “genocide”, since we knew what it entailed.

None of this is to say that Israel is immune to criticism. So much of what makes this war so very miserable is its happening on the watch of the worst government in Israel’s history. Benjamin Netanyahu and his coalition partners, each for their own reasons, spent most of 2023 trying to replace the country’s flawed but vibrant democracy with an ultra-Right, mercenary dictatorship. They, like Hamas, badly misjudged the ranks of Israel’s civil society, who mounted massive efforts to preserve judicial independence and the rule of law, and then, come October 7, pivoted to military service, and to offering as much as they could of the social services that their hollowed-out state was unable to provide.

Netanyahu deliberately kept Hamas in power, on a low flame, rather than deal with the Palestinian Authority, whose own fecklessness made his life easier. And for years, many Israelis, myself included, went along with Netanyahu here, at least as regards not militarily confronting Hamas, because we knew that doing so would necessarily entail the nightmarish urban warfare and civilian suffering unfolding now. This was a trade-off, and one that ended very badly. But my very mentioning of the term “trade-off” reminds us that we live in a complicated world, one in which moral clarity is a hard, unending challenge, with myriad decision points along the way.

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Fortunately, we have a branch of international law to help guide us in wartime: International Humanitarian Law, including the Laws of Armed Conflict. Here, Israel has laid out its understandings of that body of law as it pertains to this conflict, and its interpretations. Those interpretations are of course open to criticism, particularly around the issue of “proportionality”, as any warfighting might be. But that requires attending to the actual facts on the ground; and that is precisely what South Africa’s presentation last week at the Hague deliberately did not do.

As Itamar Mann, a well-respected Israeli scholar, himself strongly critical of the present war, has carefully pointed out, precisely because South Africa itself is not a party to the conflict, it was perfectly positioned to lay out a more complex picture of the facts than it did. By acknowledging, for instance, Hamas’s deliberate shelling of Israeli civilians since October 7, and subsequent warfighting from its tunnels, it could have presented a much stronger case.

South Africa, of course, had reasons of its own for presenting the case as it did. It is, after all, attempting to position itself as a leader of the blocs of countries increasingly challenging the already-tottering US-led world order. But even so, pressing a case of genocide still requires proving two elements of the crime: genocidal intent and genocidal actions.

South Africa was able to present evidence of genocidal-sounding intent from any number of political actors in the Netanyahu government. None of them, though, have direct decision-making authority over the conduct of the war, leading to open hostility between some of them (Itamar Ben-Gvir above all) with the IDF high command. That direct authority is reserved not just to the military professionals, but to the war cabinet, convened by Netanyahu to insulate him from his own coalition partners, and in which the political opposition to Netanyahu is well-represented; given Israeli public fury at Netanyahu, he would no longer be in power if they weren’t in the room. Moreover, if genocide were Israel’s aim, issuing warnings before bombings, creating humanitarian corridors (however limited), and allowing in food and other necessities would be a pretty poor way of going about it.

And if this is genocide, its meaning has been far removed from its usage following the Second World War, when the term, along with “human rights”, entered the global lexicon. The two designations are far from identical, and in some respects push in different directions. But both resulted from well-meaning efforts to wrest from the teeth of unimaginable horror some new, bedrock principles on which there could hopefully rise a better world.

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People from a range of countries, religions and cultures worked to establish these new ideas, Jews and Zionists among them. For Jews, human rights’ grant of individual rights separate from citizenship was a welcome solution to the trauma of statelessness that doomed so many in the years before the war; “genocide”, meanwhile, reflected the understandings that groups, national and ethnic groups, have a personality all their own.

The crucial figure here was the Polish-Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” and is widely regarded as the Godfather of the Genocide Convention. Well before the Second World War, he had been thinking and working, along with a number of other jurists, on a central question vexing modern nation-states: the rights of national minorities.

He recognised that national groups, like individuals, exist prior to the state — and sought to reconcile their group-belonging with the individualised nature of citizenship. In 1919, this idea found hopeful expression in the national minority treaty system of the nascent League of Nations, under which member states pledged to honour the collective rights of national minorities within their borders.

We know how well that all worked out. The point, though, is that while the League was a disastrous political and moral failure, it was a legal failure too — and it was those treaties for minority protection that failed, for Jews above all.

After this collapse, Jewish jurists sought alternatives — the framework of human rights, the nation-state of Israel — and sometimes both at once, as James Loeffler’s magnificent scholarship has shown. Lemkin (though himself a Zionist in his early years, as Loeffler has shown), took a different tack. To him, the idea of human rights was amorphous and unenforceable. As for Zionism, while it had indeed contributed to his own thinking on minorities’ group rights, he chose to downplay its role — largely to avoid genocide’s politicisation in a solely Jewish context.

For Lemkin, if Human Rights was a way of granting individuals rights prior to the state and even if they had no citizenship at all, the Genocide Convention was a way of preserving collective groups from the modern state’s uniquely centralised, industrialised and murderous power. Implicit in the Genocide Convention is the notion that the extermination of the Jews was paradigmatic but sui generis. The Holocaust, in other words, was not to be seen as utterly and unreservedly unique, not least because then we would be left with nothing to learn from it. Vicious regimes have savaged innocent groups of people throughout history. Rather, what is so striking about the Holocaust is the way nearly every form of degradation and slaughter known to history, compounded by such modern creatures as industrialised mass murder and racial ideology, made for an apotheosis of physical cruelty and cultural extermination.

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The Holocaust was thus the model, the catalogue, of all that hatred of groups could bring and all that international law was meant to prevent. Despite his deeply held differences with Jewish architects of human rights such as Hersh Lauterpacht (who was responsible for the idea of “crimes against humanity” at the Nuremberg Trials) and Jacob Robinson (a key drafter of the UN’s Refugee Convention), he shared their fundamental conviction that Jewish suffering yielded powerful new lessons for the world.

Which brings us back to last week’s activities in the Hague. Israel, too, emerged in 1948 in the aftermath of monumental genocide, and the circumstances of its birth are joined to the concept of genocide at the root. If it practises genocide, one might conclude that it therefore forfeits its “right to exist”. Indeed, Israel appears to be the only country regularly talked of in terms of having, or not having, “a right to exist”.

This is a marked shift from Lemkin’s vision, which hoped that extending the idea of personhood from individuals to groups would help those groups survive. The “right to exist” euphemism, by contrast, inverts and weaponises the language of individual rights to facilitate the kind of mass murder we saw on October 7. It contorts the immense, pained complexity of the Jewish State, the cruelties and injustices attending its birth, as well as those it has itself committed, into a vicious contest, in which one side is always on the defensive, just an argumentative slip away from offering itself up for destruction.

What’s worse, the always conditional nature of Israel’s existence in so many precincts is exactly what Netanyahu and his ultranationalist partners count on to keep them from coming to terms with Palestinian national identity. Pile-ons like those we have seen these last months in the end disserve the Palestinians and their genuine needs, and serve the ends of the most malignant actors involved, Hamas not least among them.

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Jihadism, the stated ideology of Hamas, doesn’t accept the legitimate personhood of national groups and is in both theory and practice genocidal to the core. Its accusing Israel of genocide, in a fact-free way that undercuts the legitimacy of the idea of genocide as a whole, works to erode the rules-based international legal order that Hamas rejects to begin with. That international legal order and its aspirations to universalism is far from perfect, to say the least. Yet what might take its place? If another universalism, then of what? Not all universalisms are benign — and as universalisms go, Jihadism is singularly unforgiving.

Several nephews of mine serve in the Israeli Army and have been in the thick of fighting in Gaza. I asked one of them, a reservist in a commando unit and a bohemian neuroscientist in civilian life, what he thought of last week’s proceedings at the Hague. He didn’t get defensive, but told me that he and some comrades had been talking about it. He calmly asked: “What is the value of doing this now? I’m not doing genocide. Are others? I didn’t see it. Is the state? I don’t think so. But what’s going on there? What exactly do they want to get out of this?”

The answer, I’d venture, is much — and also nothing at all.

Much — in that some of what motivated the proceedings has to be the result of genuine concern for Palestinian suffering. But so much of it seems to be foisting onto Israel blame for all that colonialism wrought, and all that post-colonialism failed to do; beating up on America via its Israeli client; keeping alive Soviet-style Third Worldism for the sake of Western progressives; blaming the failures of the Gods — of ideologies, of utopian legalism — on the all-too-human Jews; retreating from a confrontation with Jihadism by hoping that one day Israel will simply go away.

And nothing at all — in that there is no attempt in these proceedings to ease the very real suffering of Palestinians on the ground from all that Hamas has brought upon them on its own, and by bringing down upon them the full force of Israel; and no attempt to convey to moderate Israelis that there actually is an international community trying to use international law to end conflicts rather than carry them on by other means.

Few doubt that our world needs International Humanitarian Law now more than ever. But that law needs to be credible — or it will be worse than nothing at all.

Any number of religions have passed through this cycle of birth, growth, decay, reformation and renewal. The latest is a religion born 75 years ago this week — the religion of human rights.

Sadly, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the manifest failures of the human rights framework as we know it today, and its grotesque contributions to the evil it is meant to fight, are not a bug of the system, but a feature. For decades in the Middle East, the UN’s countless Declarations, Covenants, Reports, Commissions and disproportionate denunciations of Israel did nothing to stem the chain of conflicts, cruelties and injustices that led to the horrific massacres of October 7, the subsequent flattening of much of Gaza, with hundreds of thousands of people displaced and innocent hostages buried alive in tunnels. Indescribable butcheries and tortures, and even documented gang rapes, were met by UN bodies, human rights NGOs and women’s organisations with thunderous silence. It took nearly two months for UN Women to even acknowledge these horrors at all.

Elsewhere, responses were more insidious. On 18 October, Human Rights Watch announced that it had verified “three incidents of deliberate killings” taking place during “the October 7, 2023 attacks by Hamas-led gunmen”. Three. In a statement issued on 8 November, it called on the US, UK, Canada and Germany to suspend military assistance and arms sales to Israel, detailing what it described as “widespread, serious abuses amounting to war crimes against Palestinian civilians”, with scarce mention of Hamas, other than one line calling on “Iran and other governments” to stop arming them. A week later, any lingering benefit of the doubt vanished after an outgoing senior editor there explained that this bloodless response to the bloodiest day for Jews since 1945 “did not happen in a vacuum”. Rather, “Human Rights Watch’s initial response was the fruition of years of politicisation of its Israel-Palestine work that has frequently violated basic editorial standards related to rigour, balance, and collegiality.”

In fairness, Human Rights Watch’s passing mention of Iran, though the kind of perfunctory ritual that gives insincerity a bad name, was still better than most anything coming from Amnesty International. But, then, Iran has long assumed a peculiar role in the world of human rights. Just last month, Hamas’s most prominent sponsor, a regime that openly imprisons and tortures dissenters, was allowed to chair a meeting of the Social Forum of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Yet few eyebrows were raised: over the decades, we have learned to shrug off such quirks with cockeyed optimism, convincing ourselves that they don’t really matter. But they do. And even by the comically degraded standards of UN human rights bodies, this was breathtaking.

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More to the point, the Iranian regime is able to participate in the world of human rights institutions precisely because, like the Soviet Union before it, it does not believe in them at all. Not that the Iranians, Hamas and other Jihadists don’t have principles. They certainly do, and we discount them at our peril. In the moral universe of Jihadism, the well-being of individuals, and certainly of infidels, dissolves into nothingness in the face of the divine; and the violence of October 7 was its own kind of worship. Oscar Wilde’s quip that “hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue” turns out to have been tragically optimistic. When it comes to human rights, hypocrisy is the Devil’s method of rotting goodness from within.

How did we end up here? The concept of human rights feels both extremely old and extremely new. It echoes messages of justice, ethics and respect for human personhood known throughout history, and yet it also propounds a notion of universal rights not enunciated until the end of the Second World War. The year of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948, was also the year of the Genocide Convention, the desegregation of the US Armed Forces, the creation of the State of Israel, and the Berlin Airlift. It saw the birth of the American-led international order that would define our lives in terms of human rights, free trade, aspirations to racial justice, and the creation of nation-states for oppressed minorities. It was that year, more than 1945, which in many ways gave birth to the world order that is now collapsing before our eyes. But the idea of human rights was also built on the past.

Notions of the sacredness of human personhood and the unique claims of human dignity have been with us for millennia. Our modern understanding of human rights, though, first emerged from ideas of “natural rights” that had fuelled Europe’s and America’s political revolutions in the 18th century. Those revolutionaries, as well as the Abolitionists and Humanitarians of the 19th century, synthesised rich religious legacies of moral reflection and the sacredness of human life with modern concerns for individual well-being and nations’ aspirations for self-determination. During the heat of the Dreyfus Affair, Émile Durkheim wrote that this concern for individual well-being was a new kind of religion, a new moral order around which society would hopefully convene.

A number of the drafters of the 1948 Universal Declaration were committed to the religious traditions on which they drew, East and West, translating their ideas into the depersonalised, secular idioms of international law. It was hoped that unmooring these ideas from their theistic foundations would make them universally relevant to the making of a better world. Later, however, amid the pressures of the Cold War, the impulses of the human rights creators diverged. Some favoured strengthening decent government and rule of law at the levels of individual states, while others leaned towards creating transnational versions of individual states’ legal systems, along with the vast panoply of councils, committees, rapporteurs and subcommittees made necessary by the absence of decent government and rule of law in so many UN members states.

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It was not until the Seventies, once the failures of Soviet and Chinese communism and the disappointments of decolonisation were beyond dispute, that human rights returned to the stage in what Samuel Moyn calls “the last utopia”. Alongside this rose a vast network of human rights advocacy, forced to tack between the genuinely noble idea of transnational standards of justice with the inevitable necessity of choosing sides. Though they advocated a kind of anti-politics, they inevitably ended up as political actors in the global arena.

As always, the great sticking point was the Jews. As James Loeffler has brilliantly shown, the same Jewish jurists were deeply involved in the Universal Declaration and in Zionism, seeing in both an answer to the disastrously failed minority rights treaty system of the League of Nations.

But the roles of Jewishness and antisemitism in the larger story of human rights go even deeper. For millennia, Jewish existence has been a puzzlement to others, and regularly to ourselves. From Biblical times to today, the Jewish people have proclaimed a universal God with ethical demands on the basis of a particular covenant with Him and one another. In other words, Jewish existence always puts into question the relations between the national and the universal, the powerful and the powerless, the religious and the secular. We never fit into standard categories. There have been moments when this Jewish synthesis has risen magnificently onto the world stage, such as the Soviet Jewry Movement, lasting from the Sixties to the Eighties, in which universal rights, national identities and the larger causes of democracy and freedom all came together. But those times are exceptions.

The theological-political tensions of human rights — between the sacredness of individuals and the just claims of collectives — are well illustrated by the path of Amnesty International’s founder, Peter Benenson. A British Jew who worked hard to help Holocaust refugees, he eventually converted to Catholicism. Crucially, the Catholic doctrines he espoused were not the Thomist natural law teachings that played a large role in the post-war formulations of human rights, by which personhood, if ultimately beyond the state, is nonetheless enmeshed in webs of obligation and social order, which makes democratic states qualitatively different from others. Instead, they were rooted in the Augustinian teachings of the irremediable sinfulness of this world, and the lonely purity of the individual, no matter the state or social order against whom they rise, be it democracy or dictatorship.

These seeming abstractions had powerful real-world effects. For Benenson and Amnesty International, the violation of any one individual’s human rights is unacceptable, no matter the larger political and social system in which that person lives, be it democracy or dictatorship. That is a noble judgment, and a beautiful one. It is also, sadly, an invitation to the mindless legalism that can lead to Iran chairing a meeting of the UN Human Rights Council.

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The Soviet Union, for its part, freely signed any number of human rights documents because it had no intention of keeping them, and Leninist ideology said it didn’t have to. That not just dissidents, but the United States itself, would hold them to those obligations as they did in the late Seventies came as a bitter surprise.

With Western victory in the Cold War, human rights seemed poised finally to become a universal dispensation and a culmination of the best impulses of history. But this turned out to be a deeply destructive delusion. Today, the religion of human rights is as badly in need of reformation as was the priestly religion of ancient Israel, the Catholic Church in the time of Martin Luther, and, yes, Islamic thought after the frenzies of Jihadism will finally, hopefully, have exhausted themselves.

A reformation need not spell the end of human rights, but their re-birth. Human rights embody the precious notion, wrested from centuries of awful suffering, that there are certain things no state may be allowed to do ever, to anybody. Around the world, there are people standing up to dictatorships with unbelievable bravery and nothing legally to interpose between their governments and themselves but the human rights treaties and conventions that their governments have signed.

But a reformation is still necessary. Partly, this is a question of disaggregation. The term human rights has become linked to many noble and useful concepts: representative government, international humanitarian law, social and economic justice. These are all worlds away from the increasingly unhinged abstractions of human rights as preached in Geneva. And all connote a turning away from airy abstractions to face concrete realities on the ground — one small, usually compromised, step at a time.

The core idea of human rights — of ensuring respect for every single person’s fundamental dignity in processes of government and law, without exception — is not to be discarded. But we have to be brave enough to admit that the iterations of human rights as we know them have failed — and that if they are not drastically revised, conceptually and institutionally, they will do more harm than good.