On Oct. 25, 2023, the Egyptian Canadian novelist Omar El Akkad shared on social media a video of a devastated, rubble-strewn Gaza street, the kind of image that at that time, still retained the power to shock. He added, “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.”
In time, the post became a book, with a striking cover for the British edition that reprinted the original text as its title. In the United States, the cover bore a shorter version of the title: “One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This.” This month, as Israel began its sudden offensive against Iran and just before American bombers joined in — opening up the possibility of a much-expanded and much-extended regional conflict, or perhaps even World War III — I found myself staring at those book covers, and wondering … will they? Or is the world more likely to just move on, now?
When the first Israeli strikes hit Iran on June 13, it seemed to open a new chapter in the global unraveling of the last few decades, in which the relative stability of what was once called an “American-led international order” gave way to something both more violent and more chaotic.
But it may also have marked the closing of a chapter: one in which Israel’s conduct in Gaza was the subject of ongoing, if sporadic and not necessarily consequential, moral scrutiny.
As recently as last month, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, was calling the war in Gaza unjustifiable on television, and the prime minister of Spain was calling Israel a “genocidal state” in the Spanish Parliament. The leaders of France, Canada and Britain jointly released a statement calling the suffering of Gazans “intolerable,” the amount of humanitarian and food aid “inadequate” and “unacceptable” and, although they acknowledged Israel’s right to defend itself against terrorism, a recent escalation “wholly disproportionate” — and threatening concrete action if Israel did not suspend its offensive and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid.
Along with Australia, Norway, Canada and New Zealand, Britain also sanctioned two Israeli officials — Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — for “repeated incitements of violence against Palestinian communities,” freezing their assets and blocking them from entering their countries.
Today, just weeks later, many of those leaders are focused elsewhere, with some lining up behind Israel and the United States, and others stressing their concerns over Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons. In much the same way that Hamas’s heinous Oct. 7 attack on Israel helped turned the world’s attention away from Ukraine, Israel’s surprise attacks on June 13 appear to have drawn it away from Gaza and toward another conflict — one with higher stakes, and bigger bombs, colored less by an oppressive sense of grim inevitability than the hysterical spectacle of Trump-style showmanship.
“Nobody knows what I’m going to do,” President Trump told reporters on June 18, just as Fox News was telling viewers that a tactical nuclear attack was not off the table — and CNN and The Wall Street Journal were reporting that the U.S. intelligence community believed Iran was years away from developing its own nukes. Three days later, the president had dispatched American bombers, seemingly motivated by the positive coverage Israel’s offensive had gotten on TV.
In obvious ways, Trump is both the architect and the embodiment of this emergent geopolitical era, which is sometimes called a New Cold War or a return of great power rivalry, but also looks like an age of “wolf warrior” diplomacy and a dog-eat-dog throwback to the nakedly nationalistic age of 19th-century imperialism. Whatever term you might want to use, the period has been drained of much of the moralistic, solidaristic and cooperative rhetoric that used to give geopolitics at least the flush of human feeling and higher principle. The old system had plenty of delusions and blind spots; the new one may regard even catastrophically destructive campaigns with something like amoral indifference. What’s been called the “return of history” has also brought an atavistic acceptance of the horrors of war.
Weeks ago, the former State Department spokesman Matthew Miller — during the Biden administration, the very face of the foreign policy “blob” that seemed almost uniformly to support the war in Gaza — casually acknowledged that in his view it was “without a doubt true that Israel has committed war crimes.”
In several interviews over the last month, the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has repeatedly said the same. “What we are doing in Gaza now is a war of devastation: indiscriminate, limitless, cruel and criminal killing of civilians,” he wrote late last month in Haaretz. “It’s the result of government policy — knowingly, evilly, maliciously, irresponsibly dictated. Yes, Israel is committing war crimes.”
How many war crimes? In a comprehensive and engrossing prosecutorial account published by New York magazine last week, the journalist Suzy Hansen offered a loose estimate of the scale, writing that the accusation that Israel had committed “likely hundreds, maybe even thousands” of war crimes had become “all but undeniable.”
These may feel like belated acknowledgments of facts long known by those watching closely. But Miller’s comment is especially eye-opening, given how much time he spent stiff-arming inquiries about Israel’s conduct in the war, and America’s support for it, almost since the war’s opening days.
South Africa first brought its case against Israel to the International Court of Justice in December 2023, after all, less than 12 weeks after the war began. By May, the court was ordering Israel to halt its offensive in Rafah, and by July was issuing advisory opinions declaring Israel’s continued presence in the territory “unlawful.” Last November, a U.N. special committee investigation concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza were “consistent with genocide.” The following month, Amnesty International concluded the same.
Many of these objections were muffled or dismissed as reflexive anti-Zionism, as were the mass protests that sprang up in the fall of 2023 — in Washington, in London and elsewhere — and the campus encampments established at American universities the next spring. And as Hansen wrote, the first objections were raised not just in retrospect but also in real time. “The Israeli genocide scholar Raz Segal had called it a genocide by Oct. 15,” she noted. “Eight hundred genocide scholars signed a letter warning of genocide soon after.”
On Oct. 17, 10 days after the war began, a State Department official named Josh Paul, who’d helped manage arms transfers to American allies, quit his job in protest of the war, posting a heartfelt resignation letter on LinkedIn, giving interviews to the BBC and PBS, among other outlets, and participating in a New Yorker profile, by my brother, which appeared Nov. 6. The fighting was not even a month old.
When an explosion killed civilians at Al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City on Oct. 17, it produced a frantic flurry of commentary, speculation, and debate about who was responsible — a critical-seeming question, at the time, because attacking a hospital was still seen as an uncrossable red line. Back then, debate about Israel’s conduct in the war was tangled up in a thicket of arguments about the state’s security policy, its ruthless rhetoric, the sympathies of its critics, the scale of national trauma on Oct. 7 and what kind of response would be justified as self-defense or retribution. It was sometimes hard to see the particular details of the military response clearly, through all that thicket, but it also seemed like an important matter of geopolitical discernment.
Reporting from the United Nations shows that today, nearly every hospital in Gaza has been damaged or destroyed, as have most schools and mosques. According to the United Nations Satellite Center, in less than two years, nearly 70 percent of all structures in Gaza have been possibly, moderately or severely damaged — or destroyed. As of January, U.N. figures showed nine in 10 homes were damaged or destroyed. About 90 percent of the population has been displaced, with many Gazans multiple times. A study published in January by The Lancet, the London-based medical journal, suggested that nearly 65,000 Palestinians had been killed by traumatic injury in the first nine months of the war — a figure 40 percent higher even than the estimates suggested by the Gaza Ministry of Health. The study also estimated that more than half of the dead were women and children; some estimates of the share of civilian casualties run higher. More than 175 Palestinian journalists have been killed.
Those figures have been disputed, by Israel and many of its supporters, as has the degree to which this war has killed proportionally more civilians than many of the most gruesome military offensives of recent memory (Falluja, Mosul). But as you read about the recent targeted strikes on Iran, which according to the Israeli military killed a number of senior military and nuclear leaders, it’s worth reflecting on reporting by +972 magazine, from earlier in the Gaza conflict, that for every low-level combatant that Israel’s military A.I. targeted, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians in a strike — and that, in at least several instances, for higher-ranking figures, as many as 100 or more civilian deaths were tolerated. (Last April, I wrote about +972’s reporting, much of which was later corroborated by The Times.)
In recent weeks, the most horrifying news from Gaza has been about the attacks on those lining up for desperately needed humanitarian aid. Earlier in the conflict, it was especially striking to watch Cindy McCain — the head of the World Food Program and the widow of Senator John McCain, so much a stalwart supporter of Israel that his laughing face has been used in memes about the recent strikes in Iran — raise the alarm about the critical levels of hunger throughout Gaza. In May, she warned of famine — as she had been, on and off, for about a year. After that alarm-raising, a new food-distribution system was soon established. According to the U.N. human rights office, hundreds of Palestinians have been killed since then, while waiting for food.
For those who have been following the conflict closely, few of these facts — or even those many more outlined in Hansen’s 10,000-word account — will seem unfamiliar, either in particular or in kind. But “familiar” is one thing we say when what we mean is simply that we’ve become inured.
Not that long ago, Americans would often invoke the judgment of history when considering domestic disputes and global conflict, as though in the fullness of time the world’s perspective would invariably converge on justice. But things don’t always become clearer as time passes. Just as often, the memory fades and the particularities blur, with those marking their objections in the heat of the moment growing eventually hoarse as everyone else simply marches on.
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