Jamie Dettmer is opinion editor and a foreign affairs columnist at POLITICO Europe.
With Britain, France and Canada declaring they will recognize Palestinian statehood in the fall, Israel’s traditional allies are finally breaking rank. And if you ask former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the country’s current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his zealous right-wing coalition government only have themselves to blame.
“There’s an ever-widening gap between the appalling atrocities Hamas inflicted on Israelis on Oct. 7 and what we are now inflicting on the Palestinians,” he told POLITICO. “We have become a pariah state.”
But is the criticism and isolation enough to change the direction of travel?
Olmert was in office from 2006 to 2009 as leader of the liberal Kadima party — a breakaway from Netanyahu’s Likud party — and he’s a rare voice in Israel. A fierce critic of the conduct of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, he has warned from the start that it lacked a clear endgame.
Now, Netanyahu is at odds with some of the country’s staunchest allies, even prompting unease from Germany, Olmert lamented. Chancellor Friedrich Merz is under growing domestic pressure to join other EU countries and penalize Israel over Gaza, which would mark a critical break in Berlin’s traditionally unwavering support. And U.S. President Donald Trump recently contradicted Netanyahu over reports of hunger in Gaza, saying the Palestinian enclave was experiencing “real starvation” — albeit clearly blaming Hamas for stalled ceasefire negotiations.
“We’re losing the kind of international support, which always tied Israel to the strongest, most powerful, most important, most enlightened elements in the Western world,” he said.
In a trenchant op-ed titled “Enough Is Enough. Israel Is Committing War Crimes,” the former prime minister wrote: “What we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination.” He also warned that an Israeli government proposal to herd Gazans into a “humanitarian city” — which he calls a concentration camp — would be tantamount to ethnic cleansing, and senior Israeli military commanders are wary of such a plan as well.
In another break from the norm, Olmert’s war crimes charge was also recently echoed by two of Israel’s most prominent human rights organizations — B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights — who say Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and that the country’s Western allies have a legal and moral obligation to stop it.
Olmert himself had previously defended Israel against “accusations of genocide and war crimes” at the start of the campaign, but his position evolved as Israel’s conduct turned more brutal, “with the widespread slaughter of civilians, including women, children and the elderly, and the deliberate starving of Gazans by blocking food and medical aid,” he said — civilian death and injury shouldn’t be justified as collateral damage.
Unsurprisingly, Olmert’s disapproval has enraged Netanyahu’s allies, who see his remarks as treasonous and accuse him of “stabbing soldiers in the back.” Foreign Affairs Minister Gideon Sa’ar accused Olmert of “taking an active part in a diplomatic campaign, in a propaganda war and in legal warfare against the State of Israel and the IDF.” And Education Minister Yoav Kisch accused him of joining a “radical leftist chorus defaming Israel.”
The only other Israeli politician to be held in such disdain by the country’s right wing is Democrat party head Yair Golan, who prompted an outcry when he told Israel’s national broadcaster that “a sane country does not fight against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not give itself the aim of expelling populations.”
But Israeli government officials angrily deny all allegations of war crimes and genocide, which have now been raised at The Hague. They’ve also described the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant as examples of antisemitism.
The knee-jerk conflation of antisemitism and any criticism of Israeli war policy “is a very easy way out for us,” Olmert observed. “We condemn everyone as antisemites,” which is wrong and dangerous and risks fueling antisemitism. “Rage across the world now on the humanitarian issue is spreading rapidly,” he told POLITICO.
Some of those demonstrations and protest marches may well have “been influenced by the latent antisemitism we know to exist and which has been part of our lives for generations,” Olmert said. “But the reason for the public eruptions is [that] the war now waged by Netanyahu has lost any legitimacy, as we see the accumulation of civilian deaths in Gaza and the humanitarian crisis and children being shot at near aid distribution sites.” By the Israeli government’s own admission, around 30,000 civilians have been killed since October 2023.
Hamas’ declaration that it won’t lay down its arms, even in the face of Arab League calls to do so, doesn’t help those arguing for the prioritization of civilian Palestinians either. Ordinary Gazans are caught between a militant Islamist group happy to trade their lives, and Israeli supremacists who see them as abettors of Hamas.
Meanwhile, accusing French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of antisemitism or of supporting terror is also absurd, especially considering both helped intercept ballistic missiles that Iran launched at Israel in April, Olmert explained. “Of course, the accusation of antisemitism is a weapon wielded by a self-righteous government. Netanyahu and the others in the coalition are using the allegation to try to defend themselves against justified accusations of using excessive force.”
Other critics of the Gaza campaign, like left-wing Israeli journalist and author Gideon Levy, also suspect the scattershot antisemitism allegations — which are broadly endorsed across Israeli society — displace a sense of guilt about what the country is doing. “Here we have the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors talking about transferring 2.3 million people, talking about it openly. You cannot digest it. So, you better deny it,” he said.
During his time in office, Olmert was responsible for negotiations around the establishment of a Palestinian state across more than 94 percent of the occupied West Bank and, arguably, he came closer than any other Israeli leader to pulling it off. However, Palestine Liberation Organization leader Mahmoud Abbas backed away from Olmert’s plan, feeling his Israeli interlocutor couldn’t deliver. And, indeed, Olmert resigned shortly after and was convicted of obstruction of justice and for accepting bribes during his time as trade minister and as mayor of Jerusalem.
Today, with nearly half-a-million Israeli settlers in the West Bank, Olmert’s plan would be far more hazardous for any Israeli government to try and pull off — even if it wanted to. Not that Netanyahu or his coalition partners have any interest in endorsing a genuine two-state deal. Even in February 2023, the most Netanyahu said he’d be willing to do is grant Palestinians autonomy but not sovereignty. And still, Israel would have to maintain full control over the West Bank’s security.
To hammer the point home, the Israeli Prime Minister’s been damning the Oslo process at every available opportunity, reiterating that it was all a terrible mistake and that there’s no one to negotiate with on the Palestinian side.
Olmert, for his part, believes there are Palestinian partners to negotiate with, but that Israel is constantly undermining moderate Palestinians. He’s also worried what comes next might be an annexation of Gaza and even the West Bank — something Netanyahu’s key right-wing partners have long advocated. And the only man he thinks can stop this happening is Trump.
“What’s happening is totally unacceptable and unforgivable. And at some point, Trump will have to intervene,” he said. “I don’t know if Trump has a heart. But something may force him to tell Netanyahu ‘enough is enough’ as that sentiment becomes more widespread in America.” But with Trump’s envoys praising Israel’s aid distribution in the enclave at the weekend — a view other traditional allies of Israel don’t share — that seems a dim prospect.
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