An open letter to the Israelis: rise and save the soul of your country

Imagine a Palestinian commander giving several of his fighters a box of grenades to toss from the car. When asked why they needed to do that, the commander said, 'we want the Israelis to live in fear, in awe and constant dread, to drain them psychologically and make them know who owns this land.'

Imagine, every day, the Palestinian government murders, maims and buries Israeli corpses with their arms tied behind their backs, livers and brains shattered. This macabre scene is repeated time and again as the Palestinians' appetite for more Jewish blood remains unquenched.

Imagine that more than two million Israeli Jews living in Gaza are enduring the worst calamity of their lives. You cannot measure their tragedy by how many were killed, which exceeds 58,000, but by the thousands of orphans and widows, the famine, the disease, and most notably, the loss of an entire generation's future.

Imagine that you are living in Gaza, where international law does not apply, fundamental human rights are ignored, and the Geneva Convention is disregarded. All rules of conduct are tossed aside, replaced by raw, arbitrary, and transcendent violent force.

Look at the gruesome reality

Your so-called "most moral military in the world," the Israel Defense Forces, has become the Israel Destructive Forces, denigrating the value of human life. Your army has lost its moral compass, killing erratically, terrorizing, demolishing, devastating, and decimating at will, until nothing is left to spare but a wasteland, and an eerie void engulfs you.

Jean-Pierre Filius, a noted French historian who entered Gaza in December 2024, said, "Even though I have been in a number of war zones in the past, from Ukraine to Afghanistan, via Syria, Iraq, and Somalia, I have never, but never experienced anything like this."

The indiscriminate, unrelenting bombing for 18 months of nearly every city, town, and village, leveling nearly every standing structure – schools, universities, hospitals, mosques, government institutions, cultural heritage sites, water treatment plants, and parks – undeniably is meant to make the entire Strip unlivable.

To add an unimaginable layer of inhumanity, your government stopped the supplies of food, fuel and medicine, causing mass deprivation, disease, and death.

The smell of death, the spooky silence, and the immensity of trauma are paralyzing. No one is talking, just staring aimlessly, confounded as to what has struck them and why.

It is clear why your government is refusing free access to the international press and why scores of Palestinian journalists were deliberately killed, fearing the world will see that your government's wanton destruction, desolation, devastation and mounting death, unfolding before their eyes, is tantamount to genocide.

This is what your criminal government has inflicted on Gaza and its inhabitants. You will have to carry the stigma, the stain, for generations. The international community looks at Israel with contempt, baffled by how such a country with an incredible capacity for good becomes a ruthless pariah state, and a brutal power that commits heinous human rights violations with impunity.

Yes, Hamas' attack is unforgivable, and there is no denying that the Palestinians have made many colossal mistakes; there is no refuting Hamas committing myriad atrocities against you, no argument about Fatah's repeated missed opportunities to make peace. But then, should all Palestinians be eradicated for their own governments' misdeeds and erased as a nation?