The Joint List—an alliance of Arab political parties—emerged from the most recent Israeli election as the third-largest party in the Knesset. Thus Benny Gantz, the leader of the Blue and White party now tasked with trying to form a governing coalition, must consider if he should court the Joint List’s support. To Ben-Dror Yemini, the positions taken by group’s parliamentarians, who have vocally supported terrorism and remain committed anti-Zionists, should disqualify them as political allies:

Two surveys conducted this year both show that a clear majority of the Arab public supports some form of participation in an Israeli coalition government. The problem remains the colossal gap between the will of the Arab public and the will of its leadership.

Almost every possible scenario for a future government is met by pundits saying—and rightly so—that the chances of it being formed are slim. But . . . out of all the options, a minority government supported from outside by members of the Joint List, even if not all of them, is not the least likely.

To prevent the worst possible scenario from becoming a reality—a third round of elections in less than a year—Blue and White must sacrifice one of its two core principles in order to form a coalition: either team up with Netanyahu despite the party’s “anyone but Netanyahu” policy, or partner with the Joint List, despite promising it wouldn’t do so.

Blue and White acts under the banner of bringing back sanity into politics and reducing polarization in society, but establishing a government with the support of provocative lawmakers like the Joint List’s Ofer Cassif, [the sole Jewish member among them, who has accused Israel of “genocide”], would only make things worse and Israel would become even more polarized. . . . A coalition partnership with Arab factions can wait.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.