On Monday, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Alternate Prime Minister Yair Lapid announced their decision to dissolve the government and call for new elections—the fifth since 2019. Much ink will be spilled about the successes and failures of the unusual coalition led by Bennett and Lapid and why it collapsed after only a year in power. Einat Wilf attends to the fact that, of the eight disparate parties it brought together, one was the Islamist Ra’am, the first Arab party to be included in an Israeli government. Wilf points out that Ra’am’s participation in the outgoing coalition is in fact a realization of the ideas set forth by the great Zionist thinker Vladimir Jabotinsky, in his seminal essay “On the Iron Wall.”

Jabotinsky did not believe that the Zionists were destined to live always by the sword. Once the Arabs truly accepted the existence of the Jewish state, Jews and Arabs would govern together. On the other side of the Iron Wall, he believed in a highly liberal vision for the emergent state where “in every cabinet where the prime minister is a Jew, the vice-premiership shall be offered to an Arab, and vice-versa.”

Israel is closer today than it has ever been in its history to realizing the goal of full acceptance in a predominantly Arab and Islamic region. The Abraham Accords present a compelling alternative Arab-Muslim narrative, one that embraces the Jewish state as an integral part of the region rather than a foreign implant.

Similarly, [Ra’am’s leader] Mansour Abbas has given political voice to the Arab citizens of Israel who seek true integration into the Jewish state. Those are the Arab citizens who are volunteering in increasing numbers to serve in the Israel Defense Force. Those are the Arab citizens who defend Israel in diplomatic forums and on social media against its detractors. These developments reflect very real achievements of Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall. Many Arab Israelis do not seek the country’s destruction. They support, and participate in, its success.

But these achievements remain fragile. Abbas’s political rival among Israel’s Arab political leaders, Ayman Odeh, leader of the Joint List (an alliance of Arab parties), recently told young Israeli Arabs not to join the “occupation forces.” Odeh described Abbas’s conduct as “insulting and humiliating.” . . . Odeh represents a substantial number of Israel’s Arab citizens, if not the majority. . . . While positive signs of acceptance need to be celebrated, it would be unwise to ignore or explain away indications to the contrary.

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.