Netanyahu is rendering Israel morally bankrupt

Israel is not honoring its dead by this slaughter and devastation, but just the opposite. It is disgracing the dead and themselves. Israel appears bent on demonstrating before the whole world that it has lost all sense of moral compass, proportionality, pity, and compassion. The Jewish people are better than this: it is they who taught us that to save one human life is to save the world. The deliberate shedding of innocent blood is and will always be an atrocious act of evil that can never be morally justified. And the time has come for Israel to bring an end to this retribution before it loses its soul and whatever moral sympathy the world had for the wrong it suffered over six months ago.

Prime Minister Netanyahu is justifying this collective punishment by dehumanizing the Palestinians, deeming them unworthy of humane treatment. He is waging a merciless campaign against innocent Palestinians who had nothing to do with Hamas' acts of terror. For Netanyahu, there is simply no moral equivalence. For him and many of his deplorable followers, the Palestinians are sub-humans, and their lives are unequal to those of Israeli Jews.

Israel will win this war; the question is, will it win it while adhering to Jewish moral values that have guided and ensured their survival throughout the centuries, or win it by leaving behind deep moral wounds that will be etched in memory and history books as one of Israel's darkest chapters? They must remember that just about every Arab country will quietly (and some even overtly) cheer the demise of Hamas, but they are and will continue to speak ever louder and clearer about their objection to the killing of innocent Palestinians, especially women and children, and they will scuttle any future prospect of normalization of relations between Israel and other Arab states.

The dehumanization of Palestinians will come back to haunt the Israelis simply because the Palestinians have no other place to go. And whether they are ordinary human beings with hopes and aspirations or subhuman, Israel is stuck with them. And regardless of how the war will end, Israel will have to address the conflict with the Palestinians. The depth of the scars of the war will define the relationship for years to come.

As the death toll and destruction rise in Gaza by the minute, the initial overwhelming sympathy toward Israel's tragic losses has waned even among many of its friends. Indeed, once Israel loses its moral compass in dealing with the crisis, it will no longer be seen as the victim who rose from the ashes of the Holocaust and has every right to defend itself but the victimizer whose survival rests on the ashes of the Palestinians.

Israel's ultimate triumph rests on its ability to rise above the fray and adhere to the moral values on which the country was founded and which are the only pillars that can sustain it.