Gaza Is Where Israel's Story of Power Breaks Down

When Israeli intellectuals sit down to debate “security,” “force,” or “the future of Gaza,” I do not hear an abstraction. I hear people discussing the fate of streets I walked, institutions I helped build, neighbors whose names I knew, and a family I will not see again. For someone from Gaza, these conversations are never theoretical. There are arguments about whether the place that shaped me is allowed to exist as an ordinary society or only as a problem to be managed by other means.

So when I watch Yuval Noah Harari speak with Ezra Klein, and Gideon Levy speak with Tucker Calrson about Gaza, I listen as someone the conversation is about, not only as someone interested in it. Both men are honest in ways most of their society is not. Both expose real cracks in the Israeli story. And both, finally, reach the edge of what they can see, the edge where Gaza begins, and where my voice has to take over.

I want to use what they say, and then say what they cannot.

The story Israel tells itself

Harari’s deepest argument is not about Israel at all. It is about how human societies actually work. The fashionable claim of our moment, the one he attributes to an official’s worldview, is that reality is governed by force, that order comes when the weak surrender to the strong, and that everything else is sentimental decoration. Harari’s answer, as a historian, is blunt: if brute force were the only human reality, “we would still be living in tiny hunter-gatherer bands in the African savanna.” Civilization is the story of cooperation and trust at scale, and you cannot build trust with force alone.

Nations, in his telling, are stories. They are held together not by walls or weapons but by a shared account of who we are and what we owe one another. Which means a nation can be destroyed from within, not only by enemies, but by the story it chooses to tell about itself.

This is the frame I find most useful, because Israel today is living inside a particular story, and that story has a single engine: force. Safety through domination. Order through fear. Peace, if it comes at all, as the silence of a defeated opponent. Harari names the trap precisely. “If you think force is the only thing that guarantees your security,” he says, “eventually you will have to conquer the entire world.”

That sentence should be read slowly in Tel Aviv. Because a society that believes only in force does not become more secure. It becomes a society that must keep expanding the perimeter of what it controls, forever, because the story admits no other way to be safe.

The military solution that never solves

Gideon Levy says the same thing from inside the rubble. Israel, he argues, “was brought to believe that it is doomed to live on its sword”, that the only language available in this region is military power, as brutal as possible. And the result, in his devastating phrase, is that Israel won all its wars militarily and lost them all politically.

Listen to the logic he describes, because it is the logic of addiction: what is not achievable by force will be achieved by more force. Lebanon for the third time, with the same strategy that failed twice before. Gaza again and again. Iran. Each failure is read not as evidence that force has limits, but as proof that there was simply not enough of it. This is not a strategy. It is a compulsion wearing the uniform of strategy.

And here is the part that should trouble anyone who actually cares about Israeli security: by its own standard, the doctrine has failed. If overwhelming force could produce safety, Gaza would have been “solved” a decade ago. Instead, every operation has produced the conditions for the next one. The wall, the siege, the surveillance, the repeated bombardments, they did not deliver the quiet they promised. They delivered October 7th, then a catastrophe without end, then a country more isolated than at any point in my lifetime. As that same conversation notes, among young Americans the belief in Israel as a just nation has collapsed. That is not the world hating Jews. That is a story losing the people it needs to believe it.

Gaza is not Hamas, but Hamas helped destroy Gaza’s political life

Here I have to say something that neither Harari nor Levy can say with the same authority, because they did not live it.

I oppose Hamas. Not as a slogan, but from experience. Hamas ruled Gaza as an authoritarian movement. It crushed alternatives, hollowed out civil society, militarized a generation, and dragged two million people into a strategy whose costs were always going to be paid by civilians and never by the men who planned it. Hamas, too, told a story, liberation through armed resistance, and that story also failed. It promised dignity and delivered tunnels, isolation, ruined cities, and unbearable suffering. Anyone who pretends otherwise is not on Gaza’s side; they are on the side of the people who speak in Gaza’s name while spending Gaza’s blood.

But here is what Levy sees clearly, and what most Israelis refuse to see: Gaza is not Hamas. After October 7th, he says, it became axiomatic in Israel that “they are all terrorists, they all Hamas”, and the Israeli media simply stopped showing Gazans as people at all. The whole society of teachers, nurses, engineers, students, fishermen, clerks, and children was collapsed into a single enemy, so that whatever was done to it required no further thought.

Levy goes further, and I think he is right: the war stopped being only about Hamas. He describes it as a war to crush Palestinian society in Gaza itself, to oppose every arrangement that might let Gaza function, whether Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, or an international force, because a functioning Gaza is exactly what the current Israeli story cannot tolerate. A people with institutions is a people with a political future. And a political future is the one thing domination cannot allow.

The Gazan civilian, erased twice

This is the cruelty I feel most personally. The ordinary Gazan is erased twice over.

Hamas erases them in the name of sacrifice, turning their home into a position, their death into a headline, their grief into a recruitment poster. Israel erases them in the name of security, turning their existence into a threat, their suffering into “fake news,” their society into a target set. Between the two, the actual human being disappears: the man who wanted his children in school, the woman who ran a clinic, the family that simply wanted a normal day.

Harari touches the wound when he observes that many Israelis cannot emotionally tolerate the suffering of Palestinians, that you can show them a starving child in Gaza and they will look away or call it a lie. Levy lives it: he is nearly alone in his own country, uninvited from the television panels, screamed at in the park, because he insists on the most radical idea available in Israel today, that Gazans “are human beings like any other human being,” that they deserve to build their own institutions, that they have, in his words, no citizenship of any country on earth and yet are asked to vanish quietly.

I am grateful for both men. They pry open the Israeli conscience from the inside, which is something I cannot do. But neither of them speaks from the tent that has been someone’s home for two and a half years, or from the silence where a wife and two sons used to be. That is the testimony only Gaza can give. The view from inside the ruin is not the same as the view from the balcony in Tel Aviv, however brave the man on the balcony.

What a different story would require

None of this is an argument for naïve peace language. I have buried too much to offer slogans. Gaza does not need to be loved; it needs to be governed, protected, and rebuilt.

A serious alternative is not a feeling. It is an architecture. It means real civilian protection, not as a press release but as a condition. It means accountable governance that answers to Gazans rather than to factions or occupiers. It means the disarmament of militias, including Hamas, as part of a credible security order, not as an Israeli fantasy of permanent control. It means reconstruction that is allowed to actually happen, local leadership that is allowed to actually lead, regional guarantees, and a horizon that reconnects Gaza to Palestine and to the region instead of sealing it off as a holding pen.

That is a security agenda. It is also the only one that has never been tried, precisely because it requires Israel to imagine Palestinians as political human beings rather than as a problem to be displaced. Harari is right that nations can hold more than one story at once, and that even stories people would die for can be set down when conditions change. Force has to be fed constantly, weapons, fuel, fear, fresh enemies. Peace only has to be made possible.

Gaza is where Israel’s story of power breaks down, because Gaza is the proof. Force has been applied without limit, and it has produced insecurity, moral decay, isolation, and a war with no end. The story promised safety and delivered the opposite. A story that cannot keep its central promise is not strong. It is already dead; it simply has not admitted it yet.

So let me end where it has to end.

Gaza does not need another story written over its ruins. It has had enough authors, Hamas writing in the language of sacrifice, Israel writing in the language of siege, each erasing the people who actually live there. Gaza needs a future built with its people, not imposed upon their graves. Not Hamas’s future of tunnels and martyrdom. Not Israel’s future of walls and domination. A human future, in which security does not require the destruction of the other, and in which Palestinians are not asked to disappear as the price of being allowed, at last, to live.

Because this much I know, from the inside: Gaza cannot be rebuilt by the same stories that destroyed it.