Last week, Israeli opposition leader Yair Golan made international headlines when he declared in an interview on Israeli public radio that “a sane country does not wage war against civilians, does not kill babies as a hobby, and does not aim to expel a population.”

It was a rare internal indictment, although to suggest Israel is committing war crimes in Gaza is hardly a radical claim. The army itself admitted to Israeli outlet HaMakom that 82 percent of those killed in Gaza during the first two months after the ceasefire collapsed were civilians. The nine children of the Al-Najjar family, or those burned alive in Gaza’s Fahmi Al-Jarjawi school following an Israeli airstrike — these are the most recent flesh-and-blood evidence of this brutal reality.

But just days later, Golan changed course and asserted on Channel 12’s “Meet the Press” that “Israel has not committed war crimes in Gaza,” and “doesn’t kill babies for fun.”

An easy explanation for Golan’s reversal lies in electoral calculations. A poll by Israeli daily Maariv showed Golan’s Democrats party dropped from 16 to 12 projected Knesset seats after his initial interview on public radio. Yet in a subsequent poll by Channel 12, 5 percent of respondents said they would not vote for Golan after his comments, but 7 percent said that they had decided to vote for him because of what he said.

In recent months, Golan has benefited from being seen as the only opposition figure willing to confront Netanyahu and his government head on, and his prominence in the anti-government protest movement has grown accordingly. In this regard, this latest confrontation should only reinforce that image.

Yet even the Maariv poll alone — which still awards Golan 12 seats after his “killing babies as a hobby” remark, reveals something surprising. In a political climate where accusing Israel of deliberately killing Gaza’s children is utterly illegitimate, and where, according to a horrifying new poll, 82 percent of Israeli Jews endorse mass expulsion and 47 percent support the biblical-scale slaughter of conquered cities — somehow over 10 percent of Jewish Israelis still backed a politician who condemned these very atrocities. And this was before his reversal.

When we include Israel’s Palestinian citizens, who hardly need Yair Golan to name what they see daily, we find that more than 20 percent of the population in Israel believes that their country is committing war crimes in Gaza. If that’s the case, we should hear this view from one in five commentators, analysts, and pundits. Yet in reality, you’d be hard-pressed to find even one in 100 — even 500 — willing to voice such criticism in Israeli media.

The silencing of these concerns isn’t new. Before October 7, challenging the myth of Israel’s fundamental military righteousness was already politically toxic. After the attacks, it became utterly unthinkable. But in recent weeks, especially since Israel unilaterally broke the ceasefire in early March, awareness of the army’s war crimes in Gaza has moved beyond the radical left and Palestinian community, and into wider mainstream discourse. 

There is ex-Israeli army chief Moshe Ya’alon, who said recently that Israel “sends soldiers to commit war crimes in Gaza,” and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who this week claimed that Israel is “no longer fighting against Hamas” and decrying its weaponization of starvation as a war crime. And there are the growing weekly demonstrations where participants hold photos of Palestinian children killed in Gaza, and former judges and other senior officials signing petitions invoking the “duty to refuse manifestly illegal orders.” 

So while Golan’s reversal is disappointing — particularly from someone positioning himself as Netanyahu’s principled alternative — his individual stance matters less than the shifting political landscape it reflects. That these voices remain excluded from mainstream discourse doesn’t mean they don’t exist, or that they aren’t growing — it only reveals the cowardice and moral bankruptcy of the Israeli media and the political establishment.

The army’s corroding credibility

Even before March, when Israel unilaterally violated the ceasefire, cracks had already appeared within Israel’s centrist bloc — the same public that flooded streets to protest the judicial coup yet reported for reserve duty after October 7, whether out of genuine belief in “destroying Hamas” or a sense of duty. Ya’alon, a bellwether for Israel’s centrist public, began describing Gaza’s destruction as “ethnic cleansing” as early as December 2024, and his language has profoundly influenced mainstream discourse, including figures like Yair Golan.

But when Israel explicitly sabotaged a comprehensive hostage deal to prolong the war, those cracks became chasms. Through them, the unvarnished horrors of reality in Gaza have started to emerge.

This renewed offensive — launched despite overwhelming public support for ending the war to secure hostages’ release — laid bare the hollow rhetoric of both the government and the military. While officials tout “total victory” over Hamas and claim military action saves hostages, in reality, Israeli operations in Gaza mostly kill civilians and jeopardize the Israeli captives (not to mention the systematic obliteration of Gaza’s urban space, which still receives far less public scrutiny than it warrants.)

Israel’s utilization of starvation in Gaza also played a major role in shifting sentiments. When Israel suspended all humanitarian aid in early March, the decision drew little domestic outcry — indeed, Channel 12’s Amit Segal reminded Golan during their “Meet the Press” interview that he had initially endorsed starving Gaza’s population in the earlier stages of the war. But the recent flood of images — emaciated infants, desperate mobs raiding aid distribution sites — has begun cracking even this indifference.

As often happens, the shift has come about indirectly, primarily through the international media’s non-stop coverage of Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe. But tellingly, even Israeli outlets have been showing more and more images from the Strip, usually framing them through the lens of “how the world views us.” 

The Israeli military, too, has profoundly corroded its own credibility among centrist Israelis. Ordinarily, the Israeli army’s reservoir of public trust has lent a veneer of “security” to fundamentally political actions, including settlement expansion and the exclusive reliance on military force in dealing with Palestinians. Yet the military has utterly failed to cloak its actions in Gaza — the mass displacement of the Palestinian  population, engineered starvation, and the vast destruction of urban infrastructure — with any security justification. The damning assessment now circulating among Tel Aviv’s predominantly centrist anti-government protesters — “The army has fallen, just like the police under Ben Gvir” — reflects this shift.

For Israel’s centrist public, the army’s new Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, started off his term on the wrong foot by ousting one of their most trusted figures, former IDF spokesperson Daniel Hagari. Zamir’s subsequent failure to distance himself from Netanyahu and far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich has only cemented his image as their political enforcer. When Netanyahu openly states that the goal of the war is the ethnic cleansing of Gaza’s population (framing it as “implementing the Trump Plan,”) the army’s desperate attempts to rebrand these actions as “security measures” ring ever more hollow.

This erosion of trust in the army, and the palpable anxiety about it among its top brass, was laid bare in a recent article by war correspondent Ron Ben-Yishai on Israeli news site Ynet. The piece channeled concerns from “top IDF generals” about growing public skepticism toward both their capacity to “free hostages while defeating Hamas” and their conduct in Gaza. One “senior military source” insisted: “We know what we’re doing, and there are signs it’s working.”

The public response was devastating. Published on a hugely popular mainstream outlet (not left-leaning publications like Haaretz or Local Call), the article drew 157 comments — with only one or two backing the army’s claims; the rest rejected them with outright derision. As one typical comment put it: “When IDF generals say ‘We know what we’re doing,’ we say: We neither believe nor trust you.”

Chief of Staff Zamir appears to recognize the potentially enduring damage from this rift between the military and figures like Ya’alon and Golan. While the religious-Zionist sector’s influence grows within the ranks, the army still relies fundamentally on this “patriotic center” that both makes up most of the reserves and protests in Kaplan Square to fill combat, command, and especially technical roles.

Zamir’s attempts to push back against the political echelon, whether by abruptly dismissing Netanyahu’s handpicked Shin Bet chief General David Zini from his military post, or publicly rejecting Zini’s “forever war” statement, reflect his anxiety about this crisis. But these minimal gestures may prove insufficient to rebuild the army’s fractured credibility with its core constituency.

A fundamental reckoning

Tactics originating in the radical left, like displaying images of children killed by Israel in Gaza or holding anti-war demonstrations near the border fence, have undeniably helped shift public discourse and “crack the wall of indifference.”

But speaking of Israeli war crimes now extends far beyond activist circles. At a rally in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, held last week under the title “Ending the Madness,” the issue was front and center: Ya’alon declared infant killings “government policy,” while protest leader Ami Dror stated, “A nation of Holocaust survivors cannot starve babies.” The thousands in the audience, who resembled the traditional moderate-left demographic, applauded these once-unthinkable words.

Growing public recognition of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza alone, however, will not stop the war. It will demand multiple converging forces: Trump’s desire for profitable Gulf State deals; European pressure fueled by the unimaginable images emerging out of the Strip; the swelling tide of refusals in the Israeli army (though still not fully quantifiable); developments in Israel’s constitutional crisis, now centering on the Shin Bet appointment; the war’s economic strain; and more.

Yet the fact that this shifting consciousness is happening at all matters profoundly — especially as it spreads despite media and political silence, or perhaps because of it. This awakening could reshape current political discourse, pressure figures like Golan to break their silence going forward, and play a role in “the day after” debate about Gaza. For the future of this land, this reckoning is fundamental.

A version of this article was first published in Hebrew on Local Call. Read it here.