[News] Israel seeks redemption in the Gaza ruins

[Anti-Imperialist News]

mondoweiss.net 
<https://mondoweiss.net/2025/10/israel-seeks-redemption-in-the-gaza-ruins/?ml_recipient=169520470453913230&ml_link=169520404894844338&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2025-10-28&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation+-+12pm> 



  Israel seeks redemption in the Gaza ruins

Abdaljawad Omar
October 27, 2025
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Since the outbreak of Israel’s genocidal war, there has been a curious 
preoccupation in Israeli political discourse with finding the right name 
for it. Every campaign, it seems, must be christened with an appellation 
that gives it narrative coherence. The name chosen early on, “Swords of 
Iron,” was steeped in the language of force and glinting with the 
symbolic metallurgy of statehood and defense. It gestures, too, toward a 
past both mythical and ideological — the “Iron Wall” that has long 
underpinned Zionist doctrine, and the fantasy of unbreakable security 
through permanent domination.

Yet the proliferation of iron in the discourse is, paradoxically, a sign 
of its corrosion. What does it reveal about a state that, after 75 years 
of existence, still insists it is fighting for its independence? Or 
still has to remind itself of the iron it imports from the U.S. and uses 
it on Palestinian bodies?

Names are instruments of meaning, and in Israel, they have become 
battlegrounds of interpretation. The struggle over what to call this war 
reveals a deeper struggle over its purpose. Prime Minister Netanyahu has 
recently proposed renaming it to the “War of Redemption,” a gesture at 
once desperate and theological, seeking to transfigure political 
brutality into divine necessity.

What attracts Netanyahu to the language of redemption is the conviction 
that Israel — and by extension, himself — is forever being tested. 
Redemption isn’t a matter of repentance or transcendence, but endurance. 
The familiar choreography of crisis and recovery offers Netanyahu a kind 
of moral alibi, allowing him to convert disaster into destiny.

Here, the language of redemption becomes a mirror for his political 
mythology: the leader as both savior and survivor, the state as both 
victim and victor. In scripting his role in Israel’s history, Netanyahu 
casts himself as the one who both presided over disaster and redeemed 
the nation from it.

The Israeli military prefers 
<https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/haaretz-today/2025-10-20/ty-article/.highlight/war-of-redemption-the-real-reason-netanyahu-is-renaming-the-gaza-war/0000019a-02c2-dfc6-a3bf-f3e635b80002> 
to call it the “October 7 War,” a choice that gestures, perhaps, toward 
accountability — or more likely, toward the familiar psychology of 
perpetual victimhood. The name fixes the war to a date of trauma, as if 
to anchor the nation’s moral position in the moment of its own suffering.


    *Permanence through crisis*

If every name gestures toward an ending — toward the moment when the 
story can be told in the past tense — then Israel’s present war is, by 
its own logic, unwinnable. It cannot end because it cannot be 
narratively resolved. Its objectives shift with every press conference, 
its justifications mutate with every image of destruction that leaks 
through the rubble. “Victory” is declared and retracted in the same 
breath, for what would victory even mean in a war fought not for 
territory but for meaning itself? The violence cannot conclude because 
the state’s sense of self depends on its continuation.

This is the paradox of permanence through crisis. To stop fighting would 
be to discover that the war was never a passage to salvation but the 
condition of Israel’s political being. Closure would mean reckoning with 
what the war has destroyed: not merely Gaza, but the very moral and 
historical coherence the state claims to defend.

Narrative closure requires a moral horizon — a point at which action can 
be understood as justified, completed, or redeemed. Yet the genocidal 
logic of the current campaign forecloses such a possibility. Every bomb 
deepens the moral abyss it claims to fill.

And this performance unfolds before an audience no longer captive to its 
illusions. The world now sees Israel for what it is. The veil has 
thinned, perhaps irreparably. Livestreamed images from Gaza have 
rendered abstraction impossible. Those who once found refuge in the old 
fictions of security and self-defense now hesitate to repeat them.

Even Donald Trump, a man hardly burdened by moral reflection, has 
conceded that Netanyahu has lost the world. You cannot bomb your way to 
legitimacy, and you cannot fight the world and win.

Yet Netanyahu’s politics depend on precisely this illusion. His power 
requires an enemy vast enough to sustain his myth — first Iran, then 
Hamas, and now, inevitably, the world itself.

In his imagination, Israel stands alone because it must: its isolation 
is proof of its righteousness, its brutality the cost of its endurance.

But because the rhetoric of redemption has curdled into spectacle, what 
remains is not the image of a nation defending itself, but of a state so 
entranced by the story of its own survival that it can no longer imagine 
how to live among others.

The so-called “War of Redemption” cannot redeem, because redemption 
implies transformation — and transformation requires the capacity to 
imagine a world beyond domination, beyond the permanent impasse of the 
struggle over Palestine.

This genocide has transformed Israel’s image, but resolved nothing. It 
has revealed the full extent of Israel’s capacity to destroy — sustained 
by the indulgence of its allies and amplified to the point of grotesque 
excess — but has also clarified its limits. For all its destructive 
reach, Israel remains condemned to reckon with the people it seeks to 
erase. In performing its strength, Israel has only exposed its 
dependence — on Western approval, military subsidy, and, most of all, on 
the impasse itself.

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Abdaljawad Omar <https://mondoweiss.net/author/abdaljawad-omar/>
Abdaljawad Omar is a writer and Assistant Professor at Birzeit 
University, Palestine. Follow him on X @HHamayel2 
<https://x.com/hhamayel2?s=21&t=kWr9Cxh8rnTkK4lRyrYujw>

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