On 9 August the prime minister told his cabinet, in four words that travelled the world in an afternoon, “Israel rejects the 15-point document.” He added that Israel “will not carry out any withdrawal until Hamas is genuinely disarmed … and will continue to thwart threats against our forces and our citizens,” and specified what the word had to mean: “real disarmament, not fictitious disarmament.” Abroad this was filed as intransigence. Here it was heard as a definition.
The reason the definition matters is arithmetic rather than ideology. Kobi Michael, a senior researcher at the Institute for National Security Studies, framed the likely end point in April: “If international actors do not 'buy' Hamas' games and realize that they have no real intention to disarm, they may come to the conclusion that only the IDF can do this.” Nobody in this country wants that conclusion. Plenty expect it.
Every other party to this negotiation can walk away from a bad clause. Israel has to live at the address the clause creates.
The year that shaped the position is easy to forget from a distance. Between the end of February and a ceasefire on 8 April, some 650 ballistic missiles were fired at Israeli cities across forty days; roughly half carried cluster submunitions. The Israeli health ministry's toll, as reported here, was twenty-six civilians killed and 4,292 injured. Interception worked, warning worked, shelters worked, and people still died in Beit Shemesh in their homes.
None of that erases what Gaza has cost. The health ministry there counts more than 73,000 Palestinians killed since October 2023 and over 174,000 wounded, with more than 1,250 killed since the ceasefire began. Israelis argue about those figures, about what proportion were combatants, about what was proportionate — and the argument is louder in Israeli newspapers, courts and streets than in most of the parliaments now voting to sanction the country.
Which is what makes the new European posture read the way it does here. Andy Burnham, taking office in London, said his government would be “looking at further sanctions, both on those involved in violence in Gaza, but also looking at steps to ban trade in goods with illegal settlements.” There is a real Israeli argument to be had about settlement trade, and many here would make it. Fewer are willing to make it while it is being made for them from outside.
The prime minister also said, on the same day he rejected the American document, that “as long as I am prime minister, no Palestinian state will arise.” That sentence is not a national consensus, and treating it as one is the single most common foreign error about this country. It is a position held by a government, contested by an opposition, and shortly to be put to voters who have been arguing about little else.
The reasonable request to allies is narrow. Judge the sequence on its engineering, not on the impatience of a news cycle. Accept that a state which watched its southern communities overrun will price verification differently from a state that did not. And notice that the ferocity of the internal argument here — over the war, the settlements, the inquiry that has still not been opened — is evidence of something worth allying with, not against. A country that had stopped arguing with itself would be much easier to deal with, and would be worth considerably less.
