The Palestinian writer Hassan Khudr commented on the genocide in Gaza with this observation: “What can be said, as the war approaches the end of its second year is that Netanyahu is winning so far, while Israel has lost the war.”

Hasan’s idea is worth lingering over. We are standing on the opposite shore from those he addressed — opposite the Israelis whose country name has become linked with the scene of genocide, parallel to the bloody rise of a leader who has governed Israel for more than two decades.

Netanyahu’s “victories” are also victories over broad swathes of Israeli society. A country once promoted as a Western island in a “backwards” East has lost much of its persuasive power; the notion of an “Eastern Sparta” no longer serves that narrative.

The genocide has begun to wound Israel’s image in the West, even in the United States. It is not only a Western public whose moral shock at what is happening in Gaza is growing; governments that never before showed such rejection of the scenes in Gaza have declared shifts in their policies toward Israel.

“For many segments who once stood by it, ‘Netanyahu’s Israel’ is no longer convincing.” But Bibi Netanyahu appears indifferent to this shift. He seems to believe that Donald Trump’s backing is enough to continue the slaughter.

This is the kernel of Hassan Khudr’s point. Khudr — a Palestinian intellectual who knows Israel well and understands the essence of Western bias in its favor, who has debated Israeli intellectuals in Western and academic forums and whose recent book Gaza on the Cross was published by Riad Al-Rayyes — knows how Netanyahu has damaged the idea of Israel in the West.

For those of us on the other shore of what is happening to Israel, crippled as we are by our inability to do anything other than count victims, it might be useful to find a place for ourselves within this downward trajectory of Israel’s idea — without falling into illusions about the “victories” touted to us by shadowy powers. We, too, have allowed our Palestine to be lost in the bazaars of Islamist resistances.

What I mean is this: we should find a position within the narrative of the collapse of the original idea of Israel and the rise of this “Eastern Sparta.” That requires, first, that we abandon the lines of commitment imposed on us by both modern and unmodern resistors: the rigid scripts of confrontation. We must claim a place in the Western debate over the victim’s role in the narrative of genocide.

“What can be said, as the war approaches the end of its second year is that Netanyahu is winning so far, while Israel has lost the war.”

We are victims of the bloody ascent of the new Israel. In the past, we faced a struggle between a just right and a state founded at its expense. Today the confrontation is different: we are confronting genocide. The Israeli defense minister boasted: “Gaza is burning now!”

The expanding room for maneuver within Western arenas — arenas Israel once used to build the idea of a “state of survivors” — gives us an opportunity we have not previously exploited. The first condition for our success is to abandon rehearsed rhetoric of resistance and boycott and to engage the balances that Israel once used to enhance the image of victimhood. There is ample space for us, the victims, in the wake of this technological monster’s “miracle of success.”

Many countries have expressed readiness to recognize the State of Palestine, and broad currents of Western public opinion have begun to join the ranks of those stunned by the massacre. We face a man — Netanyahu — who is insensitive to these signs; he is indifferent to the “legacy of the founding fathers” who marketed a different Israel.

It is no longer useful merely to invoke the original right and the primal injustice, both of which are indeed rights and wrongs. Decades of successive defeats over more than seventy years should confront us with painful facts and force us to employ new elements in our narrative.

We must remind the world that what Israel is doing to the Palestinians today constitutes a wrong parallel to the wrong suffered by Jews in Europe during World War II. We must persuade the world that we do not intend to “throw Israelis into the sea”; rather, Netanyahu is the one throwing the people of Gaza into the sea. We must demonstrate that the Palestinian cause is not represented exclusively by occult forces such as Hamas or Hezbollah.

This may be an ambitious aim in the present miserable political landscape and under the continued dominance of resistance blocs over our discourse. Yet what we are discussing today is the awakening of our elites to something fundamental that has begun to afflict Israel — or the idea of Israel — which is precisely what Hasan Khudr meant when he said: Netanyahu is winning while Israel is losing.