This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.

Israel stands at a fateful crossroads.

After 22 months of war triggered by Hamas’s invasion and massacre, having radically degraded the terror group’s 24-battalion army but failed to secure the release of the final 50 of its hostages, Israel under the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faces a clear-cut choice: It can choose to approve a proposal, ostensibly accepted by Hamas and broadly similar to the government’s own previously advocated frameworks, for a phased accord ultimately intended to see all the hostages returned and the war brought to an end. Or it can press ahead with a planned expansion of the war into Gaza City in an effort to compel Hamas to accept an all-at-once comprehensive deal — to sign off, that is, on terms for its surrender.

The coalition’s strategy for achieving its three core war goals — destroying Hamas, bringing home the hostages and ensuring that Gaza can never again pose a threat to Israel — has been incoherent and inconsistent from the start. The leadership has never been able to reconcile the determination to utterly destroy Hamas with the imperative to get back all the hostages — because Hamas abducted those hostages, and will not let them all go, precisely to ensure that it could survive the war it deliberately precipitated in its ongoing strategic determination to destroy Israel.

Floundering and internally riven, the coalition has spoken and acted in ways increasingly damaging to core national interests: to Israel’s internal cohesion, its moral compass, and its international legitimacy. It has expanded and contracted the war. It has approved deals and, most recently, in March, abrogated them. Key members have openly declared the goal of occupying and resettling the Gaza Strip; the prime minister has denied any such intention but disciplined nobody for asserting it. One minister last month declared that Israel was “racing ahead for Gaza to be wiped out” and that “all Gaza will be Jewish.” Netanyahu clarified that this was not government policy but, again, the minister remains in situ.

Appallingly, for 11 weeks between March and May, the coalition ordered a halt to all aid supplies into Gaza, asserting that there was sufficient food and other vital aid available inside the Strip but that Hamas and other armed groups were stealing it. This may well have been the case, but as the IDF subsequently acknowledged, adequate aid was not available to all Gazans. Hamas — which of course steals as much of the........

© The Times of Israel