“For everything that happened on October 7, for every person who was killed on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die.” (Aharon Haliva, former IDF intelligence chief) How can war crimes become an avowed strategy?
| This post is part of a reading series on Zionism vs. Democracy, by Philippe Roussel. To access all chapters quickly, open the book title tab on the Authors & Books page. |
In a leaked recording aired on 8/15/2025 on Channel 12’s primetime news program in Israel, one can hear former IDF intelligence chief Aharon Haliva telling fellow officers: “The fact that there are already 50,000 dead in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations. Okay, you raided. Okay, you humiliated. Okay, you slaughtered, you murdered. It’s all true. The price? As I said before the war. For everything that happened on October 7, for every person who was killed on October 7, 50 Palestinians must die. It doesn’t matter whether [they are] children. I’m not speaking out of revenge, I’m speaking out of a message to future generations. There’s nothing to be done about it. They need a Nakba every now and then to feel the price. There’s no choice, in this disturbed neighborhood. No choice.”1
How can war crimes appear as a strategy to any decent officer? By any external measure, Aharon Haliva appears as a man of integrity. A former IDF intelligence chief, he is also considered a centrist opponent of the current Israeli government. Taking full responsibility for the failure of his services in preventing the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, he resigned from his position on April 22, 2024. In the same recording aired by Channel 12, he lambasts Netanyahu for not resigning as well and can be heard saying, “Many processes have broken down every good [institution] here. Because there is no police force. Because there is no rule of law. Even in the army, many things related to basic discipline–it’s all falling apart. It has become a brothel.” Consequently, according to him, the causes of the intelligence failure that made the events of October 7, 2023, possible run much deeper and are notably due to the reckless, unprofessional command–with zero accountability–of the right-wing zealots in government.
All in all, Aharon Haliva thus seems a sound and responsible military officer… who considers the mass murdering of Palestinians a necessity. This is what the political philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) called “the banality of evil.”2 Even though Aharon Haliva’s tone of voice in the recording shows that he somehow feels the emotional charge of mass murdering people, there is no doubt in his mind that this must be done. His judgment is so skewed that while he likely doesn’t show any clinical signs of dementia, he is unable to see that killing innocent people can make no sense whatsoever to any sane person. Like the vast majority of Israelis, he lives in a world where Palestinians, young or old, cannot be innocent. By that logic, being born is proof enough of their guilt, in the exact same way that Jews have long been ostracized in Christian countries.