When you read the news reports of the appalling violence against Israeli soccer fans in Amsterdam, there is no doubt that powerful and ugly anti-Jewish hatreds were at work. To deny that is to stick your head in the sand. But to believe that this is all it’s about is very dangerous for Israel and the Jewish people.

One of the most striking things about being in Israel now is to realize how average Israeli Jews have seen very few of the pictures that go out every day on social media to the rest of the world showing Palestinian men, women and children who have been killed, wounded and maimed as collateral damage in Israel’s war on Hamas — which itself killed, wounded, maimed and kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7 last year.

I am not a judge. I don’t know what the “just” proportion of Palestinian civilian lives and homes that the laws of war might say is OK for Israel to destroy in response to Oct. 7 for every Israeli Jew and home ravaged that day. But I am here to say that whatever the number is, Israel has now exceeded it.

And the fact that this destruction of Gaza continues every day by a far-right Israeli government that still — some 14 months after the war started — refuses to offer any plan for decent Palestinian governance in Gaza to replace Hamas, something that would say to Israel’s friends and enemies, “Yes, this war is exacting a terrible toll but it is in pursuit of a better future for Israelis and Palestinians,” is turning the Jewish state into a pariah state.

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