Aloha and Namaste everyone and welcome to Impolitic with John Heilman, a puck and

Odyssey joint featuring lively in-depth conversations with the people who cruised the corridors of power

in America sculpting and shaping the ebb and flow of our politics and culture.

Four and a half months after Israel broke its ceasefire with Hamas and returned to all-out war in Gaza,

not only launching a brutal new military campaign, but a blockade on food and other forms of humanitarian aid

in an effort to achieve Benjamin Netanyahu's stated goal of

quote, total victory over Hamas, starting with the release of the remaining Israeli hostages

held by the group and ending with the eradication of its military and political capacities.

The widespread consensus around the world, including many quarters inside Israel, is that the effort has been a comprehensive and abject failure.

There has been no breakthrough in negotiations with Hamas, nor has there been a decisive defeat of Hamas on the battlefield.

As the Israeli writer Amir Teban put it this week in Haretz. The new phase of the war has

quote returned no living hostages, cost the lives of nearly 50 Israeli officers, led to the deaths

of thousands of Palestinian civilians, and precipitated a full-blown humanitarian disaster.

Indeed, as the scale and severity of that disaster became clear this week

with a UN-affiliated food security group declaring that the worst-case scenario of famine is currently

playing out in the Gaza Strip and the soul-destroying images of maciated children from the Gaza Strip

filling screens throughout the well-fed world. Israel was on the

receiving end of a rare level of rebuke from longstanding allies, first France, then Britain, then

Canada, all shifting towards support for Palestinian statehood in reaction to Israel's prosecution

of the war and faced with Netanyahu's macab

insistence that there is no starvation in Gaza, let alone an Israeli policy to foster it.

Even Donald Trump couldn't help but call bullshit on his palibi.

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