Micah Goodman is done being nice and even-handed. He became a best-selling philosopher by telling Israelis that the Palestinians needed more freedom. He said if the West Bank had better roads and an airport and more land and fewer checkpoints, relations between Israelis and Palestinians would improve. There was a way through the stalemate, if only people worked together. But now he wants war.

Goodman is rageful about what Hamas did to his Israeli brothers and sisters

‘It’s a necessity that the Middle East fears us’, Goodman says, calling from Jerusalem. ‘That Hezbollah gets a panic attack when it pronounces the word Israel. That in Iran they have a panic attack from the thought of a military interaction with Israel.’ I met Goodman once before in Jerusalem in 2021. When he talks, his hands and fingers conduct, curl, jab and wave about, but his eyes rest on you. Goodman sometimes sounds like a preacher, his pitch jumps then drops, his rhythm stutters and then runs forward.

In 2017, the old Micah Goodman published Catch-67, about a kinder way of dealing with the Palestinians. He came up with a plan to give people in the West Bank a better life without compromising Israel’s security. Israel could build new roads linking Palestinian towns and leave them under Palestinian control. Then West Bankers could go from Ramallah to Nablus without meeting an Israeli. This and other reforms wouldn’t end the conflict, but would make it more bearable. ‘We are out of the peace business’, Goodman said at the time. He became an adviser to Naftali Bennett about Palestinian issues, when Bennett was Israel’s prime minister for a year.

Goodman’s grand plan ignored Gaza – he now says too many Israelis did. He says they knew Hamas were terrorists and that they were Jewish pigs to them but they thought their horrors were contained behind the strip’s 20ft walls. ‘We’ll let them have workers work in Israel. They’ll have some basic quality of life and something to lose. Every now and then we’ll have a violent round with them and it be somehow contained.’ Con-tained. He spits that out. ‘I was wrong, Max. I was wrong.’ Now calm. ‘Because I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand. I got this wrong. I didn’t know that they were Nazis. I didn’t know this. I didn’t understand this. This is the awakening. This is my sin.’

Goodman is rageful about what Hamas did to his Israeli brothers and sisters and grandparents and children in Be’eri, Nahal Oz and Kfar Aza. Now, confessing to his wrongs, he seems to want atonement through a war of stunning violence. He won’t say exactly how he thinks Israel should enact revenge – only that Hamas will be finished by the end of it – but he worries that the West won’t have the stomach to support Israel through such a war. ‘There’s a zero-sum game between fear and love,’ he explains. He appreciates Bono singing tributes to the beautiful Israeli kids that have been killed and the White House being lit up white and blue, but for the Middle East to fear Israel again, revenge against Gaza will have to be infernal. ‘What really protects Israel is not the love of the West, it’s the fear of the Middle East. That’s what really protects Israel… Everything we’ll have to do to restore the fear will erode the love’, he says. ‘I am begging for your readers to remember this moment of moral clarity, because this clarity will be eroded in the long journey we have in front of us.’ It sounds biblical. And terrifying.

Goodman wants westerners to stand with Israel not just because it’s been wronged but because this is our war too. ‘Hamas is a proxy of Iran. Israel is a proxy of western civilisation’, Goodman says. ‘Bringing down Hamas, bringing down, hopefully, the Islamic Republic of Iran, is a western necessity. This is how it could end.’ He thinks if Israel finishes the Ayatollah, maybe kills off his mullahs, then finally the Middle East could heal. That might be ill-considered. ‘These are very, very big strategic questions on the table. And Israelis need to know that while we restore fear, we’re not going to erode the support of western governments… Because we’re fighting for you. We’re fighting for the West. We’re fighting to protect you.’ Like Ukraine fighting Russia for us, he argues, Israel should be allowed topple Khamenei. We don’t even have to send soldiers, he says. Just support them.

For 40 minutes, Goodman proselytises and laughs and cries and sighs and pleads. ‘Maybe I got the whole thing wrong. Maybe it’s brilliant. I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I don’t really care’, Goodman says of his old ideas. ‘All the theories I’ve developed, I’m letting go of them. I’ll re-examine everything I believe in. Everything I believe in, the minute after this war is over.’ There’s little time to think, and no time for peace.