Benjamin Netanyahu has always been a divisive figure. Many older Israelis have never forgotten or forgiven his role in the incitement that preceded – and for some, precipitated – the November 1995 assassination of the then prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. I have seen some walk out of rooms rather than listen to him speak.
If Rabin’s assassination was a bad moment for Israel, 7 October 2023 was another one, this time on a horrific scale. And Netanyahu was there again. He has held high office more or less continually in the past 28 years, as prime minister, at the foreign or finance ministries, or simply as the unsinkable chair of the Likud party, founded in 1973 by Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon to counter the post-independence hegemony of the mainly Ashkenazi Israeli left.
In a turbulent country where politics is not for the faint-hearted, perhaps controversy is inevitable. But Netanyahu hasn’t helped himself. He has been involved in multiple scandals, with allegations of extramarital affairs, links to corrupt arms deals, the buying of favourable press coverage, dubious friendships, an un-Israeli taste for high living, or simply cynical opportunism.
He has exasperated successive American presidents. He gave vocal support to Jonathan Pollard, who in 1987 was convicted in the US of spying for Israel. After enduring one insufferable lecture, Bill Clinton famously asked, “Who’s the f***ing superpower here?” Under Barack Obama he went direct to the US Senate to mobilise political opinion against the administration’s Middle East policies. He has feuded with Joe Biden – who has been as supportive in Israel’s hour of need as any president since 1967. And yet Netanyahu is the great survivor of Israeli politics, with his infinite capacity for outmanoeuvring political opponents and conjuring ever-more unlikely governing coalitions out of the mad sorting hat of the Israeli electoral system.
When Hamas attacked under-strength Israel Defense Forces (IDF) military positions and isolated civilian communities close to Gaza on 7 October, massacring or taking hostage all they found, it seemed to be the end of Netanyahu’s political career. The attack was not unique in its savagery: the same methods have been employed in the region for centuries – the 1860 Druze-Maronite massacres, the 1929 Hebron pogrom, the Algerian War of Independence, the Lebanese Civil War and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But such atrocities had never happened on this scale to Israel. And Netanyahu had presented himself as Israel’s Mr Security. He frantically tried to blame any security failings on the IDF’s high command and on complacent Israeli intelligence officials. It didn’t work. Many Israelis had already been alienated by Netanyahu’s attempt to ram through consequential changes to the judicial system, which looked as if they were meant to weaken the supreme court’s ability to hold in check a government in thrall to the religious parties and often violent right-wing settlers.
In the wake of this new catastrophe, they blamed Netanyahu’s signature policy of the previous decade: to feed Gaza with enough cash from Qatar, the small but fabulously rich and activist Gulf state in which Hamas’s political wing is largely based, and to maintain basic living standards while periodically taking military action (“mowing the grass” in the unlovely phrase) to keep Hamas in its place. Netanyahu talked tough, but maybe his willingness to pay up had persuaded Hamas that he, and by extension Israeli society, had gone soft: he was, in the words of an anonymous Obama adviser, “a chickenshit”.
In polling over the past 11 months, there have been consistent majorities in Israel in favour of Netanyahu stepping down, perhaps to be replaced by some combination of Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa’ar and Yossi Cohen, the former head of Mossad: all former Netanyahu protégés. There has been a general strike. There have been mass demonstrations. As Hamas, with murderous cynicism, turns the screw by killing defenceless hostages and then broadcasting their coerced words, there have been repeated and agonised calls from the families for Israel to make a deal with Hamas to bring the survivors home. They point out that Netanyahu was happy in 2011 to release more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners – including Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s new leader and the chief architect of 7 October – in return for one captured Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. So why not do another deal now?
The pressure is undoubtedly building. But it has not yet reached a critical point.
Netanyahu does not nurture protégés so they can replace him. He says now is not the time to change horses. And he rejects any comparisons with 2011: this time it’s a matter of national survival. That may well be true. But it is also a matter of his own survival. His coalition partners have made clear that any concession to Hamas will cause his government to fall apart.
And so the war continues. The coalition cabinet he formed immediately after 7 October contained two former IDF chiefs of staff who had migrated into national politics, Gadi Eisenkot and Benny Gantz. Given the uneasy relationship between Netanyahu and his combative defence minister, Yoav Gallant, they brought welcome professional military ballast to a cabinet otherwise dependent on the religious settler-right factions of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, a provocative adherent to the extreme Zionist ideology of Kahanism. Eisenkot and Gantz resigned in June in protest against Netanyahu’s approach to the conflict with Hamas and called for new elections.
Nothing happened. This may simply be a reflection of Netanyahu’s mastery of the political dark arts and his opponents’ naivety. But it may suggest that something more structural and less personal is in play. The current crisis has become not simply a tactical test for Netanyahu but a strategic impasse for the country, the region and, indeed, for the world. Many think Netanyahu does what he does simply because he wants to survive politically and neutralise for as long as possible those who want him on trial for corruption. That may well be the case. But it might also be true that Netanyahu’s political interests and the higher interests of Israel as a Jewish state now intersect in increasingly intractable ways.
[See also: What it means to be Palestinian]
After Hamas’s attack on 7 October, many commentators inside and outside Israel compared the shock to the surprise Egyptian assault on the country in 1973. There was the same sense that Israel had fatally underestimated its enemies. In 1973, Golda Meir assumed Anwar Sadat didn’t have the nerve to attack.
By 2023, Netanyahu had spent years – without serious consequences either for himself or Israel – undermining the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, which is dominated by the party Fatah. He seems to have assumed that Fatah’s bitter rivalry with Hamas in Gaza would permanently split the Palestinian national cause, prevent territorial contiguity, and frustrate international efforts to promote a two-state solution. He had created a new and – for Israel – highly satisfactory reality.
He wasn’t entirely wrong. There was, of course, a time when Palestine was the dominant political issue in the Middle East, North Africa and beyond. There were other underlying issues: the absence of legitimacy, brutal dictatorships, economic stagnation, widespread human rights abuses, inter-state conflicts, the rise of Islamism, all of which indicated deep if sometimes partly hidden fault lines within and between the states of the region. But they all, despite often profound private reservations, backed the Palestine Liberation Organisation – and sometimes its rivals too. It seemed as if, without a resolution of the Palestinian issue, nothing else could move.
That is no longer the case. Over the past two decades, Hamas – and Fatah and the other Palestinian factions – have become simply one more sedimentary layer in the political geology of the Middle East. The Arab Spring accelerated this process. The old patrons of Palestine – Egypt, Syria, Libya, Iraq – are in disarray. And rulers elsewhere quickly grasped the potentially fatal consequences of failing to deliver a better future for their citizens. That wasn’t going to happen through radical chic or a tired pan-Arab consensus. It is hardly a secret that the Arab states of the Gulf, notably Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, now have other priorities. For them, the real imperative is rapid economic and social reform that can meet the challenges of their increasingly globalised populations, the energy transition and climate change. They look beyond the old confines of the Arab League, the US or Europe, towards China, India, Brazil, South Korea and Central Asia – and Israel.
Iran stands in their way. Tehran has been the great winner of the regional calamities of the past 13 years. Afghanistan has been neutralised and Iraq colonised. Syria is a conduit for weapons transfers to Hezbollah in Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen are now aligned with Tehran in their demands for the expulsion of the Americans from the region and the destruction of Israel. In 2015, the Saudis thought they could push back Iran by force of arms. They were wrong. They failed in Syria and then in Yemen. In Iraq they hardly tried. In return, Tehran had its friends strike oil installations and airbases in Saudi Arabia and airports in the UAE: just a friendly warning of what might happen if they made any further wrong moves. Now, the Saudis and their Gulf Cooperation Council partners simply want Iran to leave them alone while they get on with the more urgent task of socio-economic reform.
But for Israel it is not so simple. Its strategic position in the region has been worsening for years. I remember the rejoicing in Jerusalem when Saddam Hussein was captured in 2003. But an Iraq controlled by Iran and its clients in the Popular Mobilisation Forces (PMF) – a powerful coalition of predatory Shia paramilitaries with strong ideological ties to Tehran – is a far more challenging proposition for Tel Aviv than the brutal Ba’athist tyranny of Hussein, which in practice blocked Iranian ambitions. The same goes for Syria. The result of the Ba’athist collapse in both countries has been a rapid growth in Iranian influence in both, the creation of religiously indoctrinated militias, huge logistical support for Hezbollah, and, with the Houthis in Yemen, a gradual but apparently inexorable Iranian encirclement of Israel. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its allies have formidable military assets in south Lebanon, parts of Syria, and is within striking distance of Israel in western Iraq. The IRGC is attempting to infiltrate weapons from Syria through Jordan to Hamas and other Palestinian militias in the West Bank. That is a problem not just for Tel Aviv but for Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
Hamas does not have the same relationship with Iran as Hezbollah or the Iraqi PMF, which accept the supreme political and religious authority of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Hamas is Sunni, after all, and follows the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood rather than the Khomeinist doctrine of wilayat al-faqih – the Guardianship of the Jurisprudent, Iran’s system of Islamic government. But Hamas and Iran share the common goal of destroying Israel. They fell out over the war in Syria. But that is yesterday’s news. For now they can make common cause.
Hamas may have expected its 7 October attack to trigger a response from Iran and its allies. Hamas seems to have thought that Israel might be ripe for the plucking. What else explains the extraordinary plans, reported in Haaretz in April, that Hamas made for governing parts of the country it thought it would soon reconquer – down to the identity of those who would be appointed to administer specific areas and protocols for the treatment of seized assets? Sinwar may still believe this. After all, from his lair deep under the Gazan city of Rafah (or wherever he may be) he can observe Israel’s continuing political divisions. He can also see that Israel has badly damaged itself internationally by its furious assault upon Gaza: the death and destruction it has visited upon its inhabitants, the way in which the gears of legal institutions such as the International Criminal Court are slowly grinding into action against Israel, and how self-proclaimed friends in Europe – including the new British government, which recently suspended some arms exports to Israel – are seeking to distance themselves from Israel’s actions.
The dilemma for Israel – and for Netanyahu – is this. Iran is the main threat to Israel’s survival. Hamas can damage Israel but it cannot destroy it. Iran can do both. And as it moves closer to acquiring a nuclear weapon – or even just to threshold status (which reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency and statements from Tehran suggest is within reach) – it will feel increasingly immune to outside pressure. Iran has harnessed the emotional power of Palestine – and other doctrinally related issues across the Middle East – in the service of both its expansion in the region and its campaign against Israel.
Israel cannot defeat Iran. It is too large, too far away, with a tenacity and resilience born of revolutionary zeal. Plus, its relationships with both China and Russia have evolved over the past decade to the point where they look semi-permanent. Israel can deter this coalition for a time. But then what? Israel cannot simply rely on the Islamic Republic collapsing under the weight of its admittedly serious domestic contradictions. A sensible strategy is to nullify Hamas and prevent it from ever returning to rule in Gaza, then do the same to Hezbollah in Lebanon. But, as we have seen in Gaza, the cost in human lives and in material resources would be very high. And Israel would need to know it had the unconditional, long-term support of the US.
That is now in doubt. As Israel has shifted to the right, the US has not. All polls show far less sympathy for Israel among younger Americans than their parents. In addition, every US president since Obama has said he wants to pivot from the Middle East to China. That may not be sensible or achievable – but it looks bipartisan, and, along with the mayhem in Gaza, it is making the Gulf states nervous of any new normalisation drive with Israel.
As we saw with the response to the Iranian missile attack on Israel in April, Israel also needs the strategic depth and regional connectivity that only the key Arab states can provide. In their different ways, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan are central to this – and all privately see the point of forming a defensive front against Iran. But Netanyahu’s insistence on controlling the Gaza-Egypt border and his refusal even to consider a plan for what happens in Gaza after hostilities end or for wider Palestinian political autonomy – alongside fear of ethnic cleansing, accelerated settlement construction, and alleged IDF abuses in the West Bank and
Jerusalem – have alienated all three countries (each of which has its own often volatile domestic constituencies to consider).
Netanyahu may feel that the destruction of Hamas as a coherent force in Gaza is the minimum he must achieve. For that he will need more time – some reports suggest another year. Hamas has put down deep roots in Gaza – even if its popularity is probably overstated – and has had years to build its military infrastructure. Netanyahu may also reasonably feel that a ceasefire which allows Hamas to rebuild and claim victory would be an intolerable defeat. That feeling seems to be shared by most Israelis, even as they also wish Netanyahu would go.
If he were replaced, the war would almost certainly continue. The Americans keep talking up the prospects of a ceasefire, and Netanyahu’s opponents claim that it would still allow the IDF to resume fighting after the hostages were released. But that assumes all the hostages would be released. It assumes that Hamas would sign a deal in the knowledge that the IDF would soon attack it again. And it assumes that Israeli, Arab and wider international public opinion would countenance a renewal of hostilities after a brief interlude. That seems highly unlikely.
Netanyahu, who has spent much of the past 20 years talking tough and acting cautiously, has found himself fighting a war that increasingly looks like one of national survival – for which he needs the external allies he has spent years snubbing, and to whom he will need to offer concessions on a Palestinian state he has always rejected. The inevitable result of allowing Hamas to fortify an underground city in Gaza in the hope it would never use it is that any war to destroy the fortress will inevitably cause the sort of mass and highly visible civilian suffering that makes the world recoil – in a way the global population did not when faced with tragedies in Syria or Iraq, and today in Sudan.
Netanyahu has always attracted controversy. As a leader, he has also worked magic. He now needs to win a war decisively, ensure Gaza does not become a lawless state in the manner of Somalia, avoid both domestic and international legal action, restore national unity, return tens of thousands of displaced Israelis to their homes in the north, strengthen ties with friends he has alienated, and rebuild trust with both his domestic political opponents and the military and intelligence establishments – while keeping his fractious coalition government together. It’s a challenge that may prove too much for even the greatest of political wizards.
John Jenkins is a joint strand leader at Cambridge University’s Centre for Geopolitics, and a former senior British diplomat who has served in Jerusalem and across the Middle East
[See also: The far right’s triumph has left Germany in a mess]
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This article appears in the 11 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Iron Chancellor’s gamble