After appearing to negotiate a welcome pause in return for an exchange of hostages, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu was quick to state that some people were misconstruing the deal to mean that Israel’s war with Hamas was over. He said in no uncertain terms that the war was going to continue until Hamas was exterminated.
As reported by Meron Rapoport in +972 Magazine, Netanyahu will only end the war once Gaza is demilitarised and no longer a security threat to Israel. He wants to have complete security control over Gaza because “Any place where there’s no Israeli security control, terror returns, entrenches itself, and harms us. This has been proven also in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. Therefore, I will not agree to give up on security control under any circumstances.”
Despite that stern stance, Netanyahu is being criticised for being too soft on the Palestinians – not only by right-wing extremists in Israel but also by some analysts in the US. Former Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz stated on TV that it would have been better to let the hostages die than to negotiate a swap with Hamas. In a similar vein, Daniel Pipes wrote that Israel has quickly reverted back to its old ‘bad’ policies. He wants Israel to keep on fighting until it achieves complete victory.
Pipes has held these harsh views for decades. He lived in Cairo for three years, knows Arabic, and claims to have been studying Islam and Muslims for 37 years. I was in the room when Pipes spoke at the Commonwealth Club of California in November 2005. He said that peace would only come to pass when one side – presumably Israel – achieves complete victory.
After he was done speaking, the session moderator asked the first question: Would Israel still be around in 20 years? Pipes, who had been speaking fluently until then, took a pause. Clearly, he was not expecting that question. After a moment’s hesitation, he collected his thoughts and said, “Yes, Israel would still be around.” But then he added a qualifier: “Israel may cease to be a democracy, since the Palestinians might comprise a majority.”
Bibi is indirectly asking the right-wing extremists in Israel to criticise him for being too soft. That gives him the second wind to keep the war going. His callous disregard for Palestinian lives is well known. He has turned Gaza into a slaughterhouse without evincing even a word of protest from the US government because he has convinced them that (a) he is fighting a war of self-defense and (b) most Palestinians are either part of Hamas or with Hamas.
It is very clear that the Zionists, whether in the US or in Israel, are not interested in a two-state solution. That is the main reason why this solution has not come to pass, despite being favoured by the US for decades, and despite having been talked up once again by President Biden. The Zionists want a one-state solution in which the Palestinians cease to have any rights. They believe they can use their military might, funded in large part by the US, to silence the Palestinians, once and for all.
History is replete with similarly misguided, strategically myopic rulers. They all thought they could silence the people they had occupied through sheer dint of force. While a few succeeded, many failed.
Several political analysts and historians, among them Ian Bremmer, Will Dalrymple, Richard Haas, Rashid Khalidi, John Mearsheimer, and Edward Said, feel there is no military solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Since 1948, Israel has won all its wars with its Arab neighbours but victory in the strategic sense of the term has remained beyond its grasp. This point comes through in a book by Colonel Dupuy which is appropriately entitled Elusive Victory. Dupuy is also the co-author of The Encyclopedia of Military History.
Netanyahu may well know that, but he has another compelling reason for prolonging the war. Once the war ends, so will his political career. Golda Meir resigned just a few months after the October 1973 war ended, after she was impugned in a report by the commission that had been established to look into why Israel was caught by surprise on Yom Kippur. Netanyahu knows that poll after poll taken in Israel indicates that the majority of Israelis want him to go once the war is over.
So, Bibi is indirectly asking the right-wing extremists in Israel to criticise him for being too soft. That gives him the second wind to keep the war going. His callous disregard for Palestinian lives is well known. He has turned Gaza into a slaughterhouse without evincing even a word of protest from the US government because he has convinced them that (a) he is fighting a war of self-defence and (b) most Palestinians are either part of Hamas or with Hamas.
For weeks now, very large rallies calling for a ceasefire have been held in major US cities including one that filled the Constitution Mall in Washington, DC. When the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit was being held in San Francisco, protesters calling for an end to the war in Gaza shut down the Bay Bridge for hours. In New York, Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade was interrupted by protestors who glued themselves to the road. A recent poll indicates that a majority of Americans support a ceasefire. But the US has not wavered from supporting Netanyahu unconditionally as he continues to wage war in Gaza.
What type of a man is Netanyahu? What is inside his mind? What is his endgame? Joshua Leifer, who was based in Jerusalem, provides a very disturbing profile of this man in a long essay that was published recently in The Guardian. It is called “The Netanyahu Doctrine.” Leifer is an associate editor of Dissent, who previously worked at +972 magazine and was based in Jerusalem.
Back in 1995, Netanyahu, then aged 46, was elected as the leader of Israel’s right-wing Likud Party. Yitzhak Rabin, as Israel’s Prime Minister, had signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in 1993-95. Netanyahu staked his political future on opposing the Oslo peace process.
The fact that Pipes not only wishes that Israel had killed Arafat but talks about it openly without being reprimanded by other analysts in the US is very revealing about the influence Israel wields over US foreign policy.
He even joined a demonstration that featured “a mock funeral procession for Rabin, replete with a coffin and a noose, where protestors chanted ‘Death to Rabin.’” Rabin was denounced as a traitor, while pictures of him were held aloft, showing him dressed as a Nazi SS officer. The protestors chanted “In blood and fire we will expel Rabin,” and “Death to Rabin.”
In 2015, Netanyahu told a group of Knesset members that Israel will forever live by the sword. Leifer opines that Netanyahu does not support the two-state solution because “any Palestinian state would almost certainly devolve into an Islamist terror state threatening Israel’s existence; therefore, indefinite Israeli control over the occupied territories is an absolute necessity for Jewish survival.”
Netanyahu worked hard on the art of presentation, going so far as to take acting classes to perfect his public performances. He began wearing makeup and made sure the cameras only show his good side. A man who was a trained commando, had turned into a management consultant.
The Likud party he headed had always used the “rhetoric of class resentment and religious resentment” to attract the voters. It asserted that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza should continue indefinitely for the safety of Israel. Netanyahu went a step further. Using the ‘divide and rule’ technique of the British imperialists, he sought to divide the Palestinians of the West Bank from the Palestinians of Gaza.
At a Likud party meeting in 2019, Netanyahu said that any Israeli who wanted “to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas. This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
“As part of coalition negotiations last winter, Netanyahu transferred authority over the military government in the West Bank to finance minister and hardline religious nationalist Bezalel Smotrich, who has called for the formal annexation of the West Bank and the expulsion of any Palestinians who resist.
“Once invested with authority, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich began to push immediately for the annexation of parts of the occupied West Bank, implementing land-grab measures and approving unbridled settlement expansion, which culminated, even before the current war, in making 2023 the deadliest year for Palestinians since the second intifada.”
The US has consistently opposed these settlements, and expressed its displeasure to the Israelis, to no effect. In theory, Netanyahu appears to be willing to accept a totally demilitarised Palestinian state, which he described in a 2009 speech at Bar-Iran University. However, no Palestinian leader would agree to those conditions, which go beyond demilitarisation to include Israeli security control over airspace and also an Israeli capital in an undivided Jerusalem. “It’s simply a bluff to keep the illusion of a peace process alive while further entrenching the occupation,” says Leifer.
18 years ago, Daniel Pipes worried about Israel eventually losing its demographic majority. Today, that worry haunts Netanyahu and the right-wing extremists in his cabinet. Collectively, they continue an egregious policy of disenfranchising Palestinians, while keeping them indefinitely in a ‘temporary’ occupation. What would appear to be a gross violation of international and humanitarian law goes unnoticed in the West because Israel has perfected the art of chicanery.
In the midst of the ongoing war in Gaza, a document written by the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence has surfaced. It unequivocally and explicitly recommends transferring Palestinian civilians from Gaza at the end of the war.
According to Yuval Abraham, “The transfer plan is divided into several stages. In the first stage, action must be taken so that the population of Gaza ‘evacuates south,’ while the air strikes focus on the northern Gaza Strip. In the second stage, a ground incursion into Gaza will begin, leading to the occupation of the entire Strip from north to south, and the ‘cleansing of the underground bunkers of Hamas fighters.’”
At a Likud party meeting in 2019, Netanyahu said that any Israeli who wanted “to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas. This is part of our strategy, to divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and Samaria.”
“Concurrently with the re-occupation of Gaza, Palestinian civilians will be moved into Egyptian territory, and not be allowed to return. ‘It is important to leave the travel routes to the south open to enable the evacuation of the civilian population toward Rafah,’ the document states.”
Egypt, of course, has explicitly ruled out accepting anyone from Gaza.
Since Israel’s incursion into Gaza has taken a massive toll on civilian lives, the tide of public opinion even in the West seems to be turning against Israel. Witnessing its unrelenting massacre of civilians in Gaza –doctors, nurses, patients, babies, children, women, journalists and shopkeepers, among others—there are signs that the West is beginning to wake up. The prime ministers of Spain and Belgium, after meeting with Netanyahu, expressed their sorrow at Israel’s horrid treatment of Palestinians and called for a ceasefire. The First Minister of Scotland and the Prime Minister of Ireland were among the first leaders in the West to call for an end to the carnage in Gaza. South Africa has gone a step further by closing the Israeli embassy and by petitioning the International Criminal Court to issue an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. Even the President of France has called for a ceasefire.
At the same time, Israel and its supporters in the US continue to imagine that a military victory is achievable. Recently, Daniel Pipes was asked by L’Informale, “Why has Israel never achieved victory against its Palestinian enemies?” The question was very brazen, not just because it spoke of victory in the absolute sense of the term, but because the victory was not going to be just over Hamas, but over the Palestinians broadly speaking.
He replied, “Because it never tried. Israel successfully defeated its Arab state enemies – Egypt, Jordan and Syria in particular – but it desisted from pressing its advantage against the Palestinians. Think 1982, when it desisted from killing Yasser Arafat. Or 1993, when it gave him control over adjoining territory. Or 2005, when it unilaterally withdrew from Gaza.”
The fact that Pipes, who holds a doctorate from Harvard, not only wishes that Israel had killed Arafat but talks about it openly without being reprimanded by other analysts in the US, is very revealing about the influence Israel wields over US foreign policy.
The bias does not stop there. When it comes to Israel, freedom of speech is thrown out of the window, even in academia. The Harvard Law Review recently rescinded its decision to publish an article that presented the Palestinian point of view, tarnishing the concept of academic freedom in the US. Subsequently, The Nation published it.
Israeli exceptionalism permeates the United States, as Shahid Alam discusses in his eponymous book, which is appropriately subtitled: The destabilizing logic of Zionism.