Sooner or later, the destructive political magic that has kept Benjamin Netanyahu in power for more than fifteen years was destined to unleash a great tragedy. A year ago, Netanyahu formed the most radical and incompetent government in Israel’s history. Don’t worry, he assured his critics in the United States Government, I have “both hands firmly on the wheel”.
However, dismissing all political process in Palestine and recklessly asserting that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel”, the statements of their fanatical government threw Israel into a roulette wheel in which sooner or later blood would be spilled.
It is true that blood was already spilled in Palestine when peace-seeking politicians like Isaac Rabin and Ehud Barak ruled. Any Israeli peace proposal that failed to meet the unrealistic expectations of the Palestinians triggered a violent response along with the collapse of Israeli domestic politics. Like Cronus devouring his own children, the peace process started thirty years ago in Oslo was an exercise in political self-destruction.
The point is that Netanyahu has arrogantly favored the bloodshed by agreeing to pay his coalition partners any price they demand in exchange for support. It allowed them to appropriate Palestinian lands, expand illegal settlements, challenge Muslim sensibilities at the holy mosques on the Temple Mount, and promote suicidal delusions about rebuilding the Biblical Temple.
By using Al-Aqsa as a distinctive symbol of the Palestinian cause, Hamas elevates the conflict with Israel to the level of an apocalyptic confrontation that has the potential to ignite the entire region. And this is so precisely because an equally dangerous Jewish messianism has been accumulating in recent years around the Temple Mount, seat of the destroyed holy temples of Judaism. The strict rules of halakhah have always forbidden Jews to climb the mountain so as not to desecrate the holiest of Jewish sanctuaries before it is redeemed by the arrival of the Messiah. However, now one of Netanyahu’s top ministers, the impetuous Jewish supremacist Itamar Ben-Gvir, has made a habit of provocatively visiting Mt. It is supported by a new political theology that claims Jewish sovereignty over the site to rebuild the temple. It is an approach that has been gaining ground not only among religious fanatics (more than a dozen messianic foundations want to recover the Temple Mount for Jewish worship), but also within the ruling party in Israel, the Likud, whose moderate wing has been decimated. All this is an open invitation to hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world to what could be the mother of all jihads.
To appease his radical political allies among the religious settlers, Netanyahu has sidelined the more moderate Palestinian political leadership of Mahmud Abbas in the West Bank and strengthened the radical Hamas in Gaza. A strong Islamist government in Gaza, such is Netanyahu’s twisted reasoning, constitutes the definitive reason against a political solution in Palestine. By rewarding the extremists and punishing the moderates, Netanyahu believed that, unlike the pusillanimous leftists, he had finally found the magic solution to the Palestinian conflict.
Abraham’s agreements with four Arab states and the likely inclusion of Saudi Arabia, the jewel in the crown of the arrogant prime minister, blinded him and prevented him from seeing the Palestinian volcano beneath his feet.
The fact is that, in the merciless slaughter of Israeli civilians perpetrated in the villages surrounding Gaza, Netanyahu’s hubris has found its nemesis in the form of the barbarism of Hamas. On October 6, fifty years after Egypt and Syria launched a surprise joint attack on Israel in what became known as the Yom Kippur War, Hamas stunned a complacent country by storming Gaza’s borders with Israel, killing hundreds of defenseless civilians. Nearly a hundred, including entire families, grandmothers and small children, have been brutally kidnapped and taken to the strip. Scenes of young people being raped next to the bodies of their friends were recorded on social networks.
Should we be surprised that Hamas was able to penetrate Israel’s defenses along the Gaza border so easily? These defenses did not exist. A considerable number of regular units of the land army were deployed in the West Bank to protect the religious settlers in the clashes they themselves sometimes provoke with the local Palestinians and in festivals they hold in invented holy places in biblical lands.
It is true that some of these IDF units are in the West Bank for strictly operational reasons, although it was always assumed that Gaza was not such a vital priority. The underground wall of sensors and reinforced concrete that had been built around the strip was supposed to block the tunnels through which Hamas tried in the past to reach Israeli towns across the border. This wall has been of no use. The Hamas militias have limited themselves to storming the fences on the surface.
Be that as it may, the glorious Israeli army was mostly deployed elsewhere when Hamas murdered hundreds of defenseless civilians. For long hours, desperate men and women screamed for help, with the most powerful army in the Middle East nowhere to be seen. The cruel irony of history. Exactly the same thing happened fifty years ago in the early days of the Yom Kippur War, when isolated Israeli outposts along the Suez Canal were surrounded by superior Egyptian forces and left to fight and die until the ‘last bullet. Israel would end up winning. However, then, as now, the political leaders failed and did not know how to see reality as it is, not as they imagined it. Then and now, hubris met its nemesis.
In 1973, Israel had a lot of information, but chose to ignore it. In the current tragedy, Israel has completely lacked information about Hamas’ intentions. The country of startups, whose sophisticated cyber units can detect the movement of a leaf on a tree at an Iranian base in Syria, has heard nothing of Hamas’ plans. Israel’s obsession with the possible nuclearization of Iran and the concentration of its domestic services in the occupied West Bank should partly explain such neglect.
The Islamist group has not only achieved a tactical surprise, but also a strategic one. This has been evident in the calculated decision of Hamas not to participate in any of the confrontations of the last two years between Israel and the Islamic Jihad. Likewise, the impression given by the group in recent times that it was becoming a government that responded to the material needs of its people and that it was not continuing a presumably ineffective resistance misled the Israelis into believing that the subsidies from Qatar and Israel’s gestures deter Hamas from future military adventures.
And now what? “Restore deterrence”? How, exactly? Self-punishment in the form of a renewed occupation of Gaza? Some ground operations should not be ruled out, if only because Netanyahu needs them for his political survival. In any case, it is difficult to imagine a total land invasion of the strip. One reason is the appalling level of destruction and casualties this would entail. Another is Hizbullah’s possible temptation to open an additional front from Lebanon, in the north. Hizbullah’s capabilities are far superior to those of Hamas, and a war on these two fronts, with Iran’s possible support for Israel’s enemies, constitutes an unimaginable apocalypse.
This is precisely what President Joe Biden has sought to avoid by advising Israel’s enemies “not to exploit the crisis”. To leave no doubt on this point, Biden has ordered the most modern and advanced aircraft carrier in the United States Navy to set sail for the Eastern Mediterranean. Another element that could also prevent a ground invasion is the insurance policy that it means for the Islamist group to have so many defenseless Israeli hostages in their hands. Although, truth be told, when has the Israeli-Palestinian conflict responded to a Cartesian logic?
We learned from Clausewitz that war is supposed to make sense in the context of a political and diplomatic goal. The current war of Hamas has such objectives: to secure its hegemony in the heart of the Palestinian national movement through resistance and presenting itself as the ultimate protector of the holy cause of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa by ensuring the liberation of its men from Israeli prisons by taking as many hostages as possible; and prevent Palestine from being abandoned to its fate and betrayed by the “Arab brothers” in the rush to normalize relations with the Jewish State. For the Netanyahu government, on the other hand, it is a purely reactive war with no other political objective than to reach a pause until the next round of hostilities.
A country that does not demand responsibility from its leaders for a criminal racket such as that which has become evident with the horrible scenes that have taken place around Gaza loses the right to be a true democracy. Now, incredible as it may seem, Netanyahu’s poisonous political disinformation machine is already at work spreading a conspiracy theory that some leftist officers in the Israel Defense Forces were responsible for the negligence that led to to the war. A pale emulation of the Nazi theory about the “stab in the back” that was supposedly behind the German defeat in the First World War.
When this dirty war ends, it will be inevitable to negotiate an exchange of hostages and prisoners. It is possible that the blockade of Gaza, undoubtedly ineffective, will end up being lifted. Whether the execrable barbarism displayed by Hamas militias in the killing fields surrounding Gaza is the path to Palestinian redemption is an entirely different question.
