Sooner or later, the destructive political magic that has kept Beniamin 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 US government, I have “both hands firmly on the wheel.”
However, by ruling out any 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 his fanatical government threw Israel into a roulette game where sooner or later blood was going to flow.
It is true that blood has already flowed in Palestine when peace-seeking politicians such as Isaac Rabin and Ehud Barak governed. Any Israeli peace proposal that failed to meet the unrealistic expectations of the Palestinians triggered a violent response and, with it, the collapse of Israeli internal politics. Like Cronus devouring his own children, the peace process initiated thirty years ago in Oslo was an exercise in political self-destruction.
The fact is that Netanyahu has arrogantly favored bloodshed by agreeing to pay his coalition partners any price asked in exchange for support. He allowed them to seize Palestinian land, expand illegal settlements, challenge Muslim sensibilities in the sacred mosques on the Temple Mount, and promote suicidal delusions about rebuilding the Bible 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 inflame the entire region. And this is precisely because an equally dangerous Jewish messianism has been accumulating in recent years around the Temple Mount, home of Judaism’s destroyed sacred temples. Strict halachic rules have always prohibited Jews from climbing the mountain so as not to desecrate the holiest of Jewish shrines before it is redeemed by the arrival of the Messiah. Now, however, one of Netanyahu’s top ministers, the brash Jewish supremacist Itamar Ben-Gvir, has made it a habit to provocatively visit Mt. He is supported by a new political theology that claims Jewish sovereignty over the place to rebuild the temple. It is an approach that has been gaining ground not only among religious fanatics (more than a dozen messianic foundations seek to recover the Temple Mount for Jewish worship), but also within Israel’s ruling party, the Likud, whose moderate wing has been decimated. All of this is an open invitation to hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world to what could be the mother of all jihads.
To placate his radical political allies among religious settlers, Netanyahu has sidelined the more moderate Palestinian political leadership of Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank and bolstered 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. Rewarding extremists and punishing moderates, Netanyahu believed that, unlike the faint-hearted leftists, he had finally found the magic solution to the Palestinian conflict.
Abraham’s agreements with four Arab states and the probable incorporation of Saudi Arabia, the jewel in the crown of the arrogant prime minister, blinded him and prevented him from seeing the Palestinian volcano under 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 Hamas barbarism. 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 surprised a complacent country by storming Gaza’s borders with Israel and killing hundreds of defenseless civilians. Nearly a hundred, including entire families, elderly women and small children, have been brutally kidnapped and taken to the strip. Scenes of young women being raped next to the bodies of their friends were recorded on social networks.
Should we be surprised that Hamas has been able to penetrate Israel’s defenses along the Gaza border so easily? Those defenses did not exist. A considerable number of regular Army units were deployed in the West Bank to protect religious settlers in the clashes they sometimes provoke with local Palestinians and in festivals they hold in invented sacred places on biblical lands.
It is true that some of those Israel Defense Forces units are located 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 attempted in the past to reach Israeli populations on the other side of the border. That wall has been of no use. Hamas militias have limited themselves to assaulting the fences on the surface.
Be that as it may, the glorious Israeli army was largely deployed elsewhere when Hamas murdered hundreds of defenseless civilians. For long hours, desperate men and women cried out for help, with the most powerful army in the Middle East nowhere to be found. 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 to the last bullet. Israel would end up winning. However, then, as now, the political leaders failed and failed to consider 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 decided to ignore it. In the current tragedy, Israel has completely lacked information about Hamas’s intentions. The startup country, whose sophisticated cyber units can detect the movement of a leaf on a tree at an Iranian base in Syria, has known nothing about Hamas’s plans. Israel’s obsession with the possible nuclearization of Iran and the concentration of its internal services in the occupied West Bank should partly explain such negligence.
The Islamist group has not only achieved a tactical surprise, but also a strategic one. This has been evident in Hamas’s calculated decision not to participate in any of the confrontations of the last two years between Israel and 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 did not continue with a presumably ineffective resistance misled Israelis into believing that Qatari subsidies and Israel’s gestures dissuaded Hamas from future military adventures.
And now that? “Restore deterrence”? How, exactly? Self-punishment in the form of a renewed occupation of Gaza? Some ground operations cannot 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 atrocious level of destruction and casualties that would ensue. Another is the possible temptation for Hizbullah 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 the possible support of Iran for Israel’s enemies, constitutes an unimaginable apocalypse.
That is precisely what President Joe Biden wanted to avoid by advising Israel’s enemies “not to exploit the crisis.” To leave no doubt on that point, Biden has ordered the US Navy’s most modern and advanced aircraft carrier to set sail for the eastern Mediterranean. Another element that could also prevent a ground invasion is the insurance policy that holding so many defenseless Israeli hostages means for the Islamist group. Although, to tell the truth, when has the Israeli-Palestinian conflict responded to Cartesian logic?
From Clausewitz we learned that war is supposed to make sense in the context of a political and diplomatic objective. The current Hamas war has such objectives: to ensure its hegemony within the Palestinian national movement through resistance and presenting itself as the ultimate protector of the sacred cause of Jerusalem and Al Aqsa by ensuring the release of its men from Israeli prisons by capturing of the largest possible number of hostages; and prevent Palestine from being abandoned to its fate and betrayed by the “Arab brothers” in their 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 achieve a pause until the next round of hostilities.
A country that does not hold its leaders accountable for criminal clumsiness such as that revealed by the horrible scenes around Gaza loses its 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 according to which some leftist officers in the Israel Defense Forces were responsible for the negligence that led to the war. A pale emulation of the Nazi “stab in the back” theory 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, clearly ineffective, will eventually be lifted. An entirely different question is whether the execrable barbarity exhibited by Hamas militias in the killing fields surrounding the Gaza Strip is the path to Palestinian redemption.
Shlomo Ben Ami is a former Israeli minister and ambassador.
Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix
