Don’t confuse Netanyahu’s interests with Israel’s

By Marc Champion

Right after Hamas bloodied Israel on October 7, US President Joe Biden gave the Jewish state and its leaders some hard-won advice: Don’t make the mistake we made after al-Qaeda’s September 11 attack on America, more than 20 years ago.

The time is overdue to impose costs on Israel’s government for roundly ignoring that counsel, as it chooses a path to lasting instability both for Israel and the wider Middle East.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear in Washington last week and in the days since that he believes he has solid domestic support for continuing with the war in Gaza until “victory,” defined as the complete destruction of Hamas.

Equally clear now is that he has zero intention of even cracking a door toward the creation of a Palestinian state, and that he considers indefinite military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank a viable path to Israeli security.

Not only is Netanyahu wrong on all counts, but the potential consequences are dire for Israelis and others. For non-combatant Palestinians, they are self-evidently catastrophic.

The outlook for a parent in Gaza today is that if their children aren’t killed in the war, they will be radicalized and recruited in numbers Hamas could only previously have dreamed of.

The consequences for the region are almost as bad. It is clear we are on the brink of a wider war in a part of the world that is critical to the global economy — in particular, the industrially developed West — because of its importance to energy supplies and trade routes.

The US and UK are already exchanging fire with Yemen’s Houthis, despite having little prospect of halting their missile attacks on international shipping through the Red Sea, which accounts for more than 12 per cent of global trade, until the fighting in Gaza ends.

On Saturday, missiles — likely Israeli — struck the headquarters of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Damascus. According to the IRGC, five people were killed, including the group’s intelligence chief for Syria and his deputy.

Iranian proxies in Iraq, meanwhile, fired missiles into a US military base, wounding American servicemen. Never since the war in Gaza began have the US and Israel been as close to direct conflict with Iran.

On Friday, Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant also warned that an all-out war with Hezbollah, Iran’s largest proxy militia, may not be far away. He acknowledged that there will be fighting on the northern border with Lebanon so long as there’s war in Gaza in the south.

But, according to Israeli media, he also said “there will come a moment when if we do not reach a diplomatic agreement in which Hezbollah respects the right of the residents to live here in security, we will have to ensure that security by force”.

He is not wrong. This is the logic of any war that lacks a political framework to define achievable goals and therefore a basis for de-escalation and exit. In Washington last week, Netanyahu made public that no such plans exist.

What to do? The first thing is to separate the political interests of Netanyahu and the ultra-right coalition parties that keep him in power from those of Israel.

They are not the same, and his claims to represent the views of all Israelis are false. This is one of the most politically polarized societies on earth, and polling suggests that if there were elections tomorrow, Netanyahu’s Likud party would be decimated.

Most Israelis hold their Prime Minister responsible for the deadly security failures of October 7.