For Netanyahu, the Gaza war is about clinging to power

Israel's prime minister hopes that prolonging the conflict will help save himself

When the Neoconservatives around George W Bush plotted the invasion of Iraq, they shut out  all discussion of what might happen the day after Saddam Hussein’s fall. Their intended demonstration of American power could not be jeopardised by awkward questions as to the shape of the Middle Eastern landscape after the guns fell quiet. The rest we know.

Benjamin Netanyahu has taken much the same approach in the war against Hamas following the group’s brutal killing of some 1,200 Israelis. Beyond the inhumanity of a bombing campaign seemingly heedless of the deaths of thousands of children (how, I wonder, do those young Israeli pilots feel about the civilian carnage below?), the striking thing is the determined absence of serious discussion of what happens when Gaza is completely flattened.

The Israeli prime minister has reason to brush aside strategic thinking. The war he is conducting is as much about his personal political survival as depriving Hamas of the means to attack again. Netanyahu and his far right coalition allies promoted the policy of containing Gaza, expanding West Bank settlements, and seeking accommodation with Arab states that created the conditions for the heinous Hamas killing spree of October 7. They had promised security.

The polls suggest that Israelis well understand the prime minister’s culpability. Netanyahu, however,  does not give up when it comes to personal ambition. The longer and more indiscriminate the campaign in Gaza, he calculates, the more he can hope it deflects from his own catastrophic failure. Never mind that the international community wants the killing to stop. Defiance is part of Netanyahu’s self-image. No opportunity is missed to pull on a flak jacket for the cameras. The war might as well be his re-election campaign.

Indiscriminate bombing of civilians is also calculated to eliminate any possibility that war will be followed by politics - by negotiation with Palestinians and, horror of horror in the mind of the prime minister, renewed discussion of a two state settlement. Western leaders might warn Israel that the mounting civilian death toll is radicalising another generation of Palestinians. More reason, in Netanyahu’s mind, to eschew all notion of politics.

The oft-repeated promise to “eliminate” Hamas is at once an impossible goal and a convenient excuse to prolong the fighting. However many arms dumps and tunnels are destroyed and commanders killed, Hamas will persist. And the longer the bombing goes on, the more recruits Hamas will find. Netanyahu knows this. It suits his pitch.

For how long Israel’s most important ally will defend Netanyahu against the rising swell of international condemnation is another question. So far the United States has vetoed attempts in the UN Security Council to demand a ceasefire. President Joe Biden’s frustration, however, is beginning to show through.

There is no love lost between Netanyahu and Biden. For all his record as a close ally of Israel, Biden has consistently backed the two-state solution that Netanyahu and his ultra-nationalist allies want permanently to erase. As Barack Obama’s deputy and more recently as president, Biden has also fought off Netanyahu’s never flagging effort to pull the US into a war with Iran.

The recent public warning from US defence secretary Lloyd Austin that by killing thousands of Palestinian civilians Israel risks turning tactical victory into strategic defeat is a fair reflection of the administration’s views. For his part Netanyahu has publicly defied Biden’s warning against permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza. Neither Hamas nor the Palestine Authority, he says, can have any role in the future governance of Gaza. Israel will retain indefinite military control. 

At the core of this is a refusal to accept a basic truth that Israel should have has learned through decades of conflict. It has won countless military conflicts against both the Palestinians and its Arab neighbours. And it has the wherewithal to continue the win them. But none of these victories has delivered security. That requires a political settlement.

The paradox of Hamas’s attack is that it has both underlined this reality and, if it were possible, pushed any political accommodation even further into the future. As long as Netanyahu remains in office, Israel will refuse even to come to the starting line of negotiations. The hope must be that his departure - and surely Israelis will throw him out as soon the fighting ends? - will provoke a reassessment. But for now pain, emotion and personal ambition rule.