With Netanyahu, Against Netanyahu

There is virtual unanimity – at least in the West – in condemning Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023 and the death of 1200 people, a majority of whom were civilians. In Israel, among Jews, there is almost unanimous backing for the war being waged in Gaza. An opinion poll in March even found that 75 percent of Jewish Israelis supported an army move into Rafah, though most of Israel’s allies have warned Israel that such a move would result in an even greater humanitarian catastrophe than the one which has occurred so far.

Usually, at a time of war, especially one with so much support at home, the population rallies around the leader. We can think of the role played in the Second World War by Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt and the position they held subsequently in their respective country’s mythology. This is not the case in Israel. The popularity of Netanyahu is abysmally low. Public anger with Netanyahu was already evident well before the war when there were massive demonstrations against his attempted reforms of the judiciary. Now the protesters are furious at Netanyahu’s failure to obtain the liberation of the hostages still detained by Hamas. Huge anti-government demonstrations have been held, with many demanding early elections, the main way to get rid of him. Almost 70% of Israeli Jews believe Netanyahu should resign, some say immediately, some when the war is over. Support for his Likud party has never been lower.

The opposition leader Benny Gantz, a member of the present national governing coalition wants early elections. He is one of the many who blame Netanyahu. He is joined by Nadav Argaman, former director of Shin Bet (the Israeli internal security service) who warned that Netanyahu was “destroying” Israeli society and called for his removal. Another opposition leader and former prime minister, Yair Lapid, has recently described Netanyahu as an “existential threat to Israel”.

Abroad Netanyahu has few friends, if any. Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, a staunch Zionist and hawkish on virtually all matters of foreign affairs (invasion of Iraq, Kosovo, et,c. but “soft” on China) – and nearly always wrong – urged Israel to be cautious after October 7^th. Friedman was quoted in the liberal Israeli daily Haaretz: that “Netanyahu will be remembered as the worst leader in Jewish history.” Joe Biden probably agrees, though he has tried to contain his criticisms, at least in public. In private his anger manifests. Chuck Schumer, the Democrat leader in the Senate, an uncompromising supporter of Israel, and the most powerful elected Jew in the USA, declared on 14 March 2024, that Netanyahu was an obstacle to peace in the Middle East and asked for him to be removed.

Imagining that the massacres in Gaza are due to one evil man named Netanyahu maybe a comfort to those who seek to reinvigorate liberal Zionism, but it does not make for good history.

In all complex situations there is always an attempt to simplify it by attributing the overall blame to the key decision-maker be it Netanyahu in Israel or Putin in Russia, but leaders can only act within constraints and the study of constraints is difficult because it requires a complex analysis. It is easier to blame the Second World War entirely on Hitler, as if the consequences of the First World War, the crash of Wall Street and the resulting massive unemployment in Germany, and the policies of appeasement of the 1930s had never happened.

Netanyahu knows that using constraints can be useful. He uses his far-right cabinet minister – Itamar Ben-Gvir (described by the New Yorker as ‘the minister of Chaos) and the deeply racist and homophobe Bezelal Smotrich – to tell the West that his government needs the support of warmongers such as these. He can then use the weakening support of the USA to warn his right-wing ministers that they cannot do everything they want.

His war aims are unrealistic: even if he managed to kill all Hamas fighters, the present war will have created a new generation whose hatred for Israel would have been reinforced by the massacres in Gaza where the Israeli offensive has already killed more than 33,000 people and forced 1.7 million people to abandon their homes. This will lead to the further growth of radical Islamism. A new generation of young Muslims in Gaza and the occupied territories will be inspired by organizations such as Hamas in Palestine, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Houthis in Yemen.

Besides, Netanyahu seems intent to expand the war to Lebanon and to provoke Iran by bombing its consulate in Damascus (a breach of the 1961 Vienna Convention) killing seven Iranian military personnel. This led, as expected, to Iranian retaliation and the further destabilization of an already destabilized region. Western countries, led by the USA, supported Israel, but warned it not to escalate.

Many Israelis justify their country’s action resorting to traditional complaints of victimhood and arguing that all criticisms are part of age-old antisemitism. Netanyahu thus encapsulated these feelings: “This is a virus that has accompanied us for thousands of years, the virus of antisemitism,” he said, adding that Jews now had their own state “so we have the physical capability to fight those who want to destroy us”. This exploitation of the Holocaust has long been criticised by leading Jewish intellectuals. In 2011 the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, in the journal Polityka, compared the walls surrounding the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Gaza to those surrounding the Warsaw Ghetto. Tony Judt, in the New York Review of Books (2003), wrote that Israel was a warmongering “intolerant, faith-driven ethno-state,” which did its best to avoid a settlement in the Middle East which would give equal rights to Palestinians. Noam Chomsky, a long-time critic of Israel, has recently declared that Israel’s war on Gaza “is not a war, it is murder.”

A settlement, however, if difficult to imagine. The one-state solution would assume that it might be possible for Jews and Palestinians to live in harmony together after decades of animosity. A two-state solution is equally unlikely unless one can imagine an Israeli government willing to force or convince the 700,000 Israeli settlers in the occupied territories to return to the 1967 boundaries or to live, peacefully, in a Palestinian state.