If you've been keeping track at home, two of the most important defense officials in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's war cabinet, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and former military chief of staff Benny Gantz, said last week that Netanyahu had left Israel in dire straits. You must have noticed that I warned you that you were leading into a situation. It appears to have fallen into an abyss by refusing to present a plan for Palestinians other than Hamas to rule Gaza, and instead considering a long-term military occupation of Gaza by Israel. Gantz said if there is no plan by June 8, he intends to leave the government.
Here's what these ministers' statements mean for America. Netanyahu has become a radical actor, undermining key US interests and Arab allies, and a gift that keeps on giving to Iran.
I hope Prime Minister Netanyahu looks at the policy choices he has made and says with a straight face that Israel has not been completely outmaneuvered by Iran. Iran has used its allies Hamas and Hezbollah to reduce Israel since October 7, expelling tens of thousands of Israelis from Israel's western and northern borders and isolating the country on the world stage over Gaza. . On the other hand, Iran has a high barrier to becoming a nuclear power, and has become the largest nuclear power. Imperialist powers in the region (given their de facto control of four Arab states) are not as isolated as they have been in recent years. All this is happening under Bibi's watch.
But Prime Minister Netanyahu is now busy doing something even more dangerous for Israel's future and for America. He criticized the Israeli public's belief that there is no difference between the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Hamas, which is dedicated to erasing the Jewish state from the map and replacing it with an Islamic state, and the secular Fatah-led state. It hits me mercilessly. Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. It accepted the Oslo Accords, which called for a two-state solution, in the mid-1990s and worked with Israel for 30 years to limit violence in the West Bank.
The Palestinian Authority has a million flaws, some of which were created or exacerbated by violent Israeli settlers. But there's a reason Prime Minister Netanyahu panics every time his leader Mahmoud Abbas says, in effect: “Here's the key.” It's because Prime Minister Netanyahu knows all too well how much the Palestinian Authority cooperates with the Israeli army and Shin Bet security forces to blockade the West Bank, and how much money, soldiers, and legitimacy Israel would sacrifice if it had to go it alone. Palestinian security, health, banking, and education in the West Bank.
Nevertheless, Netanyahu's far-right coalition partners want to annex Gaza, and Netanyahu's vote could keep him in office and out of prison even if he is convicted in a corruption trial. Therefore, Mr. Bibi sings the argument that Hamas and Fatah are the same.
(This is the most important development happening right now, and the International Criminal Court's decision to seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu, Gallant, and other Hamas leaders on war crimes charges will only intensify domestic tensions.) (It only distracts from the problem.)
To make matters worse, too many Israelis have accepted Prime Minister Netanyahu's nonsensical claims, and few opposition leaders, including Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, have stood up and unequivocally rejected them. Too much. This is an impending disaster. Bibi has urged Israel not to have a legitimate Palestinian government replace Hamas rule. That is what it means to claim that Hamas and Fatah are the same.
And Prime Minister Netanyahu is doing all of this at the direction of two Jewish supremacists he has given unprecedented powers to in his cabinet: Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
“We have to go back to Gaza now! We are coming back to the holy land!” Ben Gvir said during Israel's Independence Day march last week, without Prime Minister Netanyahu's rebuke. . “We must encourage immigration. Encourage voluntary migration of Gaza residents.”
He is not a lone voice: Prime Minister Netanyahu's next military chief has reportedly drawn up his own plan for Israel to rule Gaza permanently with a military junta, without input from the defense minister or army chief of staff.
Mr. Gallant, a former head of Israel's equivalent of the Navy SEALs and the only person in Netanyahu's Likud leadership with political courage and gravitas, was so alarmed that he last week asked for the prime minister's permission. Since October, he has made the following speeches: He has asked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a plan on who will rule Gaza once Hamas is dismantled, but he has “not received a response.”
Without a plan, Gallant added, only two negative options remain: Hamas rule in Gaza or Israeli military control of Gaza. …A “day after Hamas” will only be achieved if Palestinian organizations, accompanied by international actors, take control of Gaza and establish an alternative governance system to Hamas rule. ”
Gallant did not mention the participation of the Palestinian Authority, but did not rule out the possibility. But Prime Minister Netanyahu has made his position clear, as he said this winter: “Gaza is neither Hamastan nor Fatahstan.” Fatah is President Abbas' political party.
Some wonder whether we've misunderstood Netanyahu, whose now-constant insistence that the Palestinian Authority is the same as Hamas has him at odds with Israel, said Victor Friedman, an Israeli organizational psychologist (no relation).
“Prime Minister Netanyahu's acquiescence to the far-right Smotrich and Ben Gvir is generally seen as motivated by the need to assemble a coalition government and get himself out of prison. “There are,” Friedman told me. “Now it appears he willingly sold his soul to the far right. One explanation is that the religious far right projected onto him a messianic image consistent with his own sense of being called to save Israel and the Jewish people.” He has a plan for the next day, and it's clear to everyone who hears it: “total victory” and the eventual return of Jewish settlement there. Israel is on track to reoccupy Gaza. ”
If that happens, Israel will become an international pariah, and Jewish institutions around the world will have Jews and children who feel the need to defend Israel, rightly or wrongly, and who cannot defend it. It will be torn between thinking Jews.
Sadly, Prime Minister Netanyahu did not drive Israel into its current impasse. For years, his settlement plans and Iran policy have been closely followed by the pro-Israel lobbying group AIPAC, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, the American Jewish Committee, and reflexive supporters in both the Republican and Democratic parties. has been hidden by.
And unfortunately, I don't think President Biden fully understands his “old friend” Bibi. For the first time in history, Bibi's government officially declared annexation of the West Bank as its goal and actually sought to strip the Supreme Court of its power to block it. .
My rule: Never listen to anything Bibi says in English in private. Just look at what he says in Hebrew in public. The Biden team has for months implored Netanyahu to articulate a post-Gaza vision that includes Palestinian and Arab control of Gaza and a long-term path to a demilitarized Palestinian state. Therefore, the United States should not facilitate Israel's occupation of Gaza with the West Bank and pave the way for a U.S.-Saudi security agreement that could lead to normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Prime Minister Netanyahu said no to all of them. But Mr. Biden has won a Congressional majority and replaced Elise Stefanik, a hack Republican lawmaker with no position on foreign policy, with the person who is coveted to become Donald Trump's vice president. – Showed his gratitude to Biden by giving Stefanik the unusual honor of speaking on Sunday. Congress criticized the US president and praised Trump.
So who is this great military genius they all worship? Let's think about it. In 2015, the Obama administration signed a nuclear deal with Iran and imposed inspections and restrictions on Iran. It has reduced its stockpile of enriched uranium to a small amount of 3.67% purity, far from the approximately 90% purity needed for a nuclear bomb. So even if Iran were to try to develop a nuclear weapon, it would take at least a year to produce enough fissile material for a bomb, but that would be enough time to thwart it. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vehemently opposed the deal, but several senior Israeli military and intelligence officials supported it, something Prime Minister Bibi hid from the Israeli and American publics.
After Trump took office, Prime Minister Netanyahu pushed Trump to abandon the nuclear deal, which Trump recklessly did in May 2018. Prime Minister Netanyahu appeared to believe that Trump would blow up Iran's nuclear facilities if Iran abandoned the nuclear deal and began enriching for nuclear weapons. Although Iran abandoned the nuclear deal, neither Trump nor Biden were prepared to attack Iran.
What is the result? As Reuters reported last month, “Iran is currently enriching uranium to up to 60 percent purity, and further enrichment would result in concentrations equivalent to two nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency's theoretical definition. This means that Iran's so-called breakout time, or the amount of time it would take to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb, is close to zero, perhaps only weeks or days.
This is one of the biggest national security failures in American and Israeli national security history.
And for the past decade, it's been Netanyahu — “Mr. Netanyahu,” who facilitated the transfer of more than $1 billion from Qatar to Hamas to build it in Gaza, and who has committed himself to the delegitimization of the Palestinian Authority. I used the voice of In this way he was able to tell the world that Israel has no Palestinian partners and must occupy the West Bank forever.
And now he is selling the Israelis the illusion that there are perfect Palestinians running Gaza on Israel's behalf and rebelling against the only two Palestinian governing bodies with legitimacy, Hamas and Fatah. If you believe that, I'll sell you a bridge in Gaza. This will lead Israel, America's main ally in the Middle East, into a chaotic and endlessly exhausting conflict.
Hamas is not the Palestinian Authority. Hamas is a mass-murdering Islamic extremist organization that has done more harm to Palestinians than any other. If Israel were to commit to governing Gaza in cooperation with a reforming Palestinian Authority, freezing settlements, and developing a partnership with the Palestinian Authority for a Palestinian state someday, that would change everything. It would give Israel the global legitimacy to actually dismantle Hamas, organize a Palestinian Arab Army to govern Gaza so that neither Israel nor Hamas can do so, and pave the way for Israeli-Saudi normalization.
None of this will be easy, and there is no guarantee of success for the Israeli prime minister, who has the best intentions. But if no attempt is made, Israel's long-term survival is at risk. Unfortunately, Israel today is led by someone who is only interested in his own short-term survival. And in that respect he is successful.
