Israel-Hamas War: Netanyahu's Road to Declaring War. By Michael Hirsh

Michael Hirsh — Read time: 10 minutes

Foreign Policy Magazine

Analysis: Netanyahu’s Road to War

The Israeli leader sought to sideline the Palestinians while wooing the Arab states. Now he faces a bloody backlash.

By Michael Hirsh, a columnist for Foreign Policy.

The best-laid plans of prime ministers and presidents often go awry. But rarely do they backfire as thoroughly as they have for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The best-laid plans of prime ministers and presidents often go awry. But rarely do they backfire as thoroughly as they have for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Netanyahu suddenly faces a long, bloody war with the Palestinians after spending most of his political career sidelining, short-shrifting, and underestimating them, all the while relying on his country’s military superiority—including its Iron Dome anti-missile system—to protect Israel.

And the United States, which went along with Netanyahu’s grand strategy of normalizing relations with the Arab states while humiliating the Palestinians in recent years, suddenly faces the prospect of being pulled back into a region it had desperately wanted to deprioritize. Yet again, the United States must grapple with fundamental issues of Palestinian-Israeli coexistence that date to U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s historic 1978 pact with Egypt and the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

No one can excuse the horrific atrocities committed by Hamas in the last several days, nor deny Israel’s right to a response, which very likely will entail a full or partial reoccupation of Gaza and the methodical destruction of Hamas. But it’s also clear that Netanyahu’s policies helped create the conditions that led to the bloodiest few days in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“The horrific event we’ve just experienced—and the prolonged, massive Israeli counteroffensive to follow—cannot be fully understood in isolation from what I consider … a two-layered Netanyahu strategic failure,” said Nimrod Novik, the former senior advisor to the late Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who eagerly tried to pursue the Oslo process. First, Netanyahu and his current coalition —“the most extreme ever,” in Novik’s words—downplayed or ignored warnings from Arab signatories under the Abraham Accords about addressing Palestinian grievances, Novik said.

Second, for decades, Netanyahu pursued what Novik called the “illusion” that even under his draconian policies—which turned Gaza into what Human Rights Watch calls “the world’s largest open-air prison”—Hamas would abstain from the kind of attacks on Israel that might jeopardize its hold on power in Gaza, said Novik, who is currently a fellow with the Israel Policy Forum.

“His so-called ‘separation strategy’ rested on two legs: one, solidify Hamas control over Gaza, so that we have ‘an address’ and a governing entity with which to reach understandings over easing of closure in return for cease-fire. Second, weaken the Palestinian Authority, lest it emerges as a viable partner for negotiations, something Netanyahu has been determined to avoid,” Novik said. An Israeli official did not respond to a request for comment.

Netanyahu also pushed a controversial policy of weakening the judiciary inside Israel, in part to prevent the courts from protecting Palestinians from Israeli human rights abuses, which they did only occasionally. That push—described by Netanyahu’s critics as a judicial coup—set off waves of protests in Israel that have continued for months.

To be fair, the prospects for any serious negotiations with the Palestinians, and a two-state solution, have been grim since Hamas took power in Gaza in 2007. But critics say that Netanyahu didn’t even try to negotiate. (The two sides did engage in U.S.-mediated talks under Netanyahu in 2013-2014 but made no real progress.)

On the contrary, it seems clear that since his first stint as prime minister in the late 1990s, Netanyahu has sought to undermine the Oslo Accords—and any prospect for a Palestinian state—even as he pretended to go along with the agreement at first (for example, by signing the Wye River Memorandum in 1998, which edged along the implementation of Oslo). Netanyahu even boasted in remarks that he didn’t realize were being recorded in 2001 that he had “de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords.” Then came a series of disasters that set back, even paralyzed, any prospect for a two-state solution and made Netanyahu’s project of destruction even easier—including the second Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and the aggressive Israeli response.

In 2005, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. The next year, the George W. Bush administration, pursuing its quixotic democracy agenda in the Middle East, insisted on Palestinian elections. The vote brought Hamas to power, dividing the Palestinian population up until the present day. And then, after Netanyahu won reelection in 2009, he set about completing the work he’d started in the 1990s, frustrating every effort by U.S. President Barack Obama to push for peace while continuing to create new “facts on the ground” in the form of West Bank settlements. Those settlements ensured that the Palestinians would get less and less territory in any final agreement.

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Finally, in U.S. President Donald Trump and his ambitious son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Netanyahu found his dream partnership. Trump gave Netanyahu virtual carte blanche to move further into the West Bank and ensure Oslo’s destruction. Then, one by one, Trump began to unilaterally withdraw rights and recognitions from the Palestinians that both sides used to consider “final status” issues to be negotiated under Oslo.

At Kushner’s urging, Trump announced that he was moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and ended the formal U.S. relationship with the Palestinian Liberation Organization by closing its office in Washington. The administration also denied a right of return for Palestinians to Israel and pulled funding to support Palestinian refugees—all without offering any real solution regarding the future of the Palestinian people.

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In his efforts to ensure that the Palestinians would never get a state, Netanyahu’s various governments ended up weakening Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas—who wanted to negotiate—while strengthening Hamas, which has vowed Israel’s destruction.

With the Palestinians rebuffed, Trump and Netanyahu then forged the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. The agreement was signed in September 2020, two months before Trump’s defeat in the presidential election. U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration mostly endorsed these earlier moves as it attempted to land the biggest deal of all—establishing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia.

For Netanyahu, all these policies created the conditions for the worst Israeli-Arab war since 1973, said Gilead Sher, the former chief of staff to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak. “Over the years, he led a failed and misleading security concept. He preferred … the status quo over in-depth political solutions—even transitional or interim—in the West Bank and Gaza. His policy attempted to nearly topple the PA [Palestinian Authority] and strengthen Hamas while fostering Hamas’s sense of impunity and capability.”

Or as Matt Duss, the former foreign-policy advisor to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, put it in an email: “A status quo built on repression, which is what the Abraham Accords and the so-called Israel-Saudi ‘normalization’ deal are really about, is invariably fragile and transient.”

Just how fragile has now become all too apparent. Perhaps the biggest mystery remaining—one even more puzzling than Israel’s astonishing failure of intelligence—is why Hamas would want to embark on what could end up being a collective suicide mission for the militant group. Many experts believe that the precipitating factor was the U.S.-led push to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia. This frightened Islamist groups such as Hamas because, if achieved, it would have effectively removed the religious dimension to the conflict, since Saudi Arabia is known as the custodian of the two holiest mosques in Islam.

Iran may well have been a key player here, since Tehran was desperate to stop what it saw as a broader Israeli-Sunni coalition against it in the region. The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has been planning the air, land, and sea attack with Hamas since August (though Hamas spokespeople are denying this). Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Hezbollah, is also threatening Israel’s northern border if Israel mounts a ground invasion of Gaza.

So now, both Israel and the United States find themselves embroiled in yet another Arab-Israeli war, and the geopolitics of conflict are shifting globally. On Sunday, Biden deployed the U.S. Navy’s most sophisticated aircraft carrier, six other ships, and jets to the Mediterranean, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin pledged to send munitions, raising concerns that U.S. military resources—already strained because of the war in Ukraine—could be spread even more thinly. In Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin is gleefully predicting the fracturing of the Western coalition against him, since Republican U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy was ousted last week by right-wing House members who oppose Ukraine aid. And there are even fears that China could exploit the moment to move on Taiwan.

Even in the best case, the outcome will be ugly, bloody, and long. The Washington Post reported on Monday that U.S. officials expect Israel to launch a ground invasion into Gaza in the next 24 to 48 hours, with Israel’s troops exposed to extreme danger for years to come. And Netanyahu’s bid to warm up to the Arab world may well be in shambles, with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states once again forced to call for Palestinian rights.

On Saturday, Saudi Arabia issued a statement saying that Israel had ignored “its repeated warnings of the dangers of the explosion of the situation as a result of the continued occupation, and deprivation of the Palestinian people of their legitimate rights.”

And the United States finds itself back to where it started decades ago—pressing Israel to find some kind of accommodation with the Palestinians. On Sunday, a senior administration official told reporters that Washington would continue trying to bring the Israelis and the Palestinians together in face-to-face talks, as Biden has done twice in Aqaba and Sharm el-Sheik, “to find some rules of the road.”

For Netanyahu and Israel, it’s a whole new road, and as yet there are no rules.

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Michael Hirsh is a columnist for Foreign Policy. He is the author of two books: Capital Offense: How Washington’s Wise Men Turned America’s Future Over to Wall Street and At War With Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World. Twitter: @michaelphirsh