Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears to have finally relented. After more than a year of refusing to agree to an end to the war in Gaza, he is now pushing through a ceasefire that – mediators insist – will do just that.
Netanyahu’s government met on Friday to approve the deal, which would involve a captive and prisoner exchange, a gradual Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the end of the devastating war Israel has unleashed on the Palestinian enclave.
The implementation is set to begin on Sunday, and that is when the recriminations for the Israeli prime minister are likely to begin as he faces off opposition from within his own government. That opposition is parroting back the very lines that he has long insisted on: no end to the war without the destruction of Hamas.
Far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has proudly declared that he has used his power to prevent any captive release agreement from taking place over the past year, has declared the current deal on the table “terrible” and insisted he and his party will quit the government if it is implemented.
But that won’t be enough to bring the Netanyahu government down. Ben-Gvir needs the backing of his fellow far-right traveller Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and his Religious Zionism party. Smotrich appears willing to go ahead with the deal but only in its first phase, which would see the release of some of the Israeli captives. After that, Religious Zionism has said its members would resign from the government unless the war on Gaza – which has so far killed more than 46,700 Palestinians – continues.
The Trump factor
Despite those threats to his rule, Netanyahu looks to be pressing ahead. The planned beginning of the ceasefire comes a day before the deadline set by incoming United States President-elect Donald Trump, Monday being the day of his inauguration.
The Israeli far right had seen Trump – a pro-Israel Republican who plans to bring several politicians with strong ties to the Israeli settler movement into his administration – as their man, a president who would look the other way as the movement fulfils its dream of building illegal settlements in Gaza and forcing out its population.
For now that appears to not be the case, and Trump has emphasised that he wants an end to the war before he takes office.
While on first reading that could be a negative for Netanyahu, perceptions that the Trump administration may have forced his hand can be politically useful to the Israeli prime minister in the short term, allowing him more room to manoeuvre in the future.
“This may be more transactional than many suppose,” Mairav Zonszein, an Israel expert with the International Crisis Group, said, suggesting that the hand of Israel’s longest serving leader might not be so easily forced.
“By agreeing now, Netanyahu may have bought himself greater freedom to act in the West Bank and in determining whatever future that is agreed for Gaza,” she said, referring to far-right Israeli plans to annex the occupied Palestinian territory, which is dotted with Israeli settlements, which are illegal under international law.
“Everybody knew that, at some point, the captives would have to be exchanged. That was always the case. For many people, that’s not even a security issue. What is a security issue for many is who will govern in Gaza,” she said, referring to the third phase of the ceasefire agreement, before going on to suggest that by agreeing to the ceasefire now, Netanyahu could be more certain of US goodwill when dealing with Gaza in the future.
Political reality
Netanyahu has been closely associated with the far-right members of his government since he came back into office at the end of 2022. It was Ben-Gvir and Smotrich who backed Netanyahu when others on the Israeli right had abandoned him over his ongoing corruption trial and unpopularity among large segments of the Israeli public.
Without them, he would not have been able to cobble a governing coalition together, and without them, so the thinking goes, his government would fall, and with it, any chance at granting himself immunity from prosecution.
But Netanyahu, long known as the great survivor, appears to have another plan for survival.
The majority of people in his government back the ceasefire, including the important ultra-Orthodox religious bloc. The opposition has also said it is willing to give Netanyahu a safety net to get the deal through.
The prime minister has always had a good sense of where the feeling of the Israeli public is, and, analysts said, he may have picked up that the mood is now more open to a deal that would see the captives return home and an end to the war.
It helps that Israel can argue that it has re-established deterrence and its enemies – including Hamas, the Lebanese group Hezbollah and most importantly Iran – have been dealt heavy blows.
But, Israeli political scientist Ori Goldberg said, the triumphalism over those geopolitical wins has given way to a sense of acceptance and resignation that the war needs to end.
“Nobody’s really celebrating,” Goldberg said. “Everyone knew this had to come. Israelis have been living in a kind of daze these last 15 months. Life has become hard for many Israelis, not as hard as we’ve made it for Palestinians, but hard.”
“For 15 months, we’ve been told that we’re just on the verge of absolute victory, but we’ve achieved nothing other than destruction and killing,” Goldberg added. “We’re tired. Don’t misunderstand me – many people would still obliterate Gaza if it guaranteed security – but we’ve been doing our best, and we still don’t have it.”
“Israelis are spent,” he continued. “With luck, those first six weeks should be enough to develop some momentum towards a settlement.”
Counting the costs
Netanyahu, therefore, may be able to capitalise on the public sentiment and even present himself as the one who ended the war and achieved several strategic goals before any new elections, earning himself another stay of political execution.
But for Israeli society, there is a cost to waging war on a scale that rights groups have characterised as genocide besides the captives held in Gaza, the soldiers returning from Gaza and Lebanon in coffins, and Israel’s growing international isolation.
In fact, for many observers, the Israel emerging from the carnage of Gaza is one far removed from the state that existed before the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023, which killed 1,139 people.
Over the ensuing war, the right-wing extremes of Israeli politics have staked a claim to the centre while the reach of the security services has extended beyond the limits many thought previously possible.
In May, a paper produced by two noted Israeli academics, Eugene Kandel and Ron Tzur, suggested that given the divisions produced by the country’s war on Gaza and attempts by Netanyahu’s government to untether itself from judicial oversight, “there is a considerable likelihood that Israel will not be able to exist as a sovereign Jewish state in the coming decades.”
“There’s definitely been a moral corruption within Israel,” said Dr Guy Shalev, the executive director of Physicians for Human Rights Israel, which has documented the denial of medical aid and torture of Palestinians.
“The devaluing of human life, especially Palestinian life, which wasn’t regarded as worth much before the war, has been dramatic,” Shalev said.
“The loss of life on this scale and the government’s disregard of the lives of the [Israeli] hostages eroded what we call in Hebrew, ‘arvut hadadit’, which refers to the sense of mutual responsibility that binds all Jews,” Shalev added. “I think that fundamentally, if Palestinians lives don’t matter, then eventually all lives matter less.”
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