If you are keeping score at home, you have surely noticed that the two most important defense officials in Benjamin Netanyahu’s war cabinet — Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and the former military chief of staff Benny Gantz — warned last week that Netanyahu is leading Israel into a disastrous abyss by refusing to present any plan for non-Hamas Palestinians to govern Gaza and appears to be contemplating a long-term Israeli military occupation of Gaza instead. Gantz said he would leave the government if there was no plan by June 8.
Here are the stakes for America in what these ministers are saying: Netanyahu has become a radical actor, undermining key U.S. interests and Arab allies, and becoming the gift that keeps on giving for Iran.
Just look at the policy choices Netanyahu has made and tell me with a straight face that he has not let Israel be completely outmaneuvered by Iran. Using its allies Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran has shrunk Israel since Oct. 7 — forcing tens of thousands of Israelis off Israel’s western and northern borders and isolating the country on the world stage over Gaza — while Iran has become a threshold nuclear power and the biggest imperialist force in the region (given that it effectively controls four Arab states) and is less isolated than it has been in years. All of this has happened on Bibi’s watch.
But now Netanyahu is busy doing something even more dangerous for Israel’s future — and for America. He is relentlessly pounding into the Israeli public’s mind-set that there is no difference between the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Hamas, which is dedicated to wiping the Jewish state off the map and replacing it with an Islamic one, and the secular, Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, which embraced the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s calling for a two-state solution and collaborated with Israel for three decades to limit violence in the West Bank.
The Palestinian Authority has a million flaws, some created or exacerbated by violent Israeli settlers. But there is a reason Netanyahu panicked every time its leader, Mahmoud Abbas, would say, in effect: “OK, Bibi, you want to control the West Bank all by yourself? Here are the keys.” It’s because Netanyahu knows very well how much the Palestinian Authority cooperates with the Israeli Army and the Shin Bet security service to keep a lid on the West Bank — and how much it would cost Israel in money, soldiers and legitimacy if Israel had to alone run West Bank Palestinian security, health, banking, education.
And yet, because Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners want to annex Gaza — and their votes can keep him in office and out of jail if he is convicted in his corruption trials — Bibi is singing their line that Hamas and Fatah are the same.
(This is the most important dynamic going on now, and the decision by the International Criminal Court to seek arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant and the leaders of Hamas on charges of war crimes only strengthens Bibi at home and deflects attention from this.)
Worse, too many Israelis are buying Netanyahu’s nonsensical argument, and too few opposition leaders — including Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot — are standing up and clearly rejecting it. This is a looming disaster: Bibi is talking Israelis out of having any legitimate Palestinian alternative to Hamas rule. That’s the implication of claiming Hamas and Fatah are the same.
And Netanyahu is doing all of this at the direction of the Jewish supremacist ministers in his cabinet to whom he has given unprecedented powers — finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
“We must return to Gaza now! We are coming home to the Holy Land!” Ben-Gvir said during an Israeli Independence Day march last week, without rebuke from Netanyahu. “We must encourage emigration. Encourage the voluntary emigration of the residents of Gaza.”
He is not a lone voice. Netanyahu’s incoming military secretary has reportedly drawn up his own plan — without input from the defense minister or the army chief of staff — for Israel to permanently govern Gaza with a military administration.
Gallant — the former head of Israel’s equivalent of the Navy SEALs and the only person of political courage and gravitas in Netanyahu’s Likud party leadership — became so alarmed that last week, without permission of the prime minister, he delivered a speech saying that since October he has been asking Netanyahu for a plan for who will rule Gaza once Hamas is dismantled, but has “received no response.”
Without a plan, Gallant added, “only two negative options remain: Hamas’s rule in Gaza or Israeli military rule in Gaza. … The ‘day after Hamas’ will only be achieved with Palestinian entities taking control of Gaza, accompanied by international actors, establishing a governing alternative to Hamas’s rule.”
Although Gallant did not mention Palestinian Authority participation, he did not rule it out. But Netanyahu has made his position clear: “Gaza will be neither Hamastan nor Fatahstan,” as he put it this winter. Fatah is President Abbas’s party.
Netanyahu’s now-constant repetition of the line that the Palestinian Authority is the same as Hamas is leading some to ask whether we are misreading Netanyahu, said Victor Friedman (no relation), an Israeli organizational psychologist.
“Netanyahu’s acquiescence to the extreme right, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, has generally been seen as motivated out of his need to keep his coalition together and himself out of jail,” Friedman told me. “Now it seems that he has willingly sold his soul to the extreme right. One explanation is that the extreme religious right projects a Messianic image onto him that corresponds with his own sense of having been called to save Israel and the Jewish people. He has a plan for the day after and it’s very clear to anyone who listens: ‘Total victory’ — and eventually the return of Jewish settlement there. Israel is on the way to reoccupying Gaza.”
If that happens, Israel will become an international pariah and Jewish institutions everywhere will be torn between Jews who will feel the need to defend Israel — right or wrong — and those who, with their kids, will find it indefensible.
Alas, Netanyahu has not driven Israel into its current dead end alone. For years his settlement project and Iran policies were given cover by AIPAC, America’s pro-Israel lobby; the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations; the American Jewish Committee; and knee-jerk supporters in both the Republican and Democratic Parties.
And unfortunately, I don’t think President Biden fully understands his “old friend” Bibi, whose government is the first to ever formally declare annexation of the West Bank as its goal and actually tried to strip the Supreme Court of its power to stop it.
My rule: Never listen to what Bibi tells you in private in English. Only watch what he says in public in Hebrew. For months, the Biden team has beseeched Netanyahu to articulate a post-Gaza vision that would involve Palestinian and Arab control over Gaza and a long-term pathway to demilitarized Palestinian statehood — so that the United States is not facilitating an Israeli occupation of Gaza, along with the West Bank — and to pave the way for a U.S.-Saudi security pact that could also produce normalized relations between Israel and the Saudis.
Netanyahu has said no to all of it. He did, though, show his gratitude to Biden by having his parliamentary majority give Elise Stefanik, a hack Republican congresswoman with no foreign policy standing whatsoever — and a person groveling to become Donald Trump’s vice president — the extraordinary honor of giving an address Sunday in the Knesset, where she slammed the U.S. president and praised Trump.
And who is this great military genius they are all indulging? Let’s see: In 2015, the Obama team concluded a nuclear deal with Iran that imposed inspections and restrictions on Iran — slashing its stock of enriched uranium to a small amount enriched to up to 3.67 percent purity, far from the roughly 90 percent purity needed for a bomb. So even if Iran tried to break out, it would need at least a year to produce enough fissile material for a bomb, plenty of time to stop it. Netanyahu bitterly opposed the deal, even though several top Israeli military and intelligence officials favored it, which Bibi kept hidden from the Israeli and U.S. publics.
After Trump came to power Netanyahu lobbied him hard to tear up the deal, which Trump recklessly did in May 2018. Netanyahu was apparently counting on the fact that if Iran broke out of the deal and began enriching toward a bomb, Trump would blow up Iran’s nuclear facilities. Iran broke out, but neither Trump nor Biden was prepared to launch an attack on Iran.
The result? As Reuters reported last month, “Iran is now enriching uranium to up to 60 percent purity and has enough material enriched to that level, if enriched further, for two nuclear weapons, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s theoretical definition. That means Iran’s so-called breakout time — the time it would need to produce enough weapons-grade uranium for a nuclear bomb — is close to zero, likely a matter of weeks or days.”
This is one of the greatest U.S.-Israeli national security fiascos of all time.
And over the past decade it was Netanyahu — “Mr. Security” — who facilitated the transfer of over $1 billion from Qatar to Hamas, to build it up in Gaza, and used his voice to delegitimize the Palestinian Authority. This way he could tell the world Israel has no Palestinian partner and therefore it must occupy the West Bank forever.
And now he is peddling to Israelis the fantasy that there are some perfect Palestinians who will step forward to run Gaza on Israel’s behalf and defy the only two Palestinian governing entities with any legitimacy — Hamas and Fatah. If you believe that, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you in Gaza. This will lead Israel, America’s primary Middle East ally, into a muddling, endlessly draining conflict.
Hamas is not the Palestinian Authority. Hamas is a mass-murdering, Islamist, militant entity that has done more damage to Palestinians than any other organization. If Israel were to commit to working with a reforming Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza, freeze settlements and commit to developing a partnership with it for a Palestinian state one day, it would change everything. It would give Israel the global legitimacy to indeed dismantle Hamas, organize a Palestinian/Arab force that would govern Gaza so that neither Israel nor Hamas would and open the way for normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia.
None of this would be easy or come with any assurance of success for the best-intended Israeli prime minister. But without at least an attempt — and another and another — Israel’s long-term survival is in peril. Unfortunately, Israel is led today by a man who is interested only in his short-term survival. And in that he is succeeding.
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