Why Netanyahu doesn’t want to scale back war with Hamas
Israel’s war with Hamas has now passed the 100day mark and shows no signs of ending any time soon. President Biden has proved to be a reliable friend of Israel, and the United States is supplying Israel with military aid. But Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu has not proved to be a reliable friend. He resists obliging the American president’s calls for restraint in what Biden calls Israel’s “indiscriminate” bombing of Gaza that has already caused more than 24,000 Palestinian deaths. The Israeli prime minister also rejects a path toward statehood for the Palestinians, a path that Biden endorses.
One of the reasons that Netanyahu doesn’t want to scale back the war with Hamas is that the conflict could also be called Netanyahu’s War of Political Survival. Having presided over the worst intelligence failure in Israeli history, a failure that led to the Oct. 7 Hamas atrocities in which 1,200 people in Israel were killed and 230 were kidnapped, Netanyahu’s only hope is to emerge from the war looking like an indomitable war leader. He needs a long campaign to help make people forget and overlook his failures.
The obvious answer to Israel’s security problem is to grant the Palestinians a state of their own on the West Bank and Gaza
— the so-called two-state solution. It would not be an immediate cure-all. Too much bitterness has built up during the half century of Israeli occupation. But it would remove the fuel supply of conflict, and in the long run the embers of hostility toward Israel would start to burn out and die.
But Netanyahu and the most nationalistic, religious-based, and right-wing government in Israel’s history pride themselves on resisting international pressure for a two-state solution. Netanyahu’s government is bent on a policy of annexation, and Israeli settlers continue to harass and drive Palestinians out of their homes in the occupied territories. The indiscriminate killing of so many Palestinians in the war with Gaza suggests a policy of revenge.
However, South Africa’s recent charge of genocide against Israel in the World Court is a stretch. South Africa would be on firmer ground charging Israel with collective punishment, which is also against the Geneva Conventions governing the rules of war.
As for Biden, Netanyahu continues to make a fool out of him. Indeed, it seems ridiculous to urge restraint on Israel while at the same time providing Israel with the most lethal shells and bombs for it to kill more people in Gaza. The United States should make its military aid to Israel conditional if it wants to have any say over how, why, and on whom its bombs are dropped.
As it is now, the wholesale slaughter in the bombing war in Gaza is simply going to produce another generation of hatred.
Over the decades, Israel’s traditional answer to its problems with the Palestinians is to use force and more force, driving Palestinians from their land. It has not worked and will not bring about a lasting peace.
It would appear that if slavery was the original sin of the United States, then the state of Israel’s original sin has been its treatment of the Palestinians.