Time running out for Israel’s Netanyahu

President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union address on Thursday that the U.S. military will build a temporary Mediterranean port in Gaza. The new pier will facilitate the delivery of American humanitarian aid to Gaza, which has already begun with supplies being dropped from the air by parachute.

Metaphorically and politically, Biden’s pier might be one that he hopes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walks off into the sea — or at least the setting sun.

For nearly 30 years, Netanyahu has regarded himself as singularly — if not exclusively — capable of preserving Israeli security and prosperity. Many Israelis agreed. For 16 of the 28 years since his first election victory in 1996, he has been prime minister. No Israeli PM has been in office longer.

In recent years, Netanyahu has been consumed with staying in power and staying out of jail — the former considered by many to be his principal means of achieving the latter.

He has outlasted many who predicted his exit, but now the end has come. Whether Israel prospers in a new Middle East will depend in large part upon how he handles this last phase of his premiership.

The beginning of the end was the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. Netanyahu insists that the catastrophic failure of the Israeli intelligence apparatus, security services and military forces was not his fault. Nothing ever is. But the handwriting is on the wall.

The Hamas terror attacks were the greatest security breach since the Yom Kippur War exactly 50 years earlier. The prime minister at the time, Golda Meir, was gone within nine months. Netanyahu — the security prime minister who did not secure the country — will go as soon as Israelis decide that the immediate war emergency is over. Netanyahu thus has an interest in prolonging the war. It is a terrible thing to suggest that a leader might prolong a war for his own political advantage. Netanyahu would deny it. He always does.

In any case, Israel’s leadership, having seen the beginning of the end, is rather impatient for the end of the end.

Netanyahu’s plausible successor, Benny Gantz, who is riding high in polls, was in Washington this week. He came to repair fractured relations with the Biden administration and to humiliate Netanyahu.

Netanyahu co-operated in the last, ordering the Israeli embassy in Washington to take no part in Gantz’s trip. So Gantz was welcomed to the White House and Netanyahu appeared simultaneously petulant and impotent.

Consider who the embassy was forbidden to assist. Gantz is a former Israeli defence chief, a former defence minister and a former “alternate prime minister” in a previous coalition led by Netanyahu.

After the Hamas attacks, Gantz’s National Unity party joined Netanyahu’s Likud Party in a unity government. Gantz is a minister in the current war cabinet.

Whatever Netanyahu’s umbrage at Gantz’s trip, he was received by the vice-president, secretary of state, secretary of defence and national security adviser. Meetings were held at the White House. Out of deference to protocol, Gantz did not get a photo with Biden in the Oval Office, but the comments of Kamala Harris made it clear that Netanyahu is offside even with his closest ally.

Much depends upon how Netanyahu chooses to manage this last phase of his premiership. For 30 years he has argued that Israel does not need to make a lasting peace with the Palestinians and does not need to accept a Palestinian state. His vision is for a new Middle East in which Israel and the major Arab states form an alliance, backed by the U.S., against the arc of terror supported by Tehran.

From 2020 to 2023, with the Abraham Accords, which bypassed entirely the Palestinian question, Netanyahu’s vision prevailed. Indeed, at the UN last September, Netanyahu boasted that an American-israeli-saudi accord was not far off.

If, as is plausible, the Hamas attacks were an attempt by Iran to strangle this new Middle East in its cradle, the strategic priority for Netanyahu — for Israel — is to not let the immediacy of the Gaza war derail the larger rapprochement with Saudi Arabia.

Five months into the war, it is notable that Saudi Arabia has been largely mute in any criticism of Israel.

The Saudis have their eyes on the larger prize, and the larger Iranian threat. Friends of Israel should do the same.

Five months into the war, Netanyahu has pulverized much of Gaza without losing significant allies and having to endure only moderate criticism. He has massively diminished the capacity of Hamas to inflict harm on Israel.

He has reoccupied Gaza while maintaining sufficient political support in Israel. The longtime thorn in Israel’s side, UNRWA, has been defunded by its largest donor, the U.S., and will never return to the influence it had for decades. And while the American port in Gaza will annoy Netanyahu, who else would he prefer to deliver humanitarian aid to suffering Palestinians?

Having achieved all that after the failure of last October, Netanyahu can choose to stand increasingly alone in his pulverization strategy. Or he can accept the temporary ceasefire that the Americans pressed upon Gantz and gain the return of some of the Israeli hostages. He needs, in the time left in his premiership, to claim victory and move on to the larger agenda of extending the Abraham Accords.

That his would-be successor was so well-received in Washington this week suggests that time is running out.