This cleavage between Netanyahu and the hard right highlights an overlooked pattern in the international debate about the war in Gaza: Netanyahu has often steered Israel in a more moderate direction since Hamas’s Oct. 7 rampage. He has followed the lead of the Biden administration more than right-wing Israeli opinion. Indeed, some of Netanyahu’s moderate impulses arguably helped create the conditions for the Hamas attack in the first place. There are lessons here for Washington as it tries to influence Israeli strategy in the future.
The debate in the West is whether Israel’s response to Hamas’s massacres has been excessive. But the debate in Israel has more often been whether the response is sufficient. Israeli military planners initially foresaw a large-scale ground offensive across the entire Gaza Strip, but Netanyahu ultimately approved a smaller operation focusing first on Gaza’s north. The prime minister delayed the invasion for nearly three weeks after the Hamas attack as the Biden administration persuaded it to adopt more-tailored plans for its ground war.
Then there’s Israel’s border with Lebanon. The Wall Street Journal is the latest outlet to describe disagreement in Israel over whether it should try to take out Hezbollah, the more-powerful Iranian backed militia to Israel’s north. The Israeli military is responding to the steady tempo of Hezbollah attacks, but Netanyahu seems to be restraining Yoav Gallant, his defense minister. Gallant reportedly wanted to open a full-blown second front in the war, taking on Hezbollah and Hamas simultaneously.
Instead, for now, Israel under Netanyahu is focusing its military attention on Hamas in Gaza. This focus aligns with the preferences of the Biden administration, which wants to avoid a wider regional war that could draw in the United States.
Israel’s electorate will at some point probably weigh Netanyahu’s culpability for the Oct. 7 attacks, and voters are unlikely to be forgiving. Recent polls show Netanyahu’s electoral support cratering. After all, during his long tenure, the Israeli public grew more polarized and Hamas consolidated its power in the Gaza Strip, culminating in the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
But Netanyahu’s posture toward Hamas during those years was defined, once again, by moderation relative to Israel’s right wing. Middle East scholar Martin Kramer described Netanyahu’s evolution on Hamas from hawkishness to accommodation in an essay published last week titled “How Hamas deterred Netanyahu.”
Kramer highlights a passage from Netanyahu’s 2022 memoir in which he described resisting pressure from his right to topple Hamas in 2014. “That could only be done with the wholesale destruction of Gaza, with tens of thousands of civilian deaths,” Netanyahu wrote. “After destroying the Hamas regime, Israel would have to govern two million Gazans for an indefinite period. I had no intention of doing that, especially since I had my gaze fixed on Iran, a much greater threat.”
The tragedy of Netanyahu is that this view might have been prescient. The humanitarian costs of Israel’s war in Gaza are immense, and the endgame is still hazy. But now it’s a war of necessity, not a war of choice. As Israelis across the political spectrum see it, continued Hamas rule on Israel’s border would pose an intolerable threat to the state. That doesn’t invalidate Netanyahu’s earlier skepticism about regime change in Gaza: The United States and Europe would never have supported an Israeli war to remove Hamas if not for the group’s Oct. 7 atrocities. (Indeed, they might at some point pull support for the war despite Oct. 7.)
Many have argued that Netanyahu exploited Hamas’s control over Gaza to weaken the more-moderate Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. He reportedly defended allowing Qatari funds to enter Gaza to his Likud Party in 2019 by explaining that divided governance between Gaza and the West Bank would hobble the prospects of a Palestinian state. Israel’s longest-serving prime minister has certainly been no friend of the two-state peace process, and Hamas’s rule in Gaza was at times a useful foil.
The critique of Netanyahu’s “symbiotic” relationship with Hamas has validity, but it’s a critique from the right as much as from the center. Tightening the squeeze on Gaza economically in the 2010s would hardly have been seen as a liberal, humanitarian policy. If Hamas was going to rule the enclave — and if Israel couldn’t remove it by force of arms without becoming an international pariah — then the pragmatic path was to allow resources into the enclave and hope the threat could be mitigated.
Israel failed to do so in spectacular fashion, and the current war is the result. But the United States needs to see Israel clearly during the war and in its aftermath. Netanyahu’s right-wing reputation and decadal dominance of Israeli politics could create the illusion that he is the principal obstacle to Israeli strategic moderation, and that more dovish policy is likely after he departs the scene.
In fact, while Netanyahu’s rule has reflected Israel’s hawkish impulses, it has also managed and contained them. And his subtle alignment with the Biden administration on key points in the war should underscore to Israel’s American critics that a tight embrace might be more effective than a cold shoulder if they want to influence and restrain the Jewish state.
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