How on earth did Israel get to this point, and how can it escape? These two questions seem unavoidable after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave his response to months of criticism and outrage over his conduct of the war in Gaza. It was, in a nutshell, more war.
It is important to recall that Israel experienced a moment of unprecedented global support and sympathy less than two years ago — after Hamas fighters swarmed into the country on Oct. 7, 2023, seizing 250 hostages and slaughtering 1,200 people with a savagery so abhorrent it seemed it would do permanent damage to the Palestinian cause.
Today, Israel has rarely been as isolated or as reviled by its critics. Gaza is all but razed to the ground. Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed, and the provision of food and medicine has been weaponized, threatening an exponential increase in fatalities if left unremedied. An international court is investigating genocide allegations and loyal allies have distanced themselves, offering the recognition of Palestinian statehood that they have long resisted.
Illustration: Mountain People
Even these friends of Israel now fear the reason Netanyahu has consistently refused to spell out a “day after plan” for Gaza is that destruction is his endgame, creating conditions for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from this small strip of coastland and for its settlement by Jewish Israelis. Hamas, though defeated militarily, is sensing a political victory.
This is the context from which to view Netanyahu’s decision to order the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to take Gaza City. It is being done against the advice of Israeli Chief of the General Staff Eyal Zamir. Netanyahu says what would amount to Gaza’s full occupation should be temporary, with Arab forces replacing Israeli troops once Hamas’ last holdouts have been destroyed, and yet he also set goals for the new operation that ignore the requirements Arab nations have set for getting involved.
As a result, the plan has no obvious exit strategy and few supporters. The families of the remaining hostages fear it would prove a death sentence for their loved ones. Allies have decried the certain humanitarian costs, with Germany suspending arms exports that Israel could use in Gaza. Even Belazel Smotrich, Netanyahu’s hardline finance minister was unhappy. In a blistering video address, he denounced the plan’s failure to close the door on negotiations with Hamas. For him, the plan is not tough enough.
The implications for Gaza and its residents are appalling. At a minimum, the operation would require the further mass displacement of a population that is malnourished and weak. It would also be harsh for the Israeli soldiers who would have to police a deeply resentful population. Unrecognized by Netanyahu and his supporters, this indefinite occupation would also pose a long-term danger to the future of Israel.
This is why, last week, a group of more than 550 former Israeli generals and intelligence chiefs wrote an open letter to US President Donald Trump, asking him to force their government to end the war. It had ceased long ago to serve any military purpose, they said.
Israel’s reliance on force alone to deal with others in the region — from the Palestinians, to Iran, Lebanon and Syria — is fast eroding support from critical allies in the Middle East, Europe and even the US. It risks a future where 10 million Israelis (more than 2 million of whom are ethnically Arab) are left alone to face a much larger force of hostile neighbors.
“I am very concerned,” former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert told me in a phone conversation last week. “Even in this war, let’s face it, if the Americans, France, Saudi Arabia and some others hadn’t helped with defending Israel from the Iranian ballistic missiles, everything could have been different.”
This is not to deny the remarkable military success Israel has had over the past year, first against Hezbollah, the Tehran-backed Shiite militia in Lebanon, and then Iran itself. Those undoubted victories have established Israel as, by far, the region’s dominant military power. For now, at least, the country’s geopolitical position has improved dramatically. Yet this balance of forces can change.
Just ask Armenians, who, confident in their military superiority after winning a war with Azerbaijan over 30 years ago, were later overtaken. In 2023, Nagorno-Karabakh, the territory they had fought to secure, was emptied of Armenians who left “voluntarily,” as the Azeris insist, after Armenian defenses collapsed and a blockade halted both food and military supplies. The Trump-brokered settlement signed on Friday is unlikely to bring them back.
Olmert, Netanyahu’s predecessor, is the first to acknowledge his bias against a career-long political opponent he describes as empty of all principles to serve himself. However, his views on Gaza are increasingly supported by others. As Lawrence Freedman, the emeritus professor of war studies at the UK’s King’s College, put it in a post last week, permanent occupation of Gaza amounts to permanent war, and for Israel “a forever war means constant insecurity and increasing isolation.”
So, why insist? The short answer is that the same members of Netanyahu’s Cabinet who are calling for the “voluntary” departure of Palestinians from Gaza’s rubble and its resettlement — Smotrich and Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir — have threatened to collapse the government if Netanyahu orders troops out. Given the fraud trials Netanyahu faces, that is something he would do much to avoid.
However, there is more to it. Netanyahu has been consistent throughout his career on one thing, namely his visceral opposition to the creation of a Palestinian state on lands he considers rightfully part of Israel. It is why he vehemently opposed the 2005 decision to withdraw Israeli troops and settlers from Gaza, a plan that Olmert championed. It is also why, once in power, he focused on undermining the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank while tolerating Hamas in Gaza and allowing Qatar to fund it. The logic was that so long as a terrorist organization committed to Israel’s destruction ran Gaza, he could not be asked to negotiate a future Palestine.
The strategy worked for him — until Oct. 7, 2023, when his policy of coddling Hamas ended in catastrophe. Even today, as he orders yet another final attempt to eradicate Hamas, Netanyahu continues to insist that the PA cannot be involved in any plan to replace it. However, if not a reformed PA, as proposed in Arab proposals for taking responsibility for Gaza’s reconstruction, then who?
Netanyahu has dismissed suggestions that he is influenced by the radical Zionist views of his late father, Benzion. Yet after nearly two years of war in Gaza, the link is hard to avoid. Netanyahu senior was an academic, a historian of the Spanish Inquisition, and a politically active opponent of efforts to create a Palestinian state — including the original 1947 UN partition that created Israel.
Before passing away in 2012, he made it clear in writings and interviews that he saw Arabs (and not just Palestinians, whose existence as a distinct nation he denied) as enemies by nature and incapable of compromise, leaving “no solution but force” for dealing with them. He also believed Israel must include all of its Biblical territories. Asked why his son sometimes sounded less radical, he said this was a political necessity, but that their underlying views were the same.
As my colleague at Bloomberg News, Ethan Bronner, has explained, Benjamin Netanyahu is not an aberration. Israel is changing in ways that are challenging its image as an outpost of secular, liberal democracy in the Middle East. The approach of the country’s longest-serving prime minister, as he seeks to weaken independent institutions that constrain his rule, fits a populist trend across the West. However, Israel’s geography creates a very different context. Its domestic drivers are increasingly similar to those of other countries in the Middle East.
Israel’s ruling coalition reflects this deep shift in Israeli society: Ultra-religious Jews, settlers and others who share the Netanyahu family’s absolutist ideas on Arabs and Israel’s God-given right to territorial expansion have grown in numbers and political influence. The Haredim, unlike more secular Jews, have been exempt from military conscription, receive a religious education and often do not work, living on subsidies. They remain a minority voice, but one that is growing fast due to their high birthrate. They are the antithesis of Israel’s envisioned future as a “start-up nation” created by a tech-savvy generation of secular, nightclubbing entrepreneurs.
Benjamin Netanyahu is an extraordinary communicator and a shrewd politician. He knows that when polls say an overwhelming majority of Israelis want a ceasefire in Gaza, it is a conditioned view. They want a ceasefire to get the hostages out, but would be ready to restart the war after that.
“He does more surveys than I do,” said Tamar Hermann, academic director of the Israel Democracy Institute’s Viterbi Family Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research.
Benjamin Netanyahu would not have defied the military to double down on war, had he not known he could sell the idea to enough of the voting public, she said.
The same surveys say most Jewish Israelis believe their troops are doing all they can to avoid harming Gaza’s Palestinians — much as 90 percent of Palestinians, when polled, deny Hamas’ responsibility for atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023. Little support remains for a two-state solution on either side. When asked if Palestinians should evacuate Gaza, a majority of Jewish Israelis agree.
That last finding was a fringe view before the horrors of Oct. 7. In fact, when Hermann and her colleagues read the claim, first made by a pair of US-based academics, they were skeptical. They ran their own poll on the question, only to confirm the outcome, even if the majority was smaller.
“I find the answer very painful,” she said, even though the question did not stipulate a use of force.
“People just want to see their enemies disappear,” she added.
That is especially true in Gaza, Hermann said. Not just because many Israelis feel it is the place where they gave Palestinians something close to a state, only for them to elect Hamas to power and turn it into a fortified base for attacks on Israel. Gaza also has a Biblical presence, associated with the Philistines, the archetypal enemy of the Israelites.
Hermann said me that Gaza City is built where Samson was taken and killed after his capture.
None of this makes Israelis or Palestinians wicked, but rather human and currently led by people willing to commit or order crimes in their name. The “voluntary” exodus of Palestinians from Gaza that Ben-Gvir and Smotrich openly propose is thinly disguised ethnic cleansing. The term was coined during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s to describe Serbian plans for clearing non-Serb populations from territories it wanted to carve away from its neighbors. It is not itself a prosecutable offense, even if it can involve actions — at worst, genocide — that are. It is what the international community, at the post-Cold War peak of the so-called liberal world order, intervened in former Yugoslavia to prevent. It is also more common than we like to recognize.
It is taking place in occupied areas of Ukraine right now. It was done in Georgia twice, in Abkhazia in 1992 and in South Ossetia in 2008; and on the territory of today’s Turkey, against Armenians, in 1915, to name just a handful of modern examples.
For the victor, this brutal strategy often works. That is far less likely in the Holy Land, where three religions claim the territory as sacred. Enemies do not just disappear here. A victory for the likes of Ben-Gvir in asserting what he considers to be Israel’s God-given right to the land would simply bring war later.
“Ben-Gvir and [Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei would make great partners,” Olmert told me. “Why? Because they have the same source of belief. It’s: God told us.”
What can realistically be done to change this course?
The retired officers of Commanders For Israel’s Security were correct in addressing their letter to Trump, as the only person capable of forcing Benjamin Netanyahu’s hand. The US president has to be involved, and not by endorsing Gaza’s further occupation or enabling absurd plans for clearing Gaza to build a new Trumpian Riviera on its beaches. He needs to press Benjamin Netanyahu to end the war, and allow international aid organizations to surge food and medical supplies in.
The makings of a deal are already in place. Trump wants to keep both Israel and the Gulf states happy, and the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and others have made clear what they need to see to help. They want a commitment from Israel to a two-state solution, which at this point means putting an end to the dreams of a Palestinian-free Gaza that at least some in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government have. They need for the PA to take over from Hamas.
What they are willing to offer is normalization with Israel and that they would assume the burden of reconstruction, at least temporarily, while an international force polices Gaza. The plan has clear flaws, including the lack of a hard and fast plan for dealing with Hamas and its weapons, but it is a good place to start.
For this process to have a realistic chance, Israel’s opposition needs to play a role. They should cut a deal in which they commit not to topple the government if Benjamin Netanyahu ends the war, even if the extremists in his Cabinet walk away and leave him without a Knesset majority. As part of the deal, they would set a date for elections that would give Benjamin Netanyahu reason to hope he can turn around his electoral fortunes in time to win. It would be up to them to beat him.
So far, the US administration is signaling that it supports Israel in doing whatever the country feels it must to crush Hamas. This is a mistake, because there is no single Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right coalition are ascendant after Oct. 7’s atrocities, but this is a deeply divided society. If even the IDF’s top commanders, who are no doves, think that continuing the war is driving the country toward a dangerous future isolation, then it probably is.
Marc Champion is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Europe, Russia and the Middle East. He was previously Istanbul bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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