Israel’s Self-Destruction: Netanyahu, the Palestinians, and the price of neglect
Israelis cannot expect stability if they continue to ignore the Palestinians and reject their aspirations, their story, and even their presence. They must reach out to Palestinians and to each other if they want a livable and respectful coexistence
One bright day in April 1956, Moshe Dayan, the one-eyed chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), drove south to Nahal Oz, a recently established kibbutz near the border of the Gaza Strip.
Dayan came to attend the funeral of 21-year-old Roi Rotberg, who had been murdered the previous morning by Palestinians while he was patrolling the fields on horseback.
If Dayan had been speaking in modern-day Israel, he would have used his eulogy largely to blast the terrible cruelty of Rotberg's killers. But as framed in the 1950s, his speech was remarkably sympathetic toward the perpetrators.
"Let us not cast blame on the murderers,'' Dayan said. "For eight years, they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages where they and their fathers dwelt into our estate."
On 7 October 2023, Dayan's age-old warning materialised in the bloodiest way possible. Following a plan masterminded by Yahya Sinwar, a Hamas leader born to a family forced out of Al-Majdal, Palestinian militants invaded Israel at nearly 30 points along the Gazan border.
Having failed to stop the Hamas attack, the IDF has responded with overwhelming force, killing thousands of Palestinians and razing entire Gazan neighbourhoods.
But even as pilots drop bombs and commandos flush out Hamas's tunnels, the Israeli government has not reckoned with the enmity that produced the attack—or what policies might prevent another.
Its silence comes at the behest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has refused to lay out a postwar vision or order. Netanyahu has promised to "destroy Hamas," but beyond military force, he has no strategy for eliminating the group and no clear plan for what would replace it as the de facto government of postwar Gaza.
The war has caught Israel at perhaps its most divided moment in history. In the years leading up to the attack, the country was fractured by Netanyahu's effort to undermine its democratic institutions and turn it into a theocratic, nationalist autocracy.
His bills and reforms provoked widespread protests and dissension that threatened to tear the country apart before the war and will haunt it once the conflict ends.
But whatever happens to the prime minister, Israel is unlikely to have a serious conversation about settling with the Palestinians. Israeli public opinion as a whole has shifted to the right.
The United States is increasingly preoccupied with a crucial presidential election. There will be little energy or motivation to reignite a meaningful peace process in the near future.
Broken promise
After the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995 by a far-right Israeli zealot and a wave of Palestinian terrorist attacks in Israeli cities, Netanyahu managed to defeat Shimon Peres, a key architect of the Oslo peace agreement, by a razor-thin margin in the 1996 prime minister's race.
Three years later, he was toppled by the liberal Ehud Barak, who pledged to continue the Oslo process and solve the Palestinian issue in its entirety.
But Barak failed, as did his successors.
In 2009, Netanyahu returned to power, feeling vindicated. After all, his warnings against territorial concessions to Israel's neighbours had come true.
"Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must support delivery of funds to Gaza, because maintaining separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state," Netanyahu told his party's parliamentary caucus in 2019. It is a statement that has come back to haunt him.
Netanyahu believed he could keep Hamas's capabilities in check through a naval and economic blockade, newly deployed rocket and border defense systems, and periodic military raids on the group's fighters and infrastructure.
This last tactic, dubbed "mowing the grass," became integral to Israeli security doctrine, along with "conflict management" and status quo maintenance.
For over a decade, Netanyahu's strategy appeared to work. The Middle East and North Africa sank into the revolutions and civil wars of the Arab Spring, making the Palestinian cause far less salient.
Instead of worrying about the Palestinians, Israelis began to focus on living the Western dream of prosperity and tranquility.
Internationally, the country was also thriving. Netanyahu withstood the US President Barack Obama's pressure to revive the two-state solution and freeze Israeli settlements in the West Bank, in part by forging an alliance with Republicans.
Under Trump, the United States helped Israel conclude the Abraham Accords, normalising its relations with Bahrain, Morocco, Sudan, and the United Arab Emirates—a prospect that once seemed impossible without an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement.
After winning a surprise reelection in 2015, Netanyahu put together a right-wing coalition to revive his old dream of igniting a conservative revolution.
In 2018, he won passage of a major, controversial law that defined Israel as "the Nation-State of the Jewish People" and declared that Jews had the "unique" right to "exercise self-determination" in its territory. It gave the country's Jewish majority precedence and subordinated its non-Jewish people.
The same year, Netanyahu's coalition collapsed. Israel then sank into a long political crisis, with the country dragged through five elections between 2019 and 2022—each of them a referendum on Netanyahu's rule.
The intensity of the political battle was heightened by a corruption case against the prime minister, leading to his criminal indictment in 2020 and an ongoing trial.
Israel split between the "Bibists" and "Just not Bibists." ("Bibi" is Netanyahu's nickname.)
In the fourth election, in 2021, Netanyahu's rivals finally managed to replace him with a "change government" led by the right-wing Naftali Bennett and the centrist Yair Lapid. For the first time, the coalition included an Arab party.
The "change government" collapsed in 2022 after it failed to prolong obscure legal provisions that allowed West Bank settlers to enjoy civil rights denied their non-Israeli neighbours.
To win back power, Netanyahu reached out in particular to West Bank settlers, a demographic that still saw the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as its raison d'être.
The extremists had two principal demands of Netanyahu. The first, and most obvious, was to further expand Jewish settlements. The second was to establish a stronger Jewish presence on the Temple Mount, the historic site of both the Jewish Temple and the Muslim mosque of al Aqsa in Jerusalem's Old City.
When Netanyahu was first elected in 1996, he opened a wall at an archaeological site in an underground tunnel adjacent to al Aqsa to expose relics from the times of the Second Temple, prompting a violent explosion of Arab protests in Jerusalem.
The second Palestinian intifada in 2000 was similarly sparked by a visit to the Temple Mount by Sharon, then the opposition leader as the head of Netanyahu's party, Likud.
In May 2021, violence erupted again. This time, the main provocateur was Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right politician who has publicly celebrated Jewish terrorists.
After hundreds of demonstrators gathered at al Aqsa, Israeli police raided the mosque compound. As a result, fighting erupted between Arabs and Jews and quickly spread to ethnically mixed towns across Israel.
Hamas used the raid as an excuse to target Jerusalem with rockets, which brought yet more violence in Israel and another round of Israeli reprisals in Gaza.
Bibi's coup
In Israel's November 2022 election, Netanyahu won back power. His coalition captured 64 of the Israeli parliament's 120 seats, a landslide by recent standards.
The key figures in the new government were Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of a nationalist religious party representing West Bank settlers, and Ben-Gvir.
Working with the ultra-Orthodox parties, Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir devised a blueprint for an autocratic and theocratic Israel.
Smotrich became minister of finance and was put in charge of the West Bank, where he initiated a massive programme to expand Jewish settlements. Ben-Gvir was named national security minister, in control of police and prisons.
He used his power to encourage more Jews to visit the Temple Mount (al Aqsa). Between January and October of 2023, about 50,000 Jews toured it—more than in any other equivalent period on record. (In 2022, there were 35,000 Jewish visitors on the Mount.)
Netanyahu's radical new government stirred outrage among Israeli liberals and centrists. But even though humiliating Palestinians was central to their agenda, these critics continued to ignore the fate of the occupied territories and al Aqsa when denouncing the cabinet.
Instead, they focused largely on Netanyahu's judicial reforms. Announced in January 2023, these proposed laws would curb the independence of Israel's Supreme Court—the custodian of civil and human rights in a country that lacks a formal constitution—and dismantle the legal advisory system that provides checks and balances on executive power.
If they had been enacted, the bills would have made it much easier for Netanyahu and his partners to build an autocracy and might even have spared him from his corruption trial.
The judicial reform bills were, without doubt, extraordinarily dangerous. They rightfully prompted an enormous wave of protests, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis demonstrating every week.
But in confronting this coup, Netanyahu's opponents again acted as if the occupation were an unrelated issue. Even though the laws were drafted partly to weaken whatever legal protection the Israeli Supreme Court would give Palestinians, demonstrators shied away from mentioning the occupation or the defunct peace process out of fear of being smeared as unpatriotic.
In fact, the organisers worked to sideline Israel's anti-occupation protesters to avoid having images of Palestinian flags appear in the demonstrations.
This tactic succeeded, ensuring that the protest movement was not "tainted" by the Palestinian cause: Israeli Arabs, who make up around 20 percent of the country's population, largely refrained from joining the demonstrations.
But this made it harder for the movement to succeed. Given Israel's demographics, centre-left Jews need to partner with the country's Arabs if they ever want to form a government. By delegitimising Israeli Arabs' concerns, the demonstrators played right into Netanyahu's strategy.
After the bang
Netanyahu and his supporters have tried to shift blame for 7 October away from him. The prime minister, they argue, was misled by security and intelligence chiefs who failed to update him on a last-minute alert that something suspicious was happening in Gaza (although even these red flags were interpreted as indications of a small attack, or simply noise).
But military and intelligence incompetence, dismal as it was, cannot shield the prime minister from culpability—and not only because, as head of the government, Netanyahu bears ultimate responsibility for what happens in Israel.
The Israeli public has not absolved Netanyahu of responsibility for 7 October. The prime minister's party has plummeted in the polls, and his approval rating has tanked as well, although the government maintains a parliamentary majority.
The country's desire for change is expressed in more than just public opinion surveys. The prime minister's party has plummeted in the polls, and his approval rating has tanked as well, although the government maintains a parliamentary majority.
Militarism is back across the aisle. Many Israelis have armed themselves with handguns and assault rifles, aided by Ben-Gvir's campaign to ease the regulation of private small arms. After decades of gradual decline, the defense budget is expected to rise by roughly 50 percent.
Yet these changes, although understandable, are accelerations, not shifts.
Israel is still following the same path that Netanyahu has guided it down for years. Its identity is now less liberal and egalitarian, more ethnonationalist and militaristic.
The state's Arab minority, which overwhelmingly supported a quick cease-fire and prisoner exchange, has been repeatedly forbidden by the police to carry out public protests.
Many liberal Israeli Jews, meanwhile, feel betrayed by Western counterparts who, in their view, have sided with Hamas. And just as in prewar times, almost no Israeli Jews are thinking about how the Palestinian conflict might be solved peacefully.
The prime minister's far-right buddies want to depopulate Gaza and exile its Palestinians to other countries, creating a second nakba that would leave the land open to new Jewish settlements.
If past is precedent, the country is not entirely hopeless. History suggests there is a chance that progressivism might come back and conservatives might lose influence.
The Yom Kippur War of 1973 eventually led to peace with Egypt; the first intifada, beginning in 1987, led to the Oslo accords and peace with Jordan; and the second intifada, erupting in 2000, ended with the unilateral pullout from Gaza.
But the chances that this dynamic will recur are dim.
Israelis cannot expect stability if they continue to ignore the Palestinians and reject their aspirations, their story, and even their presence.
This is the lesson the country should have learned from Dayan's age-old warning. Israel must reach out to Palestinians and to each other if they want a livable and respectful coexistence.
Aluf Benn is the Editor-in-Chief of Haaretz. This is an abridged version of an article published on Foreign Affairs.