Has Israel indeed sobered up from the doctrine of the Netanyahu era? The Israel Defense Forces announced on Thursday that a battalion commander in the Armored Corps, Lt. Col. Salman Habaka, a Druze, had been killed in battle in the Gaza Strip. He was survived by his parents, his wife and a 1-year-old son.
He showed up on the day the massacre occurred and fought at . In a video he made, he called for national unity, because “This is a time to get together and lead on to victory.” An Israeli flag will drape his coffin. Millions of Israelis will mourn him and television channels will talk of his heroism.
But will this lead to a collective outcry demanding that the disgrace of the Nation-State Law be removed from Israel’s lawbooks? If not, this nation isn’t fit to look his son Imad in the face.
The Israeli public diplomacy slogan “Hamas is ISIS” implies a qualitative distinction between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. If, under Netanyahu’s doctrine, Israel bolstered Hamas and weakened the PA, abandoning this doctrine cannot end with destroying Hamas; it also requires changing our approach to the Palestinian Authority – that is, bolstering it to prevent a disaster.
But the government isn’t doing that. Effectively, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is waging a war against the government’s extremist wings and their donkey, Netanyahu. They are using the war against Hamas and the shock the country hasn’t yet recovered from to destroy the PA and set the West Bank on fire. For them, this war is an opportunity to “cancel the Oslo Accords,” while at the same time reduce the Arab presence in the West Bank.
If there’s a litmus test for Israel’s delusional political situation, it’s the fact that time after time, the defense minister has been forced to mobilize the public to help him block the crazies who are holding the wheel. And let’s recall that I’m talking about Gallant!
How do we hope to persuade the world that Hamas is ISIS when the government includes people who see the PA as Nazis? And there’s nothing better than listening to the settlers’ representative in the media, Amit Segal, to know what and how they think. In their view, all Palestinians are on the Nazi spectrum. That’s what he tells the public day in and day out, so that nobody will dare translate our sobering up from the doctrine into resuming negotiations with the PA and bolstering our relationship with it.
The tragedy is that few people are willing to stand up to him. One of them is former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who said on his program, “Amit, you’re making yourself ridiculous when you try to go back 18 years. We are facing a reality of abandonment and lack of management, but you’re comparing those crazy murderers from Hamas to the head of the Palestinian Authority, when at this very moment, his people are cooperating with our security forces.”
But this voice of wisdom didn’t help. Segal, as if he were shell shocked, continued muttering about Nazis.
Yet even this isn’t the biggest problem Israel’s public diplomacy faces. The main issue is that we can’t even explain to ourselves what exactly we’re doing. It’s not enough for us to expose the world to the atrocities of October 7. The world also needs to know what Israel proposes to do with the Palestinians.
How does it imagine the solution to the problem? What do we do with those millions of people? Two states? One state? No state? Three states? Something. The question of whether we have a partner is secondary. What is Israel’s proposal?
The problem is that the settlers’ interests don’t overlap with Israel’s interests – not in peacetime and not in wartime. The government needs to sort out for itself (and then tell the public) who it represents – Israel or the settlement enterprise. The idea that it’s possible to live without a diplomatic horizon is also part of the doctrine from which we need to sober up.