How Netanyahu Saved Himself by Destroying GazaTwo years ago today, the Israeli prime minister was a dead man walking, writes former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy.
On Friday, Oct. 6, 2023, as the Jewish holiday season was drawing to a close, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must have been looking with some dread at the return of the Knesset from its long summer recess. Intense street protests had continued for months in opposition to his government’s judicial overhaul program – including a massive general strike called in March 2023, when Netanyahu was forced to rescind the dismissal of his then defence minister, Yoav Gallant (today, Gallant and Netanyahu both have International Criminal Court arrest warrants against them for alleged war crimes). At the time, Netanyahu’s military chiefs were warning him that under conditions of such societal division, the cohesion necessary for a people’s army to maintain security was fraying – including increasing numbers of pilots and others refusing reserve duty until what they considered to be anti-democratic measures were dropped. Netanyahu’s criminal trial was proceeding, his narrow coalition looked shaky, and the prospects of passing a budget during the autumn parliament session were uncertain. Then, Hamas launched its horrific attack. As the events of October 7 unfolded, the extent of the intelligence and response failure and the sense of governmental priorities misdirected became clear. The pens of the political obituary writers were being sharpened. Surely the buck would stop with Netanyahu; he would be toast before too long. Fast forward two years, and while there have been changes in the top echelons of the military and the Defence Ministry, Benjamin Netanyahu himself has doggedly survived into what is now his 17th year as prime minister of Israel. More than that, he has succeeded in expanding the governing coalition (the pre-summer defection of the ultra-orthodox factions does not equate with them bringing down the government). Protests, especially those to release the hostages, have never reached those spring/summer 2023 levels. A national commission of inquiry has been avoided, and the stock exchange and economy have largely held steady through two years of war and massive reservist call-ups. Netanyahu has achieved this by departing from a previous posture that was largely risk-averse and instead leaning into the mantle of perpetual war leader, with no hesitation in wreaking carnage on Gaza and in conducting military strikes that have violated the sovereignty of at least six regional states, including key US ally Qatar on Sept. 9, 2025. Most impressive or haunting, depending on your vantage point, Netanyahu has carried Israeli society with him on a premeditated spree of killing, destruction, and starvation, which is now widely recognized, including by a UN Commission of Inquiry, as a genocide. The International Court of Justice is still hearing a case to that effect brought by South Africa, having already made three decrees on provisional measures that Israel needed to undertake to not be in violation of the Genocide Convention. All of those have been summarily ignored by Netanyahu. The criminal treatment of the courageous participants bringing aid in the Gaza Sumud Flotilla, including Greta Thunberg, has become the latest entry in this catalogue of Israeli horrors. Whatever happens in the coming days and weeks with the so-called Trump plan, Netanyahu has fashioned a qualitatively different Israel and has possibly revived his political fortunes in so doing. To be clear, that does not in any way suggest that Israel’s previous treatment of Palestinians could be characterized as benign, humane, or indeed compatible with international law, but a policy so cruel, so indifferent to human suffering, for a society to enter a genocidal doom loop, that is of a different order of magnitude. The articulation of Israel’s goals has gone on a journey in the last decades from separation vis-à-vis the Palestinians alongside territorial expansion, to delimiting Palestinian existence to an ever-shrinking Bantustan, through to the current policy of erasure and removal of Palestinians. How has Netanyahu achieved this, and what does it mean for Palestinians going forward? The Consequences of the Absence of AccountabilityOf course, the antecedents were there in the settler colonial nature of the Zionist statehood project. Any society faced with atrocities on the scale of the October 7 attack, especially a society with victimhood so drilled into it, would be unlikely to embrace forbearance in response. And Netanyahu himself is a political operator par excellence, domestically up against politicians on the other side who could barely compete in the little league of politics. But Israel’s actions have been so horrific that to really get to grips with this question is to acknowledge some inconvenient truths, many of which predate these last two years. Others and I have argued that today’s reality has only been made possible as a result of the impunity accorded to Israel for so long by the US and its allies. Let us understand what exactly that absence of accountability has produced. It is the contention of this piece that, faced with a set of not particularly attractive options, Netanyahu did not land on a version of perpetual military maximalism and ruinous destruction by chance. It is reasonable to suggest that Netanyahu was testing the proposition that total victory, code word for total destruction, in Gaza and later across significant parts of the region, was based on his reading of an Israeli public and political ecosystem ready to be taken on this journey – an Israeli public that he had already led and helped shape as it’s longest serving prime minister. Netanyahu could be confident of relying heavily on his hardcore camp of supporters. It is from this messianic national religious camp that the most reliable pool of reservists have signed up for endless tours of military duty, has offered such an enthusiastic echo chamber for genocidal incitement on social media, and has produced a media landscape where Israel’s pro-Netanyahu Channel 14 and other outlets have been willing to so aggressively attack even the families of Israeli hostages being held when the latter have called for acceptance of ceasefire plans. Within days of the October 7 attack, Netanyahu would have noticed that some of the leadership of this camp had been quickest to seize on the horrendous events of that day as a moment of opportunity, deftly recalibrating what had been a focus on the occupied West Bank to assert that ‘the Lord works in mysterious ways,’ and that this could become an ‘era of miracles’ in which all of the Biblical Land of Israel could be resettled. This notion of Messianic times has become a central theme for chaplains in the army, as well as for much of the rabbinical and political leadership and influencers of the religious nationalist right. It has also been a period in which the generational effort of that camp to gain leadership positions in the military has been realized. The fruits of that labor are now evident – in the last few days, David Zini has taken the helm of Israel’s general security service, the Shin Bet (Zini is a close follower of one of the country’s most extreme rabbis, Rabbi Zvi Yisrael Thau); in September, the prime minister appointed Yoram Halevy, a settler, as new head of Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT); and in July 2024, he named Avi Bluth as head of the Israel military’s Central Command overseeing the West Bank (Bluth has faced a petition from the Association of Civil Rights, an Israeli organization, on suspicion of committing war crimes and has worked hand in glove with settler leaders). The entrenchment and subsequent proliferation of the messages of this messianic wing has exerted a gravitational pull on Israeli discourse well beyond the confines of its own adherents. Netanyahu knew he was on solid ground with the messianic camp, but his calculated roll of the dice was in how this would play out among his detractors, the self-defined liberals and centrists of the anti-Bibi camp. Netanyahu’s Bet Pays OffAs Netanyahu sized up that camp after Oct. 7, he found much to be encouraged by, and two years later, he was, it seems, correct in his assessment. Netanyahu would be well aware of the deeper history – the first major expulsion of Palestinians, the Nakba, was carried out under Labor Zionist leadership at the foundation of the state; likewise, the imposition of military governance over the remnants of the Palestinian community inside Israel between 1948 and 1966; settlements in the post 1967 Occupied Territories were also first established under Labor leaders. The more immediate question to be grappled with was whether the contemporary ‘liberal’ opposition would go along with a project of such destructive magnitude. If Netanyahu looked again at those mass public mobilizations against his judicial overhaul from the spring and summer of 2023, he would have noticed one item that did not feature as an apparent affront to the pro-democratic principles of that liberal camp – namely the regime of occupation for Palestinians (and by then, according to international and Israeli as well as Palestinian human rights groups, a regime of apartheid). When Netanyahu’s coalition guidelines included a commitment that “the Jewish people have an exclusive and inalienable right to all parts of the Land of Israel,” there was barely a shrug from the ranks of Zionist opposition parties. Netanyahu knew that he faced an opposition political camp … that was anti-Bibi, but not pro-peace. Netanyahu would be aware that Israel’s parliament contained no sizeable Zionist political party self-identifying as the peace camp or willing to raise issues of Palestinian national, civil, or human rights. He in fact knew the opposition leaders personally as people who had either defected from his own Likud, who anyway shared the National Religious weltanschauung, or who had willingly served as ministers in Netanyahu’s earlier governing coalitions (that definition captures all existing and putative opposition leaders – Naftali Bennett, Yair Lapid, Avigdor Lieberman, and Benny Gantz – it does not apply to the small remaining four seats of Labor, now called The Democrats under Yair Golan). Netanyahu knew that he faced an opposition political camp that, when in government, made no fundamental shift, neither to Israel’s apartheid policy in the West Bank nor to its siege and blockade of Gaza, one which had no critique of the ongoing displacement and subjugation of the Palestinians, other than to hurl the accusation of antisemitism at its critics. The camp was anti-Bibi, but not pro-peace. It should come as little surprise then that this same opposition has overwhelmingly refused to acknowledge, let alone condemn or stand in opposition to, policies of mass killing and destruction, the war crimes of starvation and ethnic cleansing. Within a year of each other, Netanyahu put two declarative votes in front of parliament: The first, in July 2024, rejected Palestinian statehood, and the second, a year later, endorsed the principle of annexing Judea and Samaria (Israel’s term for the Occupied West Bank). On the first occasion, no Zionist parliamentarian voted in opposition, and on the annexation vote, only four did so (those from Yair Golan’s Democrat/Labor bloc). Only the parties representing the Palestinian Arab citizens of the state – Ra’am, Hadash, Ta’al, and Balad – stood vigorously in opposition. Indeed, the increasingly draconian measures against and the silencing and intimidation of the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel have been of little interest to the so-called liberal camp. It becomes crucial, therefore, to understand how this consent has been manufactured in the Israeli mainstream. Reading the anti-Bibi Israeli media and commentary, one sees plenty of questions and challenges regarding the de-prioritization of a deal that releases the hostages, but much of the Netanyahu and, by extension, national narrative is endorsed. For instance, Israeli anti-Netanyahu media repeatedly say that Hamas is responsible for the civilian casualties by dint of their ‘embeddedness’ in that population; the lack of humanitarian aid, as well as the ongoing displacement campaigns, are also almost entirely attributed to Hamas’s decisions. This, despite the voluminous evidence (often appearing in Western media sources highly susceptible to Israeli talking points) that it is Israel preventing the entry of supplies; that Israel’s targeting of civilian areas is wholly disproportionate and indifferent to civil civilian casualties, and that Israel has deployed the most imprecise weaponry - guaranteed to maximize what is referred to in the sanitized language of genocide denial as collateral damage. And this despite the fact that Israel’s leaders have repeatedly described their own actions, including the ethnic cleansing, with premeditated criminal intentionality. These mainstream narratives have two highly consequential knock-on effects. A society pre-programmed to assume everything is the fault of the other side is primed to be genocidal. Secondly, it gives Netanyahu a lot to work with when asserting his own victory narrative to the public, especially his rejection of claims that the war should have been ended earlier. The almost complete absence of a bigger picture – of context, factoring in decades of occupation, the relentless assault on Palestinian rights and deployment of structural violence, the blockade imposed on Gaza – has barely any airtime or resonance. There have been multiple investigations regarding the events of October 7 – particularly in areas where there were significant Israeli losses, like in the Nir Oz and Nirim Kibbutzim and at the Nova Music Festival. Invariably, these looked at tactical questions of deployments, both before and during the October 7 attacks, intel, and communications failures. Not one zoomed out to even touch upon whether security was attainable while keeping any people, Palestinians or otherwise, trapped in such conditions. It makes that genocidal doom loop incredibly hard to break out of. Netanyahu has deployed other devices to manufacture and maintain this broader consent – some were already in place, while others are more novel. His management of an economy based on military Keynesianism, and in particular on inflated compensation for reservists, is particularly noteworthy. Israel entered its prolonged war and assault on Gaza in an enviable economic position. Its debt-to-GDP ratio stood at around 60%, giving lots of wiggle room to pump money into what would be a challenging war economy. As it became increasingly clear that Israel’s military reservist manpower would be stretched and would be relied on heavily, and that increasing numbers would not show up, the decision was made to increase compensation. Israeli researchers Assaf Bondy and Adam Raz have unpacked this in two important essays in which they argue that Israel’s government has managed to keep consumption levels at a steady level by injecting billions of shekels of economic handouts to reservists. Not only was the economy kept ticking over, but this was also part of a consent-generating modality. On a macroeconomic scale, this military Keynesianism has papered over deeper cracks that have emerged from growing international isolation to legitimize and prolong Israel’s war in Gaza, while individual soldiers were able to make the equivalent of high-tech salaries through participating in war crimes in Gaza. Netanyahu could also draw on years of vilifying criticism of Israel as constituting antisemitism, having redefined that issue and brought many of the legacy diaspora Jewish communal leadership institutions on that journey. There has been tremendous tumult and dissent inside Jewish communities as opposition to Israel’s criminal actions has proliferated among Jews, who also see knee-jerk support for such Israeli policies as detrimental to Jewish well-being. Nonetheless, in many Western governmental, media and policy spaces, the misattribution and conflation of antisemitism and the silencing of the opposition have continued to work in favour of Israel’s criminal actions. Israel knew it could also rely on a divided, weakened, and mostly co-opted Palestinian leadership of the Palestinian Authority and Palestinian Liberation Organization, which predictably enough has failed to rise to its people’s moment of dire need. And Israel has sought to manage regional pushback through the relentless projection of military power. In addition to this being a war against the Palestinians, it has become a war for regional domination – one that now has much of the region recognize that Israel poses the most radicalizing and destabilizing threat in the area, albeit for those states to recalibrate national security projects to account for this challenge will require a major adjustment and will be a bumpy road over an extended period of time. This is the reality into which the current ceasefire and Gaza plan lands. Any Hope?The Trump plan is itself deeply flawed, and I have deconstructed that elsewhere. Against the backdrop of everything we have witnessed, the suggestion that deradicalization is something for the Palestinian side only is staggering enough, but the attempt to impose a non-Palestinian colonial administrative structure in Gaza, and presumably for there to be an Israeli-US effort to then impose that on the West Bank (the West Bank is actually not mentioned once in the plan) while calling this a peace plan, takes the notion of chutzpah to previously uncharted territory! If a ceasefire is to be achieved and to last, there will need to be a genuine and full Israeli military withdrawal, real access for humanitarian assistance, and an international force premised first and foremost on protecting Palestinians. A ceasefire and end to the killing, the release of Israeli hostages and of Palestinians held by Israel is desperately needed, but whatever the fate of this plan in the coming days, the reality cannot be avoided of where Israel is at – the necessity and enormity of the task of shifting that trajectory. Recognizing this, and understanding that President Donald Trump, even if he momentarily turns on Netanyahu, is still surrounded by a cast of Israel whisperers and by the deep embeddedness of Israel First lobbying and narratives in US politics, unfortunately casts a shadow on any current optimism. Even as debate over Israel rages inside the MAGA circle, American discourse is dripping with anti-Palestinian racism. This piece should not, though, be mistaken for a call to abandon hope or hard work to drive change. What I have suggested is that far from being an aberration, Netanyahu is perhaps better understood as the leader for whom the cap fits at this moment in the Zionist project’s journey. Analogies to the apartheid regime in South Africa and its demise can be useful if used within limits: in 1979, then-apartheid Prime Minister P.W. Botha made his “adapt or die” speech. In facing what appears to be a similar moment for Zionism, Netanyahu has tried to take Israel on a zero-sum project, which he calls total victory. Evidence is accumulating that this is likely to be an adaptation of hubristic overreach, generating the kind of blowback that could lead to the denouement of the Zionist project as practiced thus far. For that to happen, a tactical and strategic alternative will need to be offered – one that can mobilize enough support among Palestinians, the region, and globally – and crucially also pull enough of Israeli Jewish society out of this genocidal doom loop. Daniel Levy is a political commentator and the president of the U.S./Middle East Project. He has served as an Israeli negotiator in peace talks and is a former adviser in the Israeli Prime Minister‘s Office. His latest testimony to the UN Security Council can be viewed here. He is a new Zeteo contributor. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo. |