On Friday, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government approved a plan for Israel to take control of Gaza City, where about a million Palestinians—about half of the population in all of Gaza—are now living. Many have been forced to shelter there; the Israeli military has taken control of seventy-five per cent of the rest of the territory. Netanyahu’s plan, which he says is necessary to “eliminate Hamas,” is opposed by much of Israel’s military leadership, and even by a number of centrist and center-right politicians. But he seems intent on continuing Israel’s war in Gaza, in part to maintain the support of far-right members in his cabinet, who have talked openly about resettling it and pushing Palestinian residents to “emigrate.” A true invasion of Gaza City might not happen for days or weeks, if it does at all—there has been some speculation that the threat of invasion is a negotiation tactic to get Hamas to release the remaining twenty or so living hostages still being held in Gaza. But, if the invasion moves forward, it is almost certain to exacerbate the horrific humanitarian situation. As of Saturday, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, two hundred and twelve Gazans have starved to death since the start of the war, and those who remain are facing a worsening humanitarian crisis. The total Palestinian death toll is now more than sixty thousand.
I recently spoke by phone with Amos Harel, a defense analyst at Haaretz, about the military and political dimensions of Netanyahu’s announcement. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed what Netanyahu is really aiming for by ramping up the war, whether there are plans to repopulate Gaza with Israeli settlers, and how Netanyahu has changed since the war began.
What specifically is Netanyahu proposing militarily here and what makes this such an aggressive step?
There’s always the question of what Netanyahu actually means. He doesn’t mean what he says, and he doesn’t say what he means—so it’s sometimes hard to gather. What he’s saying out loud is that this is a way to finally defeat and destroy Hamas, and he’s saying that since all hope is lost regarding the negotiations for a hostage deal, the right thing to do would be to resume military pressure on Hamas. So what he’s suggesting is a reoccupation of Gaza City, something that Israel hasn’t done since the early months of the war. And then this time he claims that, if they push the population out of Gaza City and then finally deal with the Hamas militants there, it will gradually lead to a Hamas defeat, and somehow, in a miraculous way, the hostages will also be released.
So you force people out, and Hamas stays, and then you defeat Hamas? Isn’t that idea similar to what Netanyahu has talked about before, and it has not worked? Is there something new here?
I’m not a big Netanyahu fan, and you have to admit that previous attempts to take over cities didn’t achieve the goal of annihilating Hamas as he claimed. But, if you look at what happened in Khan Younis and in Rafah, Israel did push the population out almost completely. It happened quite quickly. You remember there was a heated debate between the Biden Administration and Netanyahu over Rafah, and yet Israel did push the population out and kill many Hamas militants there. Would anything different happen this time? I don’t think so.
The main difference between then and now is that Hamas is no longer a military organization. It used to be that there was a hierarchy. There were tight command-and-control networks. There were people in charge who made the decisions and so on. This is no longer the case. What you have now is a terrorist organization using guerrilla methods. Most of its leaders were killed. Most of its fighters are either injured or dead. They now have replacements who are younger, sometimes kids who get basic training and are sent to the front. How do you defeat such an organization? There’s no Iwo Jima moment.
My suspicion is that he’s not really after that. What he is interested in, for his political survival, is prolonging the war. It’s the best excuse for not doing anything else domestically, including not launching an independent investigation of October 7th. His corruption trial would probably be delayed if there’s hectic fighting going on. [Opposition politicians have called for a commission to look into the security and intelligence failures on October 7th. Netanyahu has rejected the idea, saying it would be predetermined, and warned about the role of the “deep state.”] And the extreme, messianic right-wing parties would be happy with a new attempt to occupy the Strip.
So, essentially, they tried this in other places at other points in the war, and it did get the population out, despite the humanitarian consequences.
And they also destroyed whole cities.
But, even if Israel did kill a lot of Hamas fighters and further weaken their chain of command, at this point its structure doesn’t really exist. And you have just this organization that is essentially recruiting new people from the population, even without a chain of command.
Yeah, sure. Hamas changed the rules of the game. And, if you don’t adapt to the different game, then the whole discussion about destruction is almost meaningless. Again, you’re not fighting an army of terror, so to speak. You’re fighting a new organization or a different version of an organization that isn’t worried too much about casualties, about destruction, about the above-ground population and its suffering. And, even if there are leaders, they have had numerous leaders since the beginning of the war. The others were assassinated by Israel.
What you’re describing seems like an insurgency, something that requires some sort of political solution.
To an extent, yes. In spite of all my criticism of Netanyahu’s policies, I can’t avoid the fact that we’re fighting quite an enemy here. It’s not a force that you can easily reason with or that behaves according to the same logic that Israel applies.
Which logic are you talking about?
That’s a good question. The logic is that, if Israel applies enough military pressure, then surely they’ll cave in because it would not be logical to keep resisting. This is not the right way. This is not the way Hamas operates. They have an extreme jihadi ideology, and I think, for them, it’s more about the long run and not so much about the here and now. If the Gaza Strip is destroyed, it doesn’t mean their new leader would feel some kind of remorse and decide to stop.
I keep reading that this latest push from Netanyahu is unpopular in Israel and also that Netanyahu is a political animal, which on the surface is a little bit of a contradiction, but you were saying earlier it might keep him in power. What did you mean?
First of all, it’s deeply unpopular according to the polls, but so is the government. All public-opinion polls since the beginning of the war show deep mistrust of Netanyahu, and show that he would lose if elections were held. Most people support a hostage deal and paying any price to get them back, including the release of all Hamas prisoners in Israeli jails. And also, there’s quite a stable majority for an independent October 7th investigative committee, which is extremely important because in the end it will probably show Netanyahu’s responsibility. But you need a no-confidence vote for him to face an election. And what he does better than anybody else is maintain his coalition by any means necessary. He has quite a stable majority in the Knesset, in spite of being extremely unpopular. In order to maintain that situation, what he needs is to keep his partners satisfied.
And then, of course, you have the two extreme right-wing parties led by Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and what they want is also clear by now. They don’t only want to win the war; they want total destruction of Gaza. They want what they call “voluntary emigration,” which is actually forced emigration after making life unbearable to any Palestinian in Gaza, and they want to rebuild settlements. By now it’s rather clear that these politicians are ready to have the hostages be killed by Hamas. It doesn’t matter to them.
Do you think Netanyahu wants settlements back in Gaza?
I think Netanyahu wants to survive politically. I think that, if it were possible for there to be a forced emigration of Palestinians while, at the same time, he and Israel survive, he would like that. But I think he’s much more astute than that, and he understands that this is extremely difficult to achieve and that the international backlash would be huge. So he doesn’t search for one goal. There are always a couple of balls in the air, and he decides at the last minute which path of action is better for him in order to survive. But it’s survival above everything else.
He comes from a famous right-wing family. He’s spent his whole career on the right and is a friend of settlements. He has warmly welcomed Donald Trump’s proposal, which, however seriously you take it, would essentially force Gazans out of Gaza to create a new “riviera” and lead to what I imagine would be some Israeli presence there. Why shouldn’t we believe that Netanyahu may desire this outcome, too, even if he won’t do it overnight?
So there’s an ongoing debate about that. Is it all carefully planned? And some of his supporters claim that it is and describe a narrative that began on October 8th. Netanyahu had a speech at that time where he said we’re going to change the Middle East. And they will tell you, Well, he achieved all that. He defeated Hamas. He destroyed Hezbollah in Lebanon. He finally destroyed Iran’s nuclear plan. Everything was pre-planned. Other people are thinking that he is mostly playing by ear, that he is improvising along the way in order to survive.
But my sense, for a long time, is not that he doesn’t have a clue, but that a lot of this is about guessing and trying to survive at all costs. He is a right-winger. He doesn’t want a two-state solution. He’s fought against it for all his life. But he has also said he doesn’t support bringing settlements back to Gaza. And he has never been emotional about settlements. He has never considered moving there or anything like that. It’s very different from the line that Smotrich and company are taking. So I think he’s improvising more than anything else.
What about the idea that, when you will the means, you sometimes will the ends?
It could happen. I wouldn’t put it past him—especially if he keeps Smotrich and others by his side.
You say there isn’t a clear intent to develop settlements. But it’s very hard to read stories about the level of hunger in Gaza and not believe that the Israeli government does not want to allow sufficient food and aid to reach the people of Gaza, the children of Gaza.
Maybe this speaks to my limits as an observer, because I’m still an Israeli, and a patriot, and so on. My sense is that this has not been intentional starvation planned all along. So the situation, of course, is very, very dire. It goes back to the whole Gaza Humanitarian Foundation thing. It pretends to be American, but there are actually a lot of Israelis—and people who were not strangers to Netanyahu—involved in that as well. But it was very, very clear that there was no way that this could work. It was clear that this was an absolutely crazy plan that could not match the needs in Gaza. And remember, the day [the G.H.F.’s aid plan was deployed], Smotrich tweeted that today begins the defeat of Hamas. The so-called logic behind it was that Hamas was looting most of the aid coming in earlier, making money from it, selling it, reselling it for a price, and therefore providing for its fighters. [The Times reported that Israeli officials privately acknowledge that Hamas was not systematically looting United Nations aid. Reuters found that a U.S.A.I.D. report discovered “no evidence of systematic theft” by Hamas of humanitarian aid provided by the U.S.]
So what you are describing is a haphazard plan—
They were well aware of the horrible risk, even if they were not intentionally starving people.
Seems like, at the very least, they do not care.
That’s my suspicion as well. And you didn’t see a lot of sympathy among Israeli leaders about starvation. Only when the world woke up did this finally become a crisis for the government.
What is your reading of how Israelis feel about the war, other than the importance of bringing the hostages home? There’s been some talk that the war has not been real to Israelis because the media, with your newspaper as an exception, has not really focussed on the human costs of it. Do you feel that there is any desire to end the war aside from the desire to get a hostage deal? Or is the death toll of Gazans not at all foremost in people’s minds?
First of all, we’re very much detached from the reality inside Gaza as it’s described by the international media. If you look at the coverage on the Israeli TV stations and so on, it’s very, very limited. The images are sometimes censored, and there’s not much of a discussion there. And that goes back to October 7th. Everybody is still living October 7th. There is still grieving and not having any kind of empathy to what is going on elsewhere.
Has that changed at all in the past month?
Not really. Some Israelis on the left are more aware of this now, but the open wound of both the massacre itself and those twenty live hostages and thirty bodies kept remain obsessions. That’s deeply Jewish; that’s deeply Israeli. But we’re still stuck there. When you’re focussed on that, you have less time and energy and resources to talk about Palestinian suffering.
And yet, I think more and more people are aware of the fact that we’re stuck, that there’s no hostage deal, that there’s no end to the war. The government is refusing to discuss the day after and refusing to allow a role for the Palestinian Authority. There was a window of opportunity to, if not to end this, reach an interim deal last month. And Netanyahu missed that opportunity. And then the famine story broke. And by then it was not sensible, from Hamas’s point of view, to reach a deal. There was a wave of anti-Israeli sentiment around the world. Why should they compromise under these circumstances? And we missed that window of opportunity.
What you’ve just described about Israeli society, the obsessive focus on the hostages—
I’m including myself as well.
Netanyahu pretty clearly does not care about the hostages, and he screwed up on October 7th. Wouldn’t this imply his political career is done after the next election?
I’m getting borderline conspiratorial here. But the general sense among many analysts—and again, I’m not a political analyst, but I think it’s pretty clear to join the dots—is that he’s not going for full, free elections anymore. He’s going to lift a page out of Trump’s notebook, out of [Viktor] Orbán’s notebook, out of what happened in Poland in the recent decade or so, meaning that he will attempt to undermine the system and intimidate the center left. It’s already been done by putting Ben-Gvir in charge of the police. You see that all the time. You see the attitude toward demonstrators. The man who Netanyahu is trying to nominate to the internal security service is a messianist for the far right. [The man, David Zini, has reportedly said that Israel is governed by a judicial “dictatorship” and that the internal security service, Shin Bet, is loyal to the Prime Minister before the law.] These are the signs of what is happening. And, of course, the easiest way to do that would be to intimidate the Arab voters and the Arab parties.
But you are describing a country that, in a free and fair election, would reject him.
Yes. But there is something deeply messianic about him by now, and he believes that he is the man who needs to keep protecting the Jewish people from different threats, and that he has changed the course of the war with victories in Lebanon and Iran, and so on. He really, really believes that he should stay in power, and he will do everything he can to stay in power. Then there’s the legal issues.
People keep writing about the new Netanyahu. The old Netanyahu, we knew. We knew that he was manipulative. We knew that he would lie. We knew that he would do everything to survive. And yet, for instance, for many years, he was considered quite cautious in applying military force. He always feared unintended consequences, and he tried to avoid military casualties. He knew that things could go wrong quite quickly when you send the ground forces in. All of this has changed since 2023, if you look back to his decision to go for the pager operation, to strike the nuclear sites in Iran, and so on. His enemies from the center left kept saying he would never do that. It’s too dangerous. He knows it’s too risky. He would never bomb Iran. Well, he did, and he persuaded Trump to join in.
What you’re describing is someone who will essentially do anything to stay in power, and who has developed a certain messianism. That’s a slightly worrying combination.
Tell me about it. ♦
