David Hearst
Middle East Eye / September 2, 2024
The regional costs of not confronting Netanyahu could rapidly outweigh the domestic benefits of being dragged along by him.
The recovery of six further dead hostages has set off a tidal wave of fury in Israel.
Demonstrations, not seen since the protests over judicial reform, are shaking the country.
Israelis are calling it an uprising.
Tens of thousands of Israelis have walked out of their jobs in a general strike. Both the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, and the security establishment are in open conflict with their prime minister.
Opposition leaders Benny Gantz and Yair Lapid called for people to go onto the streets. And they have. The main highways around Tel Aviv are blocked.
However the hostages died – Hamas says they were killed by Israeli gunfire, the Israeli army says they were executed at close range just before an attempt was made to free them – the blame for their deaths has settled firmly on Benjamin Netanyahu and the ultra-right-wing clique that props up his government.
Four of the six hostages were on Hamas’ “humanitarian” list of captives and would have been released in the first stage of a hostage deal had Netanyahu not refused to withdraw from the Philadelphi Corridor separating Egypt from Gaza.
This is not speculation.
Undermining a possible deal
Israeli security chiefs who repeatedly warned Netanyahu about what would happen to the remaining hostages if he continued to scupper a deal are saying so themselves.
Three days ago, a regular cabinet security briefing turned into a shouting match between Gallant and Netanyahu, Axios reported.
Gallant reportedly told the meeting: “We have to choose between Philadelphi and the hostages. We can’t have both. If we vote, we might find out that either the hostages will die or we will have to backtrack to release them.”
Gallant, Israeli army Chief of Staff General Herzi Halevi and Mossad Director David Barnea, the head of the Israeli negotiating team, all confronted Netanyahu and his proposal to vote on a resolution to maintain full Israeli control along the border with Egypt that they said would undermine a possible deal with Hamas.
“We warned Netanyahu and the cabinet ministers about this exact scenario but they wouldn’t listen,” a senior Israeli official told Axios. The vote went ahead with the majority in favour.
However the hostages met their deaths, what the families of the hostages clearly understood is that this group of hostages were alive shortly before the army’s attempt to rescue them.
“A deal for the return of the hostages has been on the table for over two months. If it weren’t for his [Netanyahu’s] thwarting, the excuses and the spins, the hostages whose deaths we learned of this morning would probably be alive,” the Hostages and Missing Families Forum said in a statement.
The deaths of the hostages have also reverberated across the US, in the same way that the Hamas attack on 7 October did.
Not least because the parents of one of the dead, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, a US citizen, spoke on stage at the Democratic National Convention as thousands in the audience chanted “Bring them back”.
In response, the outgoing US President Joe Biden vowed to “make Hamas pay” for these deaths and the party’s presidential nominee Kamala Harris said that Hamas must be eliminated.
Both know that the responsibility for the hostages’ deaths lies with them too.
The brutal truth
Biden clearly and unequivocally called for a permanent ceasefire four months ago. The UN passed a resolution for a comprehensive three-stage ceasefire in June.
It is Biden’s first duty as commander in chief to make sure a key security ally in the Middle East abides by US policy, especially an ally as dependent on the supply of US arms as Israel is.
The brutal truth of these killings is that if Biden had been prepared to enforce his own policy with an arms embargo, a ceasefire would now be in place and many of the remaining hostages, Americans and Britons among them, would be freed.
If anyone should be looking at himself in the mirror at Goldberg-Polin’s death, it should be Biden.
For Harris to meekly follow in these footsteps is folly. She should remember what her own generals have said about the impossibility of defeating Hamas in Gaza.
It could nevertheless be that these deaths are the tipping point that forces Netanyahu to U-turn in negotiations, which still remain deadlocked.
The US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan told the families of the US hostages held in Gaza that the US will present Israel and Hamas with a take-it-or-leave-it final offer on a ceasefire deal.
This has been said many times before, and one reason why US officials have lost all credibility with independent negotiators Egypt and Qatar.
However, if what results is a phased Israeli withdrawal from the Philadelphi Corridor, and Netanyahu buckles under the domestic and international pressure, he knows full well he will be tipped into another crisis.
End of Ashkenazi control
It’s not just the likelihood that Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, and Itamar Ben Gvir, the national security minister, the two of the most extreme in his government, will walk out as they have repeatedly threatened to do.
Netanyahu knows that Israel is split down the middle. He has more than half of the country demanding he “finish the job” that David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, failed to complete.
This uprising, like the demonstrations against the judicial reforms last year, is one of the last throws of the dice for the liberal Ashkenazi elite.
They sense they are losing control of the country they built. They have already lost control of the army and the police force to the settlers. Not much is left in their exclusive hands and there has been an exodus of Israelis and money to Europe over the last year to prove it.
Netanyahu is not solely acting out of personal political survival. He, too, senses Israel is on the cusp of a right-wing revolution. That is why every political instinct tells him the stakes are so high. If it happens, it will be totally at odds with a Democrat US presidency.
Unravelling in real time
Biden should also be looking himself in the mirror at what is happening in the Occupied West Bank.
Unable, for a variety of reasons not least military preparedness, to open a second front against Hezbollah in Lebanon, Netanyahu has turned his attention on the three towns in the north of the West Bank in a full-scale military operation called “Operation Summer Camps” designed to force a population transfer.
As night follows day, attacks have begun on Israeli troops all over the West Bank and particularly in the southern Hebron area.
Biden and Harris should take note of who shot three Israeli policemen dead in response to the army operation in the north.
The shooter was a member of Fatah and a former Palestinian presidential security guard. Furthermore, Muhannad al-Asood, a resident of Idhna in Hebron/Al-Khalil, who was born in Jordan and was a citizen of the country, returned to his native West Bank in 1998 with his family after obtaining family reunification.
Asood’s personal history carries a clear warning for the consequences of how Palestinians in the West Bank will react to the opening of a second front of this war in the occupied territories, using much the same weapons and techniques in Jenin, Tulkarm and Tubas as they did in Gaza.
Asood was not a member of Hamas or Islamic Jihad or part of any known local resistance group. He made an individual decision that resistance was the only answer to Israel’s military offensive.
There are hundreds of thousands of armed, unaffiliated Palestinians like him in the West Bank and Jordan who are coming to the same conclusion.
Furthermore, tensions between Jordan and Israel are mounting exponentially.
The launch of the offensive was accompanied by a war of words between Israel’s foreign minister, Israel Katz, and his Jordanian counterpart, Ayman Safadi.
Katz not only told Jenin’s residents to leave in a “temporary” evacuation. He repeatedly accused Jordan of the build-up of arms in the camps, claiming it was unable to control its own territory.
“Iran is building Islamic terror infrastructure in Judea and Samaria, flooding refugee camps with funds and weapons smuggled through Jordan, aiming to establish an eastern terror front against Israel. This process also threatens the stability of the Jordanian regime. The world must wake up and stop the Iranian octopus before it’s too late,” Katz tweeted on X.
All lies, his Jordanian counterpart retorted.
Safadi wrote: “We reject the claims of the extremist racist ministers who fabricate threats to justify the killing of Palestinians and the destruction of their capabilities. The Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, the Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people, and the Israeli escalation in the region constitute the greatest threat to security and peace.
“We will oppose with all our capabilities any attempt to displace the Palestinian people inside or outside the occupied territories.”
A larger conflagration
Now in its fifth day, the stage is set once more for an operation in the occupied West Bank which could last as long as Gaza and which the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is powerless to stop.
Palestinian teenagers are fighting back. Wael Mishah and Tariq Daoud were born after Oslo. They did not see the First or Second Intifadas.
Both had been released during a prisoner exchange between Israel and Hamas in November. On his release Mishah talked of the plight of children being beaten and abused in Israeli prisons.
Mishah’s short journey was preordained. “He went from being a prisoner to being wanted, to confronting [the occupation], then a martyr,” his mother said.
He was killed by a drone at dawn on 15 August as he fought an Israeli raid on Nablus. There are thousands more like him who are being driven to battle.
Another fighter killed by Israel was the commander of the Tulkarm Battalion, Mohamed Jaber, known as Abu Shuja’a. He was described by Israel as its most wanted militant but he was only 26 years old, and born four years after Oslo. Abu Shuja’a was a refugee in Nur Shams Camp who came originally from Haifa. Killing him will inspire many more to join as he himself was inspired by others.
Even with the obvious reluctance of Hezbollah and Iran to get involved, all the ingredients are there for a much larger conflagration.
An Israel in the grip of an ultra-nationalist , religious, settler insurgency; a US president who allows his signature policy to be flouted by his chief ally, even at the risk of losing a crucial election ; resistance that will not surrender; Palestinians in Gaza who will not flee; Palestinians in the West Bank who are now stepping up to the front line; Jordan, the second country to recognize Israel, feeling under existential threat.
For Biden or Harris, the message is so clear, it is flashing in neon lights: the regional costs of not standing up to Netanyahu could rapidly outweigh the domestic benefits of being dragged along by him.
David Hearst is co-founder and editor-in-chief of Middle East Eye
