Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has scuttled Gaza ceasefire talks. Color me surprised. It isn’t as if he hasn’t done it before, in fact, making optimistic, conciliatory sounds about the possibility of an agreement, only to step back when one seems to be near is kind of Netanyahu’s whole shtik. It happened again this week, as one might have expected, when the Strongman of Jerusalem decided, at the last minute, to dig-in on the demand that the State of Israel maintain military control of the Philadelphi Corridor, the egress from Gaza to Egyptian territory in the Sinai.
We can set aside the observation that Netanyahu’s demand amounts to maintaining the Israeli military occupation of Egyptian territory – something the Egyptian government protested loudly – and that it was a non-starter from the beginning. That, after all, is the point: Netanyahu wants to be seen, for consumption at home and in the Diaspora Jewish community, to be behaving like a rational statesman willing to negotiate a ceasefire (if not, notably, actual peace and the autonomy and freedom of the Palestinian people). But he most certainly does not want a ceasefire.
So, he practices a kind of postmodern statecraft, where he assumes the form of serious diplomacy, utterly void of any diplomatic content. The mixed messages, it turns out, are the thing. I have to be honest, I’m not sure that Netanyahu actually bears any ill feeling toward Palestinians or anyone else for that matter, or even any particularly violent desires for conquest and domination in Gaza (though many of his allies certainly do); that seems to endow him with an inner life and motivation that I am skeptical he possesses. To my eyes, he seems rather to be motivated primarily by the survival drives in his basal ganglia and by an overwhelming, primal need to win.
What that actually means is anyone’s guess but, in terms of philosophy and political thought, I don’t really detect anything else. There is no there there and, for Netanyahu, this is all a game to stay out ahead and on top, dry-humping his allies and adversaries alike, and pissing in all the corners like a hero when he does not concede. The smell of urine is palpable.
The not conceding thing is a big part of the game, of course, even if he, or at least the State of Israel, cannot actually win. He’s happy as long as he can keep his lone king hopping from one square to the next across the chess board in a gambit that does nothing but prolong the game indefinitely. It is a dreary, frustrating, endless endgame for everyone but the Prime Minister himself.
And yet, negotiators from the United States, Egypt and Qatar dutifully file into the negotiating rooms every month or so in Rome or Doha, or wherever, to – you know – negotiate as if it isn’t some weird Israeli domination performance. The negotiators from Hamas, who have their own games to play, do know what’s going on, but they come to the table anyway.[i] Maybe the potential gain – an end to the unimaginable death and suffering – makes whatever slim chance of success worthwhile.
But that chance is slim. The State of Israel has shown an eagerness to be seen negotiating, after all, and little desire for peace.
The War on Gaza comes at a minimal cost to Netanyahu and his allies. Despite the overheated rhetoric about security, the State of Israel is not under any real threat apart from occasional rocket barrages fired by Hezbollah forces in Lebanon, and even the 7 October attacks a year ago, while brutal and bloody, never placed it in existential peril. Israeli casualties number about 1,700 dead, which includes the 1,100 killed on 7 October 2023. For a militaristic society like the State of Israel, which “regards war as a positive good (rather than a lesser evil) and as essential for human development,” a few hundred casualties a year are eminently sustainable, if not, in fact, positively desirable.[ii]
Given the State of Israel’s vast superiority in manpower (about 13-to-one), firepower (including tanks, aircraft, attack helicopters, guided missiles, and warships), materiel and funds over Hamas’s Al-Qassam Brigades, this is a war that Netanyahu can wage almost indefinitely at almost no political and financial cost. There is virtually no chance of a Hamas victory, either in terms of the nigh-impossible defeat of the IDF in the field or of holding the line against the Israeli invasion of Gaza.
Indeed, the line has not held and the Al-Qassam Brigades are fighting what amounts to a desperate, rear-guard resistance in the rubble of Gaza. Their goal cannot be to defeat the IDF in the field, but rather to make the State of Israel’s hold on the enclave as tenuous as possible and to prevent its total victory – however that might look. In the meantime, Gaza remains an unresolved crisis demanding global attention, and since any solution short of complete Israeli domination (and possible ethnic cleansing) will require international intervention, they fight on.[iii]
The Netanyahu regime has made it abundantly clear that global opinion does not matter to it, and that it will, in any event, resist international intervention, so none of that really matters. It is happy to keep fighting this inexpensive war and reaping the benefits of a growing Israeli siege mentality and political isolation (providing that it does not become economic isolation – and it won’t). These are, in fact, great political benefits for Netanyahu and the Israeli far-right cheaply purchased at the price of a handful of Israeli lives. And the tens of thousands of Palestinian lives don’t count.
Significantly, the demonstrations flooding into the streets in Tel Aviv (and rarely, it should be noted, Jerusalem) have nothing to do with the cost of the war, but rather with the disposition of the Israeli hostages that remain in the hands of Hamas. The visual rhetoric on display at these demonstrations is revealing; while a pitiful few placards demand an end to the war and condemn Netanyahu as a sort of criminal, the most prominent symbols are the blue-and-white Israeli flag and images and effigies of the remaining hostages.
One cannot doubt that there are Israelis who do want the release of the hostages and whatever for ceasefire can be secured to be a permanent peace – one need only read Haaretz to see that – but this does not seem to be a dominant view. The Israeli flag signifies patriotism, indeed a patriotism deeply imbricated in militarism, and I sense that the demand for a ceasefire is merely a demand for the means to an end. Once the hostages are returned, I suspect, many of the demonstrators, and perhaps most of them, would be happy to see the hostilities continue.
A Pew Research survey last Spring found that almost three-quarters of Israelis either supported their government’s military campaign in Gaza or did not believe that it was severe enough, and these numbers do not seem to have changed one bit three months later. Moreover, half of all Israelis surveyed have consistently said that the State of Israel should directly control Gaza when hostilities come to an end. More importantly, while it is hard to say if anyone in the State of Israel really likes Netanyahu, he does remain the most popular political leader in the country, if only the tallest of the political munchkins and, as of last month, his popularity was rising.
It is thus unwise to read the Israeli demonstrations, and even public pleas for a ceasefire deal to obtain the return of the hostages as an unequivocal demand for peace, let alone for a just peace that would secure Palestinian human rights and autonomy. It is possible, it seems, to wish for both the release of the hostages and a temporary ceasefire, while supporting the brutal destruction of Gaza and advocating for the permanent subjugation of the Palestinian people under Israeli domination… And this seems to be what most Israelis, even the demonstrators in the streets, espouse.
There is no reason today, eleven months after the War on Gaza began, for optimism. Peace is still a remote prospect, and the people of Gaza will continue to die under Israeli bombs. Any hints that events might be reaching a turning point or that the crisis must soon pass – as all crises eventually do – are ambiguous at best. All the messages are mixed.
8 September 2024
[i] I am not particularly inclined to regard Hamas as particularly heroic, or any more altruistic than the Israelis at this point but, since they are, in fact, the other party in the war, they do have to be part of the negotiations.
[ii] See Martin Ceadal, Thinking About Peace and War (1989).
[iii] I cannot imagine what this international intervention might look like. Rest assured that the State of Israel would resist a military or peacekeeping intervention with force, and the UN, the US, and most of the governments with the means to intervene know this. And it is in few countries’ economic interests – not even the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia – to isolate the State of Israel economically, so an embargo and sanctions are highly unlikely. At this point, any imaginable intervention will probably amount to no more than finger wagging and stern words.
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