by Daniel DePetris
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a man with a significant amount of pressure on his shoulders. The 3 ½-month-long war against Hamas in Gaza has long since turned into an albatross around his neck, one that has caused his approval ratings to drop precipitously and created adversity wherever he looks.
The way the Israeli military has chosen to prosecute the military campaign against Hamas is by far the biggest source of angst for the international community. The Gaza Strip, a coastal territory the United Nations predicted would be “unlivable” years before the Israel-Hamas war erupted, is now essentially a wasteland. More than 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, tens of thousands have been wounded and entire cities, such as Gaza City, the territory’s largest metropolitan area, have been leveled. More than 85% of Palestinians in Gaza are internally displaced, and acute food insecurity is the norm.
All of this is causing anger not only in the Arab world but also in the so-called Global South; South Africa filed a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice for genocide. President Joe Biden is also facing pushback from his fellow Democrats who believe the White House isn’t being as forceful with Netanyahu as it should be.
Netanyahu is also the target of intense anger inside Israel itself. Leading the charge are the families of the hostages who remain in Hamas custody. More than 130 of them, civilians and soldiers alike, are in Gaza today, some of them parked in Hamas’ extensive tunnel network. This makes it immensely difficult for the Israeli military to mount successful rescue operations — to date, only one hostage has been rescued. The families in Israel are concerned that the longer the war drags on, the more likely their loved ones will die. It’s not an unreasonable fear — some have reportedly been killed in Israeli airstrikes, while three more were accidentally killed by Israeli troops. Fair or not, many in Israel believe Netanyahu isn’t doing all he can to free the remaining hostages. Others suspect the hostages are a second-tier priority for his government, below winning the war.
The fissures within Netanyahu’s coalition government are more obvious as well. After Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu reached out to his political rivals, including former generals Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, to join his war cabinet. The decision was packaged as a way to bring the nation together during one of its darkest moments. For Netanyahu, it was also a clever way to distribute some of the blame if Israel’s war strategy in Gaza proved to be unworkable.
Yet there isn’t much “unity” in the unity cabinet anymore. Eisenkot, a former military chief of staff, is increasingly vocal about his opposition to Netanyahu’s current strategy in Gaza and said in a television interview that claims of clear, rapid progress were utter lies. “Those who talk about an absolute defeat and lack of will and ability do not tell the truth,” Eisenkot said. He even suggested the Israelis should choose new leaders. “We need to go to the polls and have an election in the next few months, in order to renew the trust as currently there is no trust.” The message isn’t subtle: Your current leadership is deceiving you about how the war is going.
Netanyahu’s political allies have largely chosen to ignore Eisenkot’s public comments. But the former general isn’t wrong to state that Israel’s war strategy is causing more trouble than it’s worth. While thousands of Hamas militants have been killed over the last three and a half months — the U.S. estimates that 20% to 30% of the group’s membership has been taken off the battlefield — Hamas has a deep bench, is well ensconced in the Palestinian social fabric and remains as committed to defending its turf as it was on the first day of the war. Outside of Saleh Arouri, the Hamas deputy political chief who was assassinated in Lebanon, Hamas’ top military leadership in Gaza — Yehya Sinwar being the most infamous — is still alive and kicking. There are even reports that Hamas officials have reemerged in Gaza City, weeks after the Israeli military claimed operational control over the area.
All of this has less to do with Netanyahu, per se, and more to do with the objectives the prime minister embraced early on. Those objectives include freeing every hostage Hamas kidnapped on Oct. 7 and destroying Hamas as an organization. Two fairly straightforward goals, and justifiable ones at that.
The problem is that however justifiable those goals are, they are inherently contradictory to one another. Annihilating Hamas as a military and governing force in Gaza would jeopardize the lives of the hostages; the terrorist group wouldn’t have any reason to keep them alive if they themselves were at risk of death. Freeing the hostages, in turn, would require Israeli concessions to Hamas, which would undermine Israel’s goal of killing the group entirely. After all, the only reason Israel was able to get more than 100 hostages back to their families in late November was because it was willing to sign on to a short-term truce and release 240 Palestinian prisoners in return. Without those sweeteners, the hostages would still be in Gaza, wondering every day whether they will live or die.
As if this wasn’t enough, Netanyahu is also a prisoner of his own extreme right-wing coalition, which tends to equate all Palestinians with Hamas, is opposed to any concessions whatsoever and would prefer to solve the Gaza problem with even greater military force and mass expulsions.
Netanyahu didn’t start this war — Hamas did. But the prime minister is discovering how difficult it is to end it.
