The operational pattern across Netanyahu’s tenures is consistent enough to constitute a strategy: prevent Palestinian statehood by sustaining the Hamas/PA split; maintain Gaza as a pressure valve rather than a political problem to be resolved; keep the conflict active at a level that justifies military budgets, settlement expansion, and emergency governance without triggering the kind of decisive confrontation that would force a political settlement.
The West Bank fits the same pattern. Settlement expansion under Netanyahu has not been an ideological excess running ahead of policy — it has been policy, methodically consuming the territorial contiguity that a Palestinian state requires while negotiations ostensibly continued. Each new outpost rendered the two-state solution marginally less viable. The cumulative effect was not accidental.
The Abraham Accords fit it too. Normalisation with Gulf states without reference to Palestinian statehood was presented as a diplomatic breakthrough. Its actual function was to decouple Arab recognition of Israel from the Palestinian question entirely, removing the last regional incentive Israel faced to negotiate seriously.
The Iran war fits the same logic extended to the regional level. A negotiated settlement with Iran that leaves the Islamic Republic intact and Hezbollah protected is, from Netanyahu’s perspective, a failure, because it forecloses the permanent state of existential threat that his political identity requires. He needs enemies that cannot be finally defeated, only managed, because final defeat would raise the question of what Israel does next, politically and territorially.
The Gaza genocide fits it too. A destroyed Gaza with no governing authority and a dispersed population is not a solution. It is the perpetuation of a problem in a form that precludes solution, which is the point. A Gaza that cannot govern itself cannot negotiate, cannot be recognised, and cannot anchor a Palestinian state.
Netanyahu’s refusal to back the US-Iran deal fits the pattern precisely. A settlement that stabilises the region, removes the existential Iranian threat, and opens the door to political normalisation is the one outcome his doctrine cannot accommodate.
Peace, in any form, is the enemy of perpetual conflict as policy.