Avi Shlaim
Benjamin Netanyahu grew up in a very nationalistic Zionist home, and he’s always been on the right wing of the Zionist movement. He personifies some of the most negative aspects of Zionism, like racism, militarism, and Jewish supremacy, but, above all, the territorial ambition of the Israeli right, which is Greater Israel. His political career has been dedicated to preventing the emergence of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
But he is not alone: the Likud party has never accepted the case for a two-state solution. The policy guidelines of Netanyahu’s current government say that Jews have an exclusive right to sovereignty over the whole Land of Israel, which for nationalists includes the West Bank or, as they prefer to call it, Judea and Samaria. This is a stark denial of any Palestinian national rights anywhere in historic Palestine. This position of the Netanyahu government is more extreme than the July 2018 Jewish Nation-State law, which said the Jews have a unique right to self-determination in the State of Israel. This was a claim to exclusive Jewish rights to statehood within the pre-1967 borders of Israel, but it didn’t lay the claim to Jewish sovereignty over the West Bank.
Netanyahu, before the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, used to boast that Israel has won, that the Palestinians are defeated, and that without conceding anything to the Palestinians, Israel can have peace treaties with Arab states. He was referring to the Abraham Accords, the peace accords between Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, which were brokered by Donald Trump in his first term as US president in 2020. For Netanyahu, this was a major diplomatic victory: peace with Sunni Arab states without making any concessions on the Palestinian issue.
There used to be a collective Arab position on peace with Israel embodied in the Arab Peace Initiative, which was adopted at the Arab League summit in Beirut in 2002. It says Israel can have peace and normalization with all twenty-two members of the Arab League in return for an end of occupation and an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, with a capital city in East Jerusalem. Netanyahu has always rejected this offer and laid a claim to exclusive Jewish sovereignty over the entire area, from the river to the sea. The premise of this policy was that Hamas would be able to govern Gaza. Hamas would be contained within Gaza as an open-air prison without threatening Israel’s security.
But on October 7, Hamas launched the most devastating attack on Israelis since 1948, so Netanyahu’s position was undermined. The Hamas attack sent the powerful message that the Palestinians will not be sidelined; the Palestinian issue will remain on the international agenda; and resistance will continue to the Israeli occupation under the leadership of Hamas. Netanyahu then changed his tune and reversed his policy. Now he said that Hamas is completely unacceptable in any form. His new war aim was the total eradication of Hamas. But this is impossible because as long as there are people in Gaza, there will be resistance. The proof is that after two years of relentless bombardment, Hamas is still standing and still fighting.
Netanyahu’s other war aim is permanent Israeli military control over Gaza. The undeclared war aim is to make Gaza uninhabitable. Netanyahu has gone a long way toward achieving this aim by destroying over 80 percent of the housing and civilian infrastructure of Gaza; by destroying the health care system; by the systematic destruction of the educational system; and by drastically reducing the ability of the Gazans to grow their own food. So far, he has succeeded in preventing the birth of a Palestinian state.
You asked about whether this is the logical endgame of Netanyahu’s career. In a sense, it is, although he’s gone too far and engaged in genocide, which was never part of any previous Israeli plan. This is really damaging in the long run because he’s destroyed any claim by Israel to hold the moral high ground. This is encapsulated in the International Criminal Court arrest warrant for him, because now the prime minister of Israel is a war criminal, which means that Israel is a criminal state. He has inflicted permanent damage to Israel’s international reputation. He’s on trial for serious corruption charges inside Israel, and he’s also a fugitive from international justice. And he knows that if there is an election, his party would lose, he would lose his immunity, and he’ll probably end up in jail. The war in Gaza has been a strategic disaster for Israel, and a major reason for pursuing it was Netanyahu’s desire to stay out of jail.
Now the prime minister of Israel is a war criminal, which means that Israel is a criminal state.