But not only his war
As a longtime national security reporter, I’ve gone to Israel many times over the past five decades to report on issues ranging from its bombing the wrong targets to its political disputes with the White House. When it comes to digging out the truth, I’ve learned that newly retired Israeli Air Force generals are often the best place to begin. My American sources, some still on active duty, have had the highest praise for the ability and integrity of the officers running the Israeli Air Force, and they have been right. There is a lot of straight talk to be had at suburban homes outside of Tel Aviv—always on background, of course.
Last summer when the Israeli’s right-wing government sought to reduce the power of Israel’s Supreme Court, more than one thousand members of the Air Force reserve, including 235 fighter pilots, signed a letter saying they would not serve if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted on implementing the imminent plan. The New York Times quoted a reserve Air Force brigadier general, Ofer Lapidot, telling a radio interviewer: “When we are on the edge of an abyss—or losing the country we fought for—the contract has been broken.”
No such complaints have been publicly uttered by Israeli pilots since October 7. For the past four months they have been involved in what is known in military argot as a “turkey shoot”: the flying of thousands of sorties over Gaza with no anti-aircraft opposition and no capability of distinguishing military targets from civilian ones. The bombs have been primarily responsible for killing and injuring what is now close to 100,000 Palestinians, many of them children. It is impossible to know how many Hamas fighters are included in the toll.
There is no record of any Israeli Air Force pilot voicing public or private opposition to the unchallenged bombing attacks, which are continuing today. Israel and the United States have not recognized the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in the Hague, which has been hearing testimony on the legality of the Israeli response.
Israel, where widespread demonstrations in support of a strong Supreme Court won worldwide admiration, was represented during the UN debate this week by its ambassador, Gilad Eilan, who accused the UN’s relief and works agency (UNRWA), which is responsible for the delivery of food and other essential goods to the refugees in Gaza, of being “a terrorist organization.” In Gaza, he said, “Hamas is the UN, and the UN is Hamas.”
There was a point in the weeks just after October 7 when, with the support of American advisers, war crimes trials for the Hamas leadership were considered in lieu of the all-out bombing of Gaza then being advocated by the right-wing leadership. Another proposal, modeled after the exile of Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement to Tunis in 1982, would have led to the expulsion of the Hamas leadership in return for the release of all hostages. The Israeli government opted instead for all-out bombing, along with a Mossad commitment to assassinate all of the Hamas leadership living abroad within one year.
The ongoing air war in Gaza, with its implicit.notion of collective punishment, has been Bibi’s war from the start, and he remains its most strident spokesman. Air Force officers who cared enough about Israel’s constitution to protest in the spring and summer are now routinely bombing civilian targets with no voiced regrets and no questions—at least not in public. Netanyahu has made it clear he is no longer interested in prisoner exchanges or any end-of-war talks with Hamas: he wants Hamas dead, leaders and all, and gone. And he has the vast majority of Israelis, including the military and the once-derided extreme right wing, behind him. In Bibi’s view, President Joe Biden must keep the American bombs and other weaponry coming and continue to veto any ceasefire resolutions in the United Nations. So far Biden has complied on both counts. (A third such resolution in the Security Council was vetoed yesterday by US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, clearly acting under orders from Biden.) There has been some muddled language from White House surrogates, such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken, about the need for a ceasefire and prisoner exchange, but such negotiations are moribund.
In the immediate aftermath of October 7, Netanyahu seemed to be written off as politically dead by most of those I spoke to. The issue was that the Hamas rampage took place on his watch. But that failure, traumatic as it was, is no longer an issue, and he is completely in charge and relishing it. In an interview on February 11 with ABC correspondent Jonathan Karl, Netanyahu blatantly ignored the worries of the Biden administration and the American people, including the younger generation of Jews, by insisting that Israel’s neighbors in the Middle East “don’t have to give…second thoughts” about having to deal with the humanitarian situation in Gaza. “We’ve been doing it and I’ve been directing it systematically. Victory is within reach [and] will be the best thing that will happen, not only for Israel but for the Palestinians themselves. I can’t see a future for the Palestinians or for peace in the Middle East if Hamas is victorious.”
Netanyahu claimed that Israel has “killed and wounded over twenty thousand Hamas terrorists . . . and we’re doing everything we can to minimize civilian casualties and continue to do so.” Sounding like an American general in the worst days of the Vietnam War, he said: “We drop thousands of fliers. We phone Palestinians in their homes. We ask them to leave. We give them safe corridors and safe zones . . . and let me tell you one other thing. We’re going to win this thing. Victory is within reach.”
Karl asked him: “Well, you can kill them [Hamas] as a military force, but how do you kill the idea of a resistance as long as there is occupation? At the end of this process . . . doesn’t there need to be a Palestinian state?”
Obviously annoyed, Netanyahu replied: “Everybody who talks about a two-state solution—well, I ask, what do you mean by that? Should the Palestinians have an army? . . . Can they sign a military pact with Iran? Can they import rockets from North Korea and other deadly weapons? Should they continue to educate their children for terrorism and annihilation? . . . Of course not.”
He said that “in any future agreement, which everyone agrees is far off, I think the Palestinians should have the power to govern themselves.” He listed a series of limitations of such power: “none of the power should threaten Israel. . . . The most important power that has to remain in Israel's hands is overriding security control in the area west of Jordan [the West Bank]. That includes Gaza.
“Otherwise,” Netanyahu said, “History has shown terrorism comes back, and we don't want terrorism to come back.” His statement was ironic, given the increasing IDF-supported violence in the West Bank by Israeli settlers against Palestinian property owners.
The war has been marked by lots of what, sadly, is irrelevant talk from Biden and Blinken about the necessity of a two-state solution. Bibi is now unchallenged, and, if he gets his way—as he has in all recent policy decisions—Israel will emerge from the war with political and military control of land that he and his fellow conservative leaders have long sought. And Bibi will be the man who did it.
And this will happen on Joe Biden’s watch.
In my reporting I try as much as possible to avoid the day-to-day public statements of Biden’s foreign policy team and rely on sources I have known for decades who have access to intelligence and the inside policy disputes. I have had contacts in Washington and in Israel with firsthand information about Israel’s nuclear arsenal. It might be time for senior US officials to break the taboo and begin to talk about the capability of that arsenal and the implications of it being in Netanyahu’s hands.
One mistake I and others made after October 7 was in misjudging Netanyahu’s ultimate goal. There is little question now that he saw the war from its first days as a vehicle for annihilating Hamas and opening up Israel to the possibility of reclaiming all of Gaza and the West Bank. There would be no more talk of the Oslo Accords and no longer a supposedly independent Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
An Israeli contact of mine of many decades with direct information about high-level Israeli thinking in the aftermath of October 7 supported the initial bombing in Gaza as targeted, so he claimed, solely at Hamas office and apartment buildings. He saw the early civilian casualties as an acceptable cost and opposed the international pressure by the end of last year for a ceasefire because “it would be a clear cut victory for Hamas.” He told me last December that there was a second reason: “Israel is sending a message to its neighbors. You attack Israel? Look at Gaza to see what you will get in return.”
But even then, amid his rage at Hamas as someone who fought and was seriously wounded in combat for his country, he told me that the “problem” was not Israel’s war with Hamas but “Bibi’s war on the Palestinian Authority and idea of an independent state.” By January, he was reduced to arguing that the American fire-bombings of Tokyo and Yokohama and Dresden and Leipzig and the dropping of two nuclear bombs was “seen as fully justified.”
To his credit, he also expressed concern that “under Bibi, the war—and its destruction—are not wedded to any reasonable national postwar political plan which would lead to an independent Palestinian state.” His earlier support for the war on Gaza, he added, “may be futile” because of the international furor and condemnation that has resulted. He continued , nonetheless, to praise Biden’s support for the war, but said the president “should try to limit the damage” that the war was inflicting on civilians. He thought Biden should “demand” that Israel should begin “a serious process of settling the conflict with the Palestinians.”
America’s immediate foreign policy goal, he told me, should be to reach some kind of “an understanding with Iran”—seen in Washington as supporting a number of anti-American proxies in the region—but that goal “cannot succeed as long as Israel continues to occupy and disenfranchise the Palestinians and deny them the right to self-determination.” The Bush administration’s post 9-11 “fantasies of regime change, democratization of traditional societies, and long-term occupation as was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said, “should be firmly rejected.”
President Biden should make a speech now, he said, “about how, when the destruction of Hamas is achieved, his administration, together with friendly Arab regimes, will begin to advance and implement the two-state solution.”
If only.
A European long involved in sophisticated peace making efforts in the Middle East told me he has an intractable view of the situation today. Israel “is committing genocide and most of the world is aghast, and most Arabs and Muslims will never forgive this. How could any other Israeli leader [than Netanyahu] translate this into a strategic victory? The Palestinian Authority is discredited. . . . It is hated by the people of the West Bank because it oppresses them and does nothing to protect them or their land from Israeli murder and expansion and it has no support in Gaza.”
Such sentiments are widely known, if not always agreed with, in the journalistic, academic and diplomatic communities, and surely known to many in the White House. The important question, to which there is yet to be an answer, is does the president of the United States know?
If only.
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