Did Netanyahu Prolong the Gaza War To Save Himself?

A long exposé misses the mark.

President Donald Trump hosts a bilateral dinner for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Monday, July 7, 2025, in the Blue Room.
Official White House Photo by Daniel Torok

Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman, and Natan Odenheimer make a damning charge in the NYT Magazine: “How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power.” The evidence is, shall we say, circumstantial.

The setup:

Six months into the war in the Gaza Strip, Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing to bring it to a halt. Negotiations were underway for an extended cease-fire with Hamas, and he was ready to agree to a compromise. He had dispatched an envoy to convey Israel’s new position to the Egyptian mediators. Now, at a meeting at the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv, he needed to get his cabinet onboard. He had kept the plan off the meeting’s written agenda. The idea was to reveal it suddenly, preventing resistant ministers from coordinating their response.

It was April 2024, long before Netanyahu mounted his political comeback. The proposal on the table would have paused the Gaza war for at least six weeks. It would have created a window for negotiations with Hamas over a permanent truce. More than 30 hostages captured by Hamas at the start of the war would have been released within weeks. Still more would have been freed if the truce was extended. And the devastation of Gaza, where roughly two million people were trying to survive daily attacks, would have come to a halt.

The kicker:

But for Netanyahu, a truce also came with personal risk. As prime minister, he led a fragile coalition that depended on the support of far-right ministers who wanted to occupy Gaza, not withdraw from it. They sought a long war that would ultimately enable Israel to re-establish Jewish settlements in Gaza. If a cease-fire came too soon, these ministers might decide to collapse the ruling coalition. That would prompt early elections that polls showed Netanyahu would lose. Out of office, Netanyahu was vulnerable. Since 2020, he had been standing trial for corruption; the charges, which he denied, mostly related to granting favors to businessmen in exchange for gifts and favorable media coverage. Shorn of power, Netanyahu would lose the ability to force out the attorney general who oversaw his prosecution — as indeed his government would later attempt to do.

That’s . . . pretty thin. We’ve all known that the war was good for Netanyahu, both politically and personally. There are plenty of good reasons to want to preserve one’s governing coalition in the midst of war. And it would be impossible to prosecute a peace deal with the government collapsing. Which it would almost certainly have done:

Then Bezalel Smotrich, his finance minister, interrupted the proceedings. As a young activist in 2005, Smotrich was detained for weeks — though never charged — on suspicion of plotting to blow up vehicles on a major highway in order to slow the dismantling of Israeli settlements in Gaza. Along with Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national-security minister, Smotrich was now one of the strongest advocates in the cabinet for re-establishing those settlements. He had recently called for most of Gaza’s Palestinian population to leave. Now, at the cabinet meeting, Smotrich declared that he had heard rumors of a plan for a deal. The details disturbed him. “I want you to know that if a surrender agreement like this is brought forward, you no longer have a government,” Smotrich said. “The government is finished.”

It was 5:44 p.m., according to minutes of the meeting. At that moment, the prime minister was forced to choose between the chance of a truce and his political survival — and Netanyahu opted for survival. There was no cease-fire plan, he promised Smotrich. “No, no, there’s no such thing,” he said. And as the cabinet discussion moved on, Netanyahu quietly leaned over to his security advisers and whispered what must have by then become obvious to them: “Don’t present the plan.”

Again, this is not just Netanyahu’s political survival. It was the survival of a Likud-led response to the October 7 massacre. While I have no doubt that Netanyahu is a cynical creature, and is enjoying the resurgence that the war has given him, I also think that he’s a True Believer who wants the Israeli right—yes, preferably in the person of himself—to set the end stages of the conflict.

To understand the role that Netanyahu’s own calculations played in prolonging the war, we spoke with more than 110 officials in Israel, the United States and the Arab world. These officials — both supporters and critics — have all met, observed or worked with the prime minister since the start of the war and sometimes long before it began. We also reviewed scores of documents, including records of government meetings, communications among officials, negotiation records, war plans, intelligence assessments, secret Hamas protocols and court documents.

For obvious reasons, one of the most sensitive accusations about Netanyahu’s conduct of the war is that he prolonged it for his own personal political benefit. Whether or not they thought he had, everyone we spoke to agreed on one thing: The war’s extension and expansion has been good for Netanyahu. 

Which, again, is not the slightest bit in doubt. But also an entirely different thing than his having prolonged the war for that primary purpose. Indeed, the writers acknowledge as much:

It is of course impossible to say that Netanyahu made key wartime decisions entirely in the service of his own political survival. His personal quest for power is often inextricably enmeshed with genuine patriotism and the belief, which infuses his public pronouncements, that he alone knows how best to defend Israel. Beyond his own motives, war is a complex, chaotic process with many daily variables that take a course of their own. Like all Israeli prime ministers, Netanyahu lacks full executive control over a sprawling administration full of competing factions and interests. His enemies in Lebanon and Iran posed genuine threats to Israel, and their defeat has strengthened Israeli security. And his adversary in Gaza, Hamas, has blocked or slow-walked cease-fire negotiations during key stretches of the war, including at a point early last summer when Netanyahu appeared more willing to reach a truce.

They follow that with this:

Yet for all these caveats, our reporting has led us to three unavoidable conclusions. In the years preceding the war, Netanyahu’s approach to Hamas helped to strengthen the group, giving it space to secretly prepare for war. In the months before that war, Netanyahu’s push to undermine Israel’s judiciary widened already-deep rifts within Israeli society and weakened its military, making Israel appear vulnerable and encouraging Hamas to ready its attack. And once the war began, Netanyahu’s decisions were at times colored predominantly by political and personal need instead of only military or national necessity.

That paragraph does nothing to advance the argument. It’s mostly about things that happened before the war, then a repeat of the thesis. The positioning of the latter makes it appear a logical conclusion of the paragraph, but it is not.

We found that at key stages in the war, Netanyahu’s decisions extended the fighting in Gaza longer than even Israel’s senior military leadership deemed necessary. This was partly a result of Netanyahu’s refusal — years before Oct. 7 — to resign when charged with corruption, a decision that lost him the support of Israel’s moderates and even parts of the Israeli right. In the years since his trial, still ongoing, began in 2020, he instead built a fragile majority in Israel’s Parliament by forging alliances with far-right parties. It kept him in power, but it tied his fate to their extremist positions, both before the war and after it began.

Again, that does nothing to advance the thesis. War aims are a political matter, not a matter of military expertise. (To be sure, the probability of success and risk factors are within the expertise of senior officers, who should be advising the PM.) And the fact that his coalition is fragile is a fact, regardless of his own culpability in making it so before the war.

Indeed, most of the evidence presented thus far goes against the authors’ thesis. It was Netanyahu who was leaning toward a peace deal at the six-month point, but he has consistently been pushed in the direction of a more ruthless approach by hardliners.

Under political pressure from those coalition allies, Netanyahu slowed down cease-fire negotiations at crucial moments, missing windows in which Hamas was less opposed to a deal. He avoided planning for a postwar power transition, making it harder to direct the war toward an endgame. He pressed ahead with the war in April and July 2024, even as top generals told him that there was no further military advantage to continuing. When momentum toward a cease-fire seemed to grow, Netanyahu ascribed sudden significance to military objectives that he previously seemed less interested in pursuing, such as the capture of the southern city Rafah and later the occupation of the Gaza-Egypt border. And when an extended cease-fire was finally forged in January, he broke the truce in March in part to keep his coalition intact.

This is the most damning piece of evidence yet. To me, though, it points to an issue that we’ve discussed here many times: the war aims are unachievable so long as Gaza (and arguably the West Bank) exist as Palestinian territories. There’s essentially no end state that precludes Hamas, or something like it, from reconstituting and committing another atrocity.

But for Netanyahu, the immediate rewards have been rich. He has amassed more control over the Israeli state than at any other point in his 18-year tenure as prime minister. He has successfully prevented a state inquiry that would investigate his own culpability, saying that the fallout must wait until the Gaza war ends, even as the defense ministerarmy chiefdomestic spymaster and several top generals all either have been fired or have resigned. As he attends court up to three times a week for his corruption trial, his government is now moving to fire the attorney general who oversees that prosecution. The war’s continuation has also shored up his coalition. It gave him time to plan and enact his attack on Iran. Above all, as even his strongest supporters note, it kept him in office. “Netanyahu pulled off a political resurrection that no one — not even his closest allies — thought possible,” said Srulik Einhorn, a political strategist who is part of Netanyahu’s inner circle. “His leadership through a prolonged war with Hamas and a bold strike on Iran has reshaped the political map. He’s now in a strong position to win elections again.”

This is the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy in action. Nobody disputes that the war has been good for Netanyahu. That doesn’t prove he continued the war for that reason.

And, again, the coalition pressure thesis is bolstered by this:

Netanyahu’s biggest domestic political boost came in September 2024, when Gideon Saar, an opposition leader, agreed to shore up Netanyahu’s majority by bringing his small party into the governing coalition. Suddenly it was far harder for Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to make ultimatums: The government would more easily survive if one or the other departed.

With far greater room to maneuver, Netanyahu finally agreed to a truce in January 2025 — encouraged by the incoming President Trump and his Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff. The text of the deal was almost identical to the version that Netanyahu rejected the previous April. Ben-Gvir resigned in protest, taking his small group of lawmakers with him. But with Saar on board, Ben-Gvir was no longer essential to Netanyahu’s survival — at least for the moment.

While the distinction between “Netanyahu’s survival” and the survival of the Likud-led coalition may seem trivial, it is not. Israel is at war. Of course he didn’t want a more left-leaning coalition in charge of the peace. And, again: Netanyahu’s personal instinct seems to have been more moderate than that of the deciding votes in the coalition, until the coalition expanded to include more moderates.

By March, however, Netanyahu’s political calculus changed once more. Ultra-Orthodox coalition members were threatening to bring down the government, angry at the lack of concessions for their community in a new national budget. Ben-Gvir offered to return to keep Netanyahu’s alliance afloat, as long as the war resumed. On March 18, the Israeli Air Force began a major bombardment of Gaza, breaking the cease-fire. A day later, Ben-Gvir returned to the coalition. Netanyahu’s budget passed. The government survived. The war continued.

Again, this tracks with the coalition argument.

Finally, we get to this:

Next began the power grab. Comparing himself to Trump, Netanyahu revived the divisive judicial overhaul, advancing plans — derailed by the outbreak of war — to give politicians greater control over the appointment of judges to the Supreme Court. Above all, he sought to fire or restrain officials who either threatened his personal future or blocked his government’s policies. “In America and in Israel when a strong right wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will,” he wrote in March on X. “They won’t win in either place!”

I don’t know the nuances of Israeli politics well enough to have a strong view on this, but it certainly reeks of populism, if not authoritarianism. But this is March 2025, a year after Netanyahu ostensibly took the peace deal he was about to offer off the table after reading the room. He’s a shrewd politician, to be sure, but I can’t imagine he was plotting that far ahead. Certainly, the resurrection of Trump was far from a safe bet at that point.

And, again, this seems to reinforce the coalition narrative:

In early June, Netanyahu decided to proceed with an attack. Having presided over the worst failure in Israel’s military history, Netanyahu was edging toward political redemption.

Yet before the warplanes took off for Iran, Netanyahu needed to solve a problem at home. Several lawmakers in his fragile coalition, ignorant of the secret plans, were set to bring down his government. As in the crisis in March, the lawmakers were ultra-Orthodox Jews, known in Hebrew as Haredim. This time, they were furious at proposals to end the exemption from military service for the ultra-Orthodox minority. They planned to join the opposition in a vote to dissolve Parliament, triggering new elections, and the vote looked set to pass. As a caretaker prime minister, Netanyahu could still order the Iran attack, but its legitimacy would be undermined.

As the ultra-Orthodox leadership considered bringing down the government, Mike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, came to Netanyahu’s aid. He invited ultra-Orthodox politicians to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, warning them in general terms that their maneuvers risked endangering Israel’s fight against Iran. He also told them that U.S. support for Israel’s campaign would wane if the government collapsed, because the United States would be less willing to back major moves by an interim leader.

A few days later, on Monday, June 9, Netanyahu made the kind of political maneuver that has allowed him to survive for so long as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Sitting in his small office at the army headquarters in Tel Aviv, where he spends part of the week, Netanyahu asked an aide to call Moshe Gafni, the leader of one of the restive ultra-Orthodox parties in his coalition. Once Gafni picked up, the aide handed the phone to Netanyahu, who summoned Gafni to meet him immediately.

After Gafni arrived at the office around 6 p.m., he was presented with a sheet of paper and told to sign it. This was a confidentiality agreement, often used in the Israeli military, that obliges the signatory to keep a military secret. Anyone briefed on highly sensitive information in Israel is required to sign such a document, which allows for legal action against those who leak classified information. Gafni signed — and Netanyahu revealed the plan to attack Iran in four days’ time.

Gafni left the room worried. He wondered if Netanyahu, the consummate politician, was playing him. He also feared that Netanyahu was in fact sincere and that a vote to dissolve Parliament might prevent this historic attack from going ahead. Two days later, Gafni’s party voted to preserve the government, and Netanyahu survived as prime minister. Less than 24 hours later, Israeli warplanes set off for Iran, beginning the greatest episode of Netanyahu’s political career.

The multipronged maneuver showed Netanyahu at the height of his political powers. It highlighted his constant quest to ensure his political survival by placating and manipulating allies within his coalition and benefactors in the United States government, often all at once. It showed the frequent overlap among his personal goals, his political needs and the national interest. Above all, it highlighted how Netanyahu has instrumentalized war — whether in Gaza, Lebanon or in this case Iran — in part to stay in office. “The plan to strike Iran was the only thing that kept the Haredim from dissolving the government,” said Israel Cohen, a Haredi radio host and confidant of Gafni’s. “And Bibi knew that.”

Again, this is all sleight-of-hand. That Netanyahu was able to use the impending Iran strike to bolster his hold on power is the nature of wartime leadership. The rally ’round the flag thesis has been around a long time. But does anyone doubt that Netanyahu, who had been itching to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities for a very long time, did so now to save his own hide? Isn’t it more likely that he did so because a series of bold maneuvers had rendered Iran weaker than it has been in years, lessening the risk of seizing the moment?

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James Joyner
About James Joyner
James Joyner is a Professor of Security Studies. He's a former Army officer and Desert Storm veteran. Views expressed here are his own. Follow James on Twitter @DrJJoyner.

Comments

  1. steve says:

    What you seem to want is Netanyahu’s own words, or someone close to him, claiming he extended the war to help himself. AS you note, he is an experienced and clever politician. You arent going to find those words. I think the best you can do is point out that nearly the entire conduct of the war has been beneficial to the war and ask if Netanyahu has a history of political actions that benefit his political career and personal life. Of course he does. Has Netanyahu engaged in dubious behavior including accepting bribes? Yup. So you have an established sleaze ball running the country.

    But, you will never find those words so as long as there is political support for what he does, and in a war the rally round the flag effect is strong, he can do whatever he wants and we will never know or be able to prove anything. However, it does look like a duck and quack like a duck. (As an aside, I am dubious about the claim of the war effort falling apart if Netanyahu left office. Truman took over and we didnt suddenly lose. The war in Gaza is so one sided Israel wasn’t going to face any risks with a new PM.)

    Steve

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  2. Michael Reynolds says:

    The problem is the framing of the question.

    It is extraordinarily hard to prove motive. Especially so if one insists on a simple binary because there is almost never a single motive, it’s motives plural, not motive singular. Who, what, when and where are easy; why is always hard.

    In criminal prosecution they look for whether a perpetrator had a motive, not whether that purported motive was the singular cause. Does Netanyahu have a motive? Yes, of course. But is it 1 + 1 = 2? No, because humans are not equations.

    IOW, as @steve: points out, unless Netanyahu writes a memoir in which he states categorically that his sole motivation was saving his ass, you aren’t going to get there, and even then you won’t really have gotten any further than a motive.

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  3. JohnSF says:

    The problem is that the continuation of the war DOES help preserve Netanyahu.
    Smotrich and Ben Gvir have repeatedly threatened that any “permanent” cease-fire or negotiated peace deal that does not meet their terms (those being expulsion and annexation) will result in them bring down the government.

    If that happens the odds are against a Likud-led coalition. Likud would probably be the largest single party, on about 25% but the current opposing alliance is at about 65%
    Therefore Netanyahu is no longer PM.
    Therefore the court cases proceed.
    And Bibi goes to jail (very high probability).

    That’s a powerful argument for Netanyahu to continue to attempt to cozen the support of the ultras, and so to continue to not address any questions of “what resolves this?”

    It does not prove that was his reason.
    But if he had not prolonged the war he’d pretty certainly not be PM.

    As regards Iran, it’s pretty certain most Israeli PM’s of whatever party would have opted for the strike given the combination of massive opportunity and genuine threat potential.

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  4. James Joyner says:

    @steve: @Michael Reynolds: @JohnSF: I fully agree that Netanyahu had multiple motivations here. It just seems to me that the authors spend a whole lot of words showing that Netanyahu faced a lot of complications, yet somehow see each turn as an Aha! While I absolutely think Netanyahu was looking to save his premiership—and was certainly happy to stay out of jail—there’s just remarkably little evidence presented that those were his chief motivations. His ideological motivations have been established for a quarter century at this point.

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  5. Andy says:

    A couple of thoughts:

    Yes, the idea that Netanyahu is motivated by his own political fortunes just tells us he’s a politician. All politicians are motivated by their own political future. There’s a reason so many Presidents kept kicking the ball on Afghanistan, for example. The idea, however, that this is the sole or primary factor doesn’t pass a rudimentary analysis, as James explained.

    The idea that the war benefits Netanyahu is only valid in the short term. Israel cannot sustain this conflict forever, and there are already large cracks showing in a military force that is composed almost entirely of reservists. It has significant economic effects when a substantial amount of manpower is removed from the economy, not to mention the direct costs. This is in addition to problems of discipline and morale, which are inevitable when fighting a foe like Hamas for an extended period with part-time reserve forces. And then there is the psychological cost on the population, which is still under attack from Yemen’s ballistic missiles.

    And consider this – what would benefit Netanyahu more – continuing a war that’s past the point of being militarily winnable with no future, or getting a deal where Bibi keeps the coalition together? Obviously, the latter. If he can get a deal and stay in power, it would cement him as one of Israel’s all-time greats. That’s what he wants, and I think the current strategy is playing for time and hoping he can make that happen – not trying to continue the conflict indefinitely for his own personal benefit.

    Third, I don’t think people understand how Israel’s government works. Netanyahu isn’t a President with full executive authority. Any deal negotiated would need to be approved by at least the security cabinet, if not the full cabinet. He needs to ensure that he not only has a majority of the votes, but also enough additional votes to ensure the deal sticks and endures for the long term. This is especially the case if the deal would cause a government collapse.

    The fragile coalition is also reflective of a huge diversity of opinion among the Israeli population on what a just war conclusion would look like, and that fundamentally makes things difficult to accomplish on a political level to get a deal that can endure. Like a lot of polities, Israelis want something that probably isn’t possible – the permanent end of Hamas, replaced by a friendly government, and the return of all hostages.

    On that score, even if the deal is approved, if it causes a collapse of the government, then the deal could die. The next government could refuse to implement it, or want a different deal, or any number of other things. No one has any idea how that would shake out or what government would emerge.

    So, any deal has two significant hurdles, which are both dangers in a fragile coalition. It seems pretty likely and obvious that Netanyahu would not sacrifice himself and his coalition for a deal that could be DOA after a government collapse. Even if he was willing to fall on his sword (few politicians are), so to speak, there’s no incentive if the sacrifice is for naught.

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  6. just nutha says:

    Have we deconstructed a nothing burger sad meal article enough now? Have we split the “certainly a motive, but not the motive” hair enough times now? The lengths you guys will go to in defense of an indefensible are breathtaking. SMH

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  7. steve says:

    Andy- The fact that the Gaza war continues despite the strains on the country and AFAICT no real gains suggests to me that he has a personal interest in maintaining the war. Also, unless I missed it, have they ever announced solid after the war plans and what would be considered the grounds for ending? AS I said above, nothing bad happens to the war effort if he isn’t PM anymore. I dont think we can prove that the actions he has taken are primarily motivated with his avoiding accountability, but every action taken in the war could have been taken by another leader. He and his coalition, the ones in power are the ones who claim there cant be any efforts to hold him accountable while the war is in effect. That’s BS.

    Steve

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  8. James Joyner says:

    @just nutha: It’s the cover story for this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. It’s a major attempt to shape the national conversation.

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  9. Andy says:

    @just nutha:

    Explanation is not advocacy.

    @steve:

    So, what is your theory then? Let’s say Bibi didn’t have the threat of potential prosecution looming over him, what do you think would be different in terms of the situation? How would Bibi act differently?

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  10. just nutha says:

    @James Joyner: A major attempt to shape the national conversation a quarrel among a small cohort of putative “decision makers” on a topic that’s easily as polarizing as Trump. Good luck to ya’.

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  11. just nutha says:

    @Andy:

    Explanation is not advocacy.

    It’s a major attempt to shape the national conversation.

    Maybe someone is not on the page they think they’re on. Hmmm …

  12. Jay L Gischer says:

    I find this fascinating. If the question were posed: “Did Netanyahu prolong the war to preserve his coalition government?”, I think the answer is pretty clearly, yes, he did.

    So the difference between that and “to save himself” is mostly interpretive. I mean, he did try to mess with the prosecutor. Maybe he has more tricks up his sleeve. You know, like a judge that says the whole prosecution is unconstitutional at the 11th hour. To pick a completely arbitrary and random possibility.

    No, the thesis would not pass academic muster. Yes, I agree that war aims are political, not operational.

    Of course, we are in a political climate where a guy who claims “they are eating our cats and dogs” gets elected. So as a political assault, it seems completely fair game. Far closer to true than our enemies ever get.

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  13. Andy says:

    @just nutha:

    To get pedantic, my saying “explanation is not advocacy” only applies to things I write, not anyone else.

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  14. Gustopher says:

    Maybe Netanyahu just wants to ethnically cleanse Greater Israel, kill a bunch of Palestinians, and commit a whole bunch of war crimes? God forbid the man have a hobby.

    Motivation doesn’t matter, the actions speak for themselves.

    To the extent that he is trying to avoid jail, we should offer him a lovely suite at Mara Lago and a promise of no extradition. If he goes for it, and it helps stop the atrocities, great.

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  15. gVOR10 says:

    I’m reminded of an old Art Buchwald bit. I forget what he called it, so I’ll say the attention coefficient. It was the average interval in minutes that a politician spent in between thoughts of himself. I think he said for most it was a matter of low double digits, but for more successful politicians, world leaders, it was a couple minutes. The one exception was Charles DeGaulle, who spent all of his time thinking about France. But this was an exception that proved the rule as DeGaulle thought he was France. Netanyahu’s motivations may be complex, but they stem from an exaggerated sense of himself.

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  16. Michael Reynolds says:

    Might Netanyahu have done everything he’s done even if there were no bribery prosecution? Yes. The accusation cannot be proven and doesn’t matter anyhow since the real issue is his actions, which are knowable.

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  17. Han says:

    The idea that staying out of jail may not be a “chief motivating factor” is just incomprehensible to me. How would maintaining one’s freedom and autonomy NOT be a chief motivating factor in any actions that could be reasonably said to have helped maintain it?

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  18. Andy says:

    @Michael Reynolds:

    Yes, actions are what’s important.

    And this is a war between two sides, and each side is staking out its positions, demands, and red lines.

    The theories about what motivates Bibi rest on the assumption that his supposed motivation to avoid prosecution is the only or primary obstacle to the end of the conflict, which is most certainly not the case. We’ve already discussed some of the other factors on the Israeli side, but it takes two to tango. Hamas has been, and continues to be, an obstacle, especially considering that they started the conflict in the first place and reneged on proposals in the past. Even with the deaths of most of their Gaza leaders and the bulk of their fighting force, they still have a desire to keep fighting until the last Palestinian, and they continue to have political goals for the end of the conflict that they aren’t compromising on. They are motivated by their political future just as much, if not more than, Israeli leaders, and also desire to remain in control of Gaza, and aren’t interested in compromising that, no matter how many Palestinians die.

    And the inaction of the international community and regional powers is also a factor here. Unlike the Former Yugoslavia, where there were (and still are) various peacekeeping forces that were essential to conflict cessation, there remains no interest in anyone doing the same for the Palestinians, most especially Arab governments, who care less about Palestinians than almost anyone. Everyone seems to agree that the only two choices they will allow are Israeli occupation, or a return of Hamas (or maybe PIJ or some other group) as the rulers of Gaza.

    Ultimately, I think there will be a deal to get the hostages back that won’t include the disarmament or end of Hamas as a political-military organization. It will probably result in Hamas going back to controlling most of the strip and exacting rents at the point of a gun from aid groups and the populace, as it’s done for a very long time. This is a return to the status quo ante, although there is a possibility that Hamas’ new leadership may realize the folly of trying to destroy Israel, given the effects of its decision to attack on Oct. 7th have been disastrous for armed anti-Zionism generally, and Gaza specifically.

    The main question is what each side can politically accept and deliver to its relevant political constituencies, and that is not just a question for Israel and Bibi, and it does not, in my view, hinge on Bibi’s potential for future prosecution.

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  19. JohnSF says:

    @Andy:
    It might have been possible to construct an alternative to Hamas; but that would require the Palestinian Authority aka Fatah to assume control. Which is anathema to much of Netanyahus’s coalition, including a fair chaunk of Likud itself.
    And would also require some Arab/Muslim state to provide the muscle for supressing the inevitable Hamas counter-action.
    Nobody seems keen to be the one to bell that cat, or wrestle that tar-baby.

    But I still think it likely that Netanyahus’s desire to keep his coalition intact has foreclosed some options.
    Certainly, a lot of Israeli’s seem to think so.
    Whether in practice they would be able to obtain better outcomes is unknowable.
    They would almost certainly have responded similary to the October atrocities.

    Just as support for the Iran air offensive is pretty general in Israel.

    Incidentally, I don’t think its that the Arab governments don’t care at all re Palestinisns: it’s just that the whole business has too many potentially very bad downsides for them.
    Same applies to eg Europeans: they may dislike what’s happening in Gaza, but any suggestion of sending “peace-keepers” would meet with a hearty public “f@ck off.”
    For obvious reasons.

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  20. JohnSF says:

    @Gustopher:
    If he wanted to do that, and was able to do that, why not just get on and DO IT?
    The answer being, regardless of what Natanyahu might or might not wish, either personally, or out of political calculaltion, he faces constraints bothe internal and external.
    Netanyahu is not Emperor of Israel, and even if he were, Israel has a number of external factors to consider.

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  21. Sirkowski says:

    Israeli conservatives have used Palestine to stay in power for most of modern Israel’s history. It’s a forever war and all who oppose it are enemies.

  22. JohnSF says:

    @Sirkowski:
    This is highly arguable.
    Until 1977 the government of Israel was dominated by the Labor Party.
    Their dominance was destroyed by the combination of the rise of the Mizrahi/”Russian” alignment supporting Likud, and above all by the Second Intifada, which convinced a large number of Israeli’s that a compromise peace was impossible.

    The subsequent political fracturing has meant that the “far-right” minority parties hold the balance of power between Likud and the opposition.
    And for obvious reasons, Likud under Netanyahu has been inclined, out of both attitude and interest, to to more amenable to their demands.

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  23. JohnSF says:

    @Andy:
    He might perhaps, if less dependant on the “far right”, have attempted a “day after the war” policy re Gaza that has some prospect of actually working, instead of hoping that the the horses might form a harmonious chorus.

    1
  24. JohnSF says:

    Incidentally, regarding the Iran strikes, the more they are considered, the more apparent it bcomes that they were the outcome not of some whim of Netanyahu, but of operational planning and intelligence developed over decades for this contingency.
    The IDF in general are not Bibi’s greatest fans, to put it mildly.

    If this sort of operation was not already being planned under Lapid and Bennett (and probably Olmert, for that matter) I’ll eat my hat.

    Also, there are indications that Israel had special forces insertion teams operating on the ground in Iran.
    Which raises the question: based out of where, exactly?
    Anyone looked close at Iraqi Kurdistan, lately, I wonder?

    The point being: this was one operation that had almost universal political support in Israel.

    And was also, it’s evident, was one of the most effective combinations of intelligence, operational planning, and execution, in recent military history.

    And if we might get rather less of the “F-35’s are useless” and “invincible Russian SAM’s” and “HYPERSONIC!!!” interwebs chat, that would be a bonus.

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  25. just nutha says:

    @JohnSF: Isn’t there some sort of a liberal adage about needing to go back 50 years to prove a point? I agree that Sirkowski’s point is exaggerated, but maybe less than you’d like to acknowledge. Call it a draw?

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  26. JohnSF says:

    @just nutha:
    Well. I would, but I’m an awkward sod. 😉
    There was an non-“right”government as recently as 2022.
    And there seems to be a fair probability of the opposition coalition winning the next elections.
    What might be intersting is the possibility of peeling off more of the Mizrah and Russian voters from the right.

    However, that does not mean “peace in the Middle East”.
    Few Israelis, even on the left, are now inclined to any sort of settlement that formally acknowledges Hamas, or might institutionalise their hold on Gaza.
    Nor are they going to tolerate a nuclear armed Iran.

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