Netanyahu’s Wars

IN RECENT WEEKS CONVERSATIONS in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, as well as in capitals of Israel’s neighbours, have centred on one question: How many wars will Israel be fighting by the end of the long, hot summer?

There is no simple answer.

“How many wars have you got?” asks a regional diplomat by way of response.

“We’re fighting six already and that won’t change. A couple will calm down, a couple will escalate. This is going to be our life for years,” says a hawkish Israeli analyst.

“Just one conflict will be underway… and that will be on a slow burn,” a Palestinian civil rights activist hopes. “But it is a horrible, lethal conflict and it will claim many more lives.”

The truth is that no one knows.

Last week, the wider regional conflagration that so many have feared since Hamas militants stormed out of Gaza into southern Israel in October 2023 to kill 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted another 250, appeared to take another step closer.

There have long been fears of escalation on Israel’s northern frontier where a 10-month war of attrition between Israel and Hezbollah, the extremist Lebanon-based and Iran-backed Islamist movement, has claimed hundreds of lives and displaced hundreds of thousands. Twelve children who had gathered to play football in a northern Israeli village on Satur­day, July 27, were killed by a rocket almost certainly fired by Hezbollah. “The state of Israel will not and cannot let this pass. Our response will come, and it will be harsh,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a visit to the grieving residents of Majdal Shams, a majority Druze Muslim community in a region annexed by Israel from Syria in 1981.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving leader, is a great survivor and, till the October 7 Hamas attack, the country’s undisputed Mr Security. He is fighting on multiple fronts even as the war in Gaza drags on. Pragmatic and cynical, Netanyahu has shown an unshakeable belief in his own judgement—and an ability to outmanoeuvre his opponents. His next move will decide the fate of a volatile region

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Quite how harsh became clear on Tuesday and Wednesday (July 30 and July 31). First a senior Hezbollah commander was killed by an airstrike in Beirut. Then, in an attack as spectacular as any for some years, Ismail Haniyeh, the political leader of Hamas, died in Tehran in what appeared to be a second missile strike almost certainly launched by Israel. Neither could have been launched without an order from the Israeli prime minister.

Though many factors are involved, particularly domestic politics in the US and Iran as well as the carefully calibrated calculations of the leaders of Hamas and Hezbollah, it is Netanyahu, the 74-year-old veteran politician still very much in charge of Israel, who will decide how many wars his country is fighting when autumn comes. These conflicts—whatever their origins in recent months, years or even decades—may eventually be known to historians as Netanyahu’s wars, and that is, in many ways, what they will be.

Netanyahu has fought wars before, of course. As a young soldier, he fought with the Sayeret Matkal, an elite special forces unit, and took part in a series of raids and assaults between 1968 and 1972. This period fell between the major conflicts of 1967 and 1973, so the main target of the best known operations in which Netanyahu was involved were the Palestinian armed groups that had launched a new wave of transnational attacks against Israeli targets. This was an early lesson for a young man with big ambitions in the use of military force to fight terrorism, with all its complex political, social, cultural and other roots. Tellingly, the CIA referred to the Israeli effort, which involved a punitive raid on Beirut in which the Lebanese airline’s fleet of passenger jets was largely destroyed to force action against the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) forces in the coun­try, as “counter terrorism”, without the hyphen. Washington’s diplomats in Lebanon complained about civilian casualties caused by Israeli reprisals following PLO strikes and, much as they are doing this week, urged restraint.

The battle against ‘terrorism’ became a central theme for Netanyahu. It chimed with the hardline strand of Zionism and bleak sense of Jewish history as a ‘succession of holocausts’ he had inherited from his father. The battle against terrorism was described in language he has used repeatedly since October 7, most recently in his address to the US Congress

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The experience that marked Netanyahu the most—and launched his political career—also involved a terrorist attack. In 1976, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacked an Air France plane travelling to Paris from Tel Aviv and directed it to Uganda. Israel mounted an audacious and successful rescue attempt, sending special forces thousands of miles to Entebbe airport where they freed the Jewish hostages being held there. The leader of the key assault team was Yonatan, Netanyahu’s older and idolised brother, who was killed in the raid’s final minutes.

From then on, the battle against “terrorism” became a central theme for Netanyahu. It chimed with the hardline strand of Zionism and bleak sense of Jewish history as a “succession of Holocausts” he had inherited from his father, but also with a resurgent conservative worldview increasingly influential in the US. These two ideological currents met and melded in a series of conferences organised by Netanyahu, who had junked his ambitions to be a management consultant and was a rising star of Israel’s strident diplomacy. At these, the battle against terrorism was described in language that Netanyahu has used repeatedly since October 7, most recently in his address to Congress last week.

“This is not a clash of civilisations. It’s a clash between barbarism and civilisation,” Netanyahu told the US lawmakers. More than 40 years earlier, speakers at the Yonatan conference— named after his brother—that Netanyahu organised in Jerusa­lem described the importance of “rallying the democracies of the world to a struggle against terrorism” as “part of a larger conflict pitting the forces of civilisation” against those of “savagery and violence” and “barbarism”.

It was terrorism too that brought Netanyahu to power: the combination of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin by a Jewish extremist and the suicide bombing campaign launched by Hamas which so undermined Israeli popular support for the Oslo peace process of the 1990s. This gave him the launchpad necessary to win his first term as prime minister, and establish a reputation as ‘Mr Security’ that would last until October 7 last year and the worst failing of Israeli’s security establishment since the state’s foundation in 1948.

Yet it is not Netanyahu’s ideology or rhetoric that will decide how many wars Israel will be fighting in a month or so but his pragmatism and, detractors say, outright cynicism.

N DECEMBER LAST year, Yoav Gallant, Israel’s defence minister, said Israel was fighting on seven fronts: “Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Judea and Samaria (the occupied West Bank), Iraq, Yemen and Iran.” Since, with the exception of Iraq, there has been significant continuing violence involving Israeli forces in all these places. This is not surprising, analysts in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv say, claiming that all are linked by Tehran’s Axis of Resistance, a coalition of motley armed groups, including Hamas and Hezbollah. Other observers point out that Israel, traumatised by the bloody October 7 attacks, is now seeking to re-establish security through deterrence and aiming to land heavy, if not knockout, blows on the ring of enemies that surround it.

As a consequence, few think the conflict in Gaza will come to an end soon. Back in January, senior Israeli defence officials and well-connected analysts often used by the Israeli military to voice their views in public were talking about a multi-year campaign in the territory to end the threat posed by the Islamist extremist organisation. They cited Operation Defensive Shield, a three-year-long campaign across the West Bank in the early noughts as an example. Now, with 39,000 dead in Gaza, mostly civilians according to most estimates, peace in the territory looks distant. Successive rounds of ceasefire talks have faltered, with only minor changes to proposals made by negotiators in January. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week that the parties were “inside the 10-yard line and driving toward the goal line in getting an agreement” but in reality there is still little obvious sign that Israel—that is to say, Netanyahu—or Hamas has made anywhere near sufficient compromise for an agreement.

There is a good reason for this: neither desires peace at the moment, at least not on the terms being offered. Hamas recog­nises that many Gazans are deeply resentful of the destruction and death the October attack on Israel brought upon them. Food is scarce, shelter rarer still, and health services have collapsed. Life is increasingly anarchic, brutal, with criminal gangs on the rise across the largely ungoverned territory. Aid is getting in, but in nowhere near sufficient quantities given the obliteration of almost all infrastructure, agriculture and supply chains. Hamas has access to fuel and food, skimmed off the aid deliveries or through their own channels, as well as stocks of weapons. Some are being made from unexploded ordnance fired by their enemies. Aid agencies, too, speak of small but certain signs that many blame the Islamist extremists as well as Israel for their plight.

“They are in their tunnels while we are trying to be human beings in the open air,” said a Gazan doctor, currently in northern Gaza, and very unwilling to give his name.

But Hamas leaders recognise too that they have made important gains. They have put the question of the future of the Palestinians and the Israeli occupation of territories seized in 1967 back at the centre of the world’s agenda. They have also inflicted significant losses on Israel, and divided its society in a way that weakens the country profoundly. They have also provoked Israel into a war that has shredded the state’s inter­national reputation. Last week, the new British government dropped its challenge to the International Criminal Court (ICC) arrest warrants for Israeli leaders including Netanyahu. The longer the war goes on, the more diplomatic damage is done to their foes, increasing leverage for Hamas when the time does come to call a halt.

Above all, Yahya Sinwar, the Hamas leader in Gaza and the man who will have to consent to any deal to end hos­tilities, knows the old adage: a government has to destroy a guerrilla enemy—the “total victory” that Netanyahu continues to promise—but the guerrillas just need to survive. Hamas has rebuilt low-level administrative networks, deploying officials to maintain a hold on markets, banks, mosques and offices. When aid agencies travel in the north of Gaza, this is clear. “There are people watching and running things who are very aware of who we are and what we are doing… and they are not the Israelis,” one humanitarian official said a few weeks ago.

Hamas shifted very early in the conflict from a quasi-conven­tional strategy against the massive power of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and moved to a fairly classic insurgent strategy. Its forces now attack in small bands of four, five or six men, always with a camera at hand to record their actions for propaganda purposes. These surge out of the vast complex of tunnels Hamas built under Gaza, most of which remain intact, to strike some­times complacent Israeli forces. Their forces go in civilian dress, dump their weapons in civilian homes or facilities and some­times stalk their targets for days, preferring IEDs or booby traps to direct assaults. The result is twofold: a steady stream of Israeli casualties—more than 300 killed since the offensive began, which is a lot for a small country—and a flow of recruits—badly trained, inexperienced but useful—for Hamas. Israel said ear­lier this month that it had killed 14,000 Hamas militants—out of an estimated 25-35,000. This would be enough to put many regular armies hors de combat, but not an insurgent force. Israeli forces in Gaza are now “mowing the grass”—re-entering areas they said they had cleared as new Hamas forces move back in. The Israelis boasted three months ago of killing 12,000. In July they boasted of killing 14,000, providing no detail whatsoever.

This is incremental progress—even if you admit the utility and morality of a body count in such circumstances.

But then does Netanyahu want the war to end anyway? The Israeli prime minister has told the desperate families of the 70 or 80 surviving abductees currently held by Hamas that he is pressing for as swift an end to the conflict as possible. But there are plenty of reasons to believe this is not true.

One reason Netanyahu has now been in power for roughly 16 years—longer than Israel’s founding father David Ben-Gurion—is that he is ultimately pragmatic. One good example is his strategy of allowing Qatar and others to fund the Hamas-run administration in Gaza over the last decade or so. This allowed the Islamist organisation, which took over by force in 2007, to avoid a total governance collapse in the terri­tory and secure its rule. It also split the Palestinians in two, with Hamas in power in Gaza and the more moderate Fatah dominat­ing the Palestinian Authority now restricted to the West Bank. Pragmatic? Cynical? Both maybe, but also extremely short-sighted, as the October 7 attacks proved.

Another example of pragmatism was Netanyahu’s handling of the mass drone and missile attack launched by Iran against Israel in April. The strike came after Israel killed senior Revolu­tionary Guard officers in consular buildings in Syria with mis­siles and was carefully calibrated by Tehran to avoid causing car­nage in Israel. Netanyahu recognised the performative nature of the Iranian attack and retaliated in kind, with a smallscale but precise strike designed to signal to the Iranians that Israel could cause major damage to their nuclear programme if necessary.

The very least that can be said is that Netanyahu, whom most still hold responsible for the disaster of October 7, benefits from the war in Gaza continuing. Whether he is actively seeking to prolong it or not is unclear, though US intelligence services appear to be among the many who suspect that he is

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Netanyahu’s rightwing coalition allies were fiercely critical of this limited response ordered, with Itamar Ben-Gvir, the loudmouthed national security minister, calling it “lame”. Netanyahu has also kept Israeli strikes against other targets in Syria to a level that is seen as just about acceptable by other actors in the region. A Houthi missile that actually hit Tel Aviv prompted a mere single strike in response. In the occupied West Bank, a steady, high level of violent repression has kept the territory at boiling point but so far avoiding meltdown.

But if this is pragmatic, Netanyahu’s attitude to the war in Gaza appears more cynical. His op­ponents argue that Netanyahu has an incentive to keep the conflict going. The prime minister is on trial for corruption and is safe from prison while in power, and staying in power depends on the support of far-right coalition allies, including Ben-Gvir, who are adamantly opposed to any halt in hostilities against Hamas. So too, incidentally, are much of the Jewish Israeli population, partic­ularly Netanyahu’s base. In fact, almost all such voters want to see a reckoning for the egregious errors and failures that allowed the October 7 attacks, but only after the war is over. The very least that can be said is that Netanyahu, whom most still hold responsible for the disaster, benefits from the war in Gaza continuing. Whether he is active­ly seeking to prolong it or not is unclear, though US intelligence services appear to be among the many who suspect that he is.

ND THIS BRINGS us back to the events of last weekend. Israel’s reaction to the missile strike which killed 12 of its citizens could range from a stepped-up series of air strikes against Hezbollah targets to a fullscale aerial assault on Lebanon backed by a major ground invasion. Both sides have sought to avoid a war so far, otherwise they would have had one already, but analysts have repeatedly warned that a miscal­culation could provoke one. This strike appears to have been a mistake—Hezbollah have denied responsibility—and so could be exactly the unlucky spark that observers feared.

Hezbollah have much greater military capacities than Hamas, with an estimated 150,000 missiles and rockets in their armoury, many capable of hitting cities and key infrastructure across Israel. Israel’s air defences would be likely overwhelmed. Hezbollah’s fighters are better trained and equipped than those of Hamas. A war would bring massive damage to Israel’s economy

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For Lebanon, Israel and the region, the stakes are now very high indeed. A fullscale war would wreak immense destruction on a fragile country, as well as kill very many people. Waves of destabilisation would surge out from the epicentre of violence. The involvement of Shia militia in Iraq and Syria would be al­most inevitable, and the Houthis would step up their attacks on Israel and international shipping. Hezbollah have much greater military capacities than Hamas, with an estimated 150,000 missiles and rockets in their armoury, many capable of hitting cities and key infrastructure across Israel. To make this point, the organisation recently released footage taken from a drone it had sent over Haifa, a critical port and petrochemical site, some 40km from the disputed boundary between Israel and Lebanon. Israel’s air defences would be likely overwhelmed. In addition, Hezbollah’s fighters, hardened in almost a decade of conflict in Syria, are better trained and equipped than those of Hamas. A war would bring massive and long-lasting damage to Israel’s economy.

So in these coming days, Netanyahu, just back from his Washington trip, will be weighing his next move. Never a gambler, it is likely to be a pragmatic and cynical one. We can expect much talk of barbarians and civilisation and Israel’s frontline role in the battle of one against another.

Throughout his long career, Netanyahu has shown an unshakeable belief in his own judgement, and an astonishing ability to exploit opportunities to outmanoeuvre opponents. Israel’s defenders argue that all conflicts are forced upon them. “We just want to live in peace with our neighbours, if they would only just leave us alone,” said one 73-year-old resident of a northern kibbutz last month. But the reality is that if any eventual peace will be seen as Netanyahu’s, so too, in many ways, will be the wars.

About The Author

Jason Burke

Jason Burke is the international security correspondent of The Guardian and has reported extensively from the Middle East. He is the author of, among other titles, The New Threat: The Past, Present, and Future of Islamic Militancy

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