Julia Nikhinson/AP Photo
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pictured before a meeting with Vice President Kamala Harris on July 25, 2024.
The remote-control bomb that Israeli agents detonated in Tehran last week killed a lot more than Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh. It also killed any prospect for a cease-fire in the Gaza war for the foreseeable future, absent the cessation of U.S.-provided offensive weapons. At the same time, it also made the prospects of a wider war, directly involving Iran and possibly even the United States, more likely.
With Israel’s war on Gaza now extending into its 11th month, this is not something for which the Israeli public is clamoring—least of all a rain of missiles from Iran. But by choosing to kill Haniyeh in the Iranian capital where he was a guest at the inauguration of Iran’s new president, Israel all but invited Iranian retaliation and short-circuited the ability of Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, on his first day in office, to pursue his promised course of at least some reconciliation with Western governments. By assassinating Haniyeh, Israel was also eliminating Hamas’s chief negotiator of a Gaza war cease-fire and hostage release.
In short, what Israel did in killing Haniyeh was to roll the war on, make its expansion more likely, further endanger the remaining Israeli hostages, and increase the odds that all of Israel will come under attack.
Which, to put it mildly, does not appear to be in Israel’s interest.
But Israel’s interest does not appear to be the chief concern of the nation’s prime minister, nor has it been for some time now. The only way to explain the policy laid out by Bibi Netanyahu is that he thinks an endless and even expanded war is in the best interest of Bibi Netanyahu.
Keeping Israel at war accomplishes several of Bibi’s goals. It forestalls the kind of thorough investigation of how Hamas’s October 7 murder raid was allowed to happen—a mind-boggling security failure for which Netanyahu has never taken responsibility. Together with his allowing his ultranationalist coalition partners to run amok, violently displacing West Bank Palestinians, it ensures his government’s continuing control of a parliamentary majority. By all but inviting Hezbollah, the Houthis, and now Iran to attack, it enables Israel to ask the United States for more weapons that it can say won’t be used against Gaza. And should Iran wage a sustained attack on Israel, Bibi could ask President Biden for direct U.S. military involvement. (The U.S. and other Western and Arab nations provided anti-missile defenses that helped Israel shoot down the roughly 300 missiles Iran fired at Israel in April, but that was a one-day operation and purely defensive.)
President Biden is a lifelong supporter of Israel, and his final and greatest gift to that nation would be to force it to stop the destruction of what little remains of Gaza.
And finally, Netanyahu has never even come up with a plan for how postwar Gaza is to be governed. Instead, he has said Israel will continue the wholesale destruction of Gaza until Hamas is completely wiped out, which will entail Israel’s indefinite armed occupation of portions of Gaza, and as to the rest—well, no plan has been forthcoming. Arab nations say they won’t provide any help unless Israel gets serious about a two-state solution, but Bibi’s continued hold on power requires his maintaining the support of ultranationalists whose policy is a Jewish state that runs “from the river to the sea.” Despite the fact that Saudi Arabia and a host of Arab states would normalize relations with Israel if it actually did move to a two-state solution, or even just gave Palestinians some control over some patch of land, Netanyahu is dead set against doing that.
Why? Because doing so would surely lose him the support of the fringe and violent settler parties that keep him in power. Because that would entail entering into a cease-fire in Gaza, which could lead to a full-on investigation of how he slept at the switch while Hamas geared up for its murder raid. Because either of those eventualities would mean he would have to forgo the de facto suspension of the criminal case brought against him for accepting bribes, a suspension that he enjoys only so long as he is prime minister. It’s a strong case, and it’s worth noting that at least one former Israeli prime minister has done time after being convicted for less egregious offenses.
As my colleague David Dayen pointed out during the Prospect’s Weekly Roundup last Friday, it’s hard to find a precedent for a leader keeping his nation at war for reasons as personal as Bibi’s. Lyndon Johnson clearly feared a huge right-wing backlash if he abruptly withdrew all U.S. troops from Vietnam, but he wasn’t facing the prospect of prison if he did. Hitler kept Germany at war long past the point when it was clear it had been absolutely defeated, but he knew he would personally not long survive a surrender. But keeping a war going, and even inviting its expansion, as a way to stay out of the clink is Bibi Netanyahu’s distinct and sole contribution to modern statecraft. And the way—probably, the only way—that his war can be shut down requires the Biden administration to stop the provision of all offensive arms to Israel.
On Friday, Biden—fearing, I’m sure, being dragged into a larger war between Israel and Iran—told reporters he’d spoken with Netanyahu and urged him to accept an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. I can’t imagine anything short of an end to the American provision of offensive weapons to Israel, however, that could compel Bibi to agree to that. It might also save Israel from the prospect of a wider and far deadlier war, not that Bibi is in the least bit interested in that.
Ending the war, though, might finally lead to Bibi’s dethronement. President Biden is a lifelong supporter of Israel, and his final and greatest gift to that nation would be to force it to stop the destruction of what little remains of Gaza, enable it to avoid the havoc that a wider war would bring, and give it a way to end the reign of l’état, c’est moi King Bibi.
