Israel again expands Gaza war as Netanyahu vows he’s changing the Middle East. The endgame is unclear as ever
By Mick Krever, CNN
(CNN) — It has become a familiar refrain: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that he is “changing the face of the Middle East.”
It is, he says, “a war of rebirth.”
It is, in a sense, undoubtedly true.
Israel has troops in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza. It’s vowed to demilitarize huge swaths of all three – backed by an unquestioning ally in the White House. The war in Gaza, which Israel restarted earlier this month, looks increasingly like it will lead to occupation for months or even years to come.
But Netanyahu is a master tactician, not a master strategist, former Israeli national security officials tell CNN. He has seized opportunities to claw himself back from being in charge during the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust to unimaginable heights of power, at least in Israel.
To cement his legacy, however, and for a grand strategy to materialize, the country and its national security leaders will need to overcome some fundamental and maybe intractable contradictions.
“We didn’t start the war on October 7,” Ophir Falk, a top foreign policy adviser to Netanyahu, told CNN. “But we’re going to win it.”
Gaza looms large
The most difficult problem is also the most obvious: Gaza.
Netanyahu wants “total victory” over Hamas, a goal a top military official derided as sloganeering, or “throwing sand in the eyes of the public.”
The prime minister has never been willing to say what, when the war is over, Gaza should look like, only what it should not be – that is, governed by either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.
“The big problem is with the government itself,” Israel Ziv, a retired Israeli general who once headed the military’s operations department, told CNN. “They are not fully committed to those goals (in Gaza). And now it’s not even clear – not to the army, and not to the public – what the government really wants.”
Netanyahu’s indecision was rewarded when US President Donald Trump proposed that all Palestinians leave Gaza. It is, Netanyahu said, “the only plan that I think can work to enable a different future for the people of Gaza, for the people of Israel, for the surrounding areas.”
His extremist right-wing coalition partners could hardly believe their luck. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich celebrated: Hamas’ attacks on October 7, 2023 would culminate in Palestinians “losing their land forever,” he said.
Though the cabinet has created an agency to facilitate those who want to “voluntarily” leave Gaza, it’s unclear whether the prime minister sees ethnic cleansing – that’s almost certainly what it would be – as a realistic or desirable goal.
“It’s nonsense – don’t take it seriously,” Nitzan Nuriel, former director of the Counter-Terrorism Bureau in the Prime Minister’s Office, told CNN. It’s nothing more than a message to Israeli extremists and Trump, Nuriel said.
But having decided to abandon the ceasefire framework that saw Hamas release 38 hostages earlier this year, Israel went back to maximum pressure: “From now on, negotiations will only take place under fire,” Netanyahu said.
Israel’s defense minister has ordered the military to push forward in Gaza for a “permanent maintenance of the territory.” Seemingly every day, the military orders more Palestinians to once again leave their shelters and evacuate. Netanyahu told Israel’s parliament Wednesday that the operation “includes taking territory, and it includes other things that I will not detail here.”
“If it doesn’t lead to renewed negotiations, then that would be very bad,” Eyal Hulata, former head of Israel’s National Security Council, told CNN. “What we will see is a permanent presence of the IDF fighting the counterinsurgency on the ground.”
The most probable outcome, Nuriel said, is a prolonged occupation of Gaza and the appointment of an Israeli military governor to run its daily affairs – with the hope that “pragmatic” Gulf states will pick up the bill.
“Is this a good idea? I don’t think so,” he said. “But politically, as far as I understand it, this is one of the government’s options. So we will see an offensive for four, five months. At the end of it, we will control all of that land. And at the end of it we will start to manage that piece of land, as we did at the end of the ‘67 war” – when Israel first seized control of Gaza from Egypt.
The unknowns
Gaza also brings with it issues that are rarely discussed in Israel, but which loom large nonetheless.
Netanyahu remains under indictment for alleged war crimes at the International Criminal Court. The Israeli government itself stands accused of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza. (Both vehemently deny the charges.)
There is not a single person in Gaza whose life has not been touched by war. More than 95% have been forced from their homes. Israel has for weeks now blocked all humanitarian aid from entering the strip, and starvation looms.
The government is seeking to destroy the UN agency that provides schooling, medical coverage and employment for millions of Palestinians – accusing UNRWA of failing to weed out extremists in its ranks.
Though Gazans have begun to express more public anger at Hamas, their views towards Israel will have been almost unimaginably hardened over the course of the war. Then-US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said earlier this year that Hamas had recruited more militants than it had lost.
Just as many Palestinians see Hamas’ October 7 attack – heinous as they may find it – as a direct result of 60 years of Israeli occupation, so too may these maximalist policies have unknowable and potentially devastating consequences for Israel.
Saudi normalization
Occupying Gaza also stands between Netanyahu and a key legacy project: normalizing diplomatic relations with Saudi Arabia.
“The problem is that the key for this achievement is ending the war in Gaza,” Amos Yadlin, former head of Israeli military intelligence and former defense attaché in Washington, told CNN. “The Saudis will not come if Israel continues the war in Gaza.”
Saudi officials have been explicit on the matter. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has called the war in Gaza a “genocide.” The country’s foreign minister told CNN last year that normalization was “off the table until we have a resolution to Palestinian statehood.”
Israeli policymakers think the Saudis are posturing.
“I don’t really think that that’s on top of their agenda,” an Israeli official told CNN. “And it’s not going to happen,” they said of a Palestinian state. “There’s no other issue on which there’s such consensus in Israel. It’s simply not going to happen.”
A forceful regional response
Israel’s response to the Hamas attack has also brought a more aggressive military posture in Lebanon, Syria and the West Bank – all under pressure from key government ministers who bring a radical, Jewish nationalist ideology previously unseen in the country’s halls of power.
“What it seems like (Netanyahu) has in mind is to use the chaos in a way that would allow him to make the political gains, which he needs,” a former senior official told CNN. “This is not strategic. This is tactical politics. But this is what he is.”
Israel now has a handful of military outposts in southern Lebanon, near the border. It has shown it is willing to regularly strike Hezbollah in a region of Lebanon from which, according to a 2006 UN Security Council resolution, they should be withdrawn. Israel’s year-long shooting war with Hezbollah – followed by a devastating bombing campaign and ground invasion – came in response to Hezbollah attacking Israel in solidarity with Hamas, on October 8, 2023.
In Syria too, Israel seized upon the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad to launch nationwide strikes on military infrastructure, and to occupy the strategic Mount Hermon and a previously demilitarized buffer zone. While Netanyahu claims that Assad’s fall was a “direct result” of Israeli actions against his ally Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon, Nuriel said: “It was obviously not because of us.… We responded to something that happened.
“If you ask me if there is any strategic plan by the prime minister, my answer is no.”
And yet, those series of tactical decisions add up to a common theme in Syria, Lebanon and Gaza, Nuriel said. Israeli security officials, he explained, are building similar lines of defense in all these places: “The borderline, fully secured by the IDF. Then a buffer zone, which nobody will be able to enter. And then another area without any ammunition.”
The most uncertain zone of Israeli expansionism is in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967. Israel already has at least 150 official settlements there, and the number of outposts that are illegal even under Israeli law has skyrocketed since October 7.
The nationalist extremists in government would love for Israel to annex the West Bank, or at least the large swaths where Jews live, outside the major Palestinian cities – that is, to formally bring it under Israeli law and jurisdiction.
Trump during his first term broke with the rest of the Western world in recognizing Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights, which it seized from Syria in 1967. With his return to the White House, many see some form of Israeli annexation in the West Bank as almost inevitable.
Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, has said he believes Israel has the “title deed” to the West Bank, which he refers to as Judea and Samaria, the biblical name used by some Israelis. (In his confirmation hearing, he told senators that he would defer to the president on annexation.)
Iran
That leaves the biggest unanswered question of them all: Iran.
That nation is, for Netanyahu, the longest-standing bogeyman. Time and again, he casts the government in Tehran as the head of an octopus whose tentacles reach all the front lines on which Israel is fighting.
“As Israel defends itself against Iran in this seven-front war, the lines separating the blessing and the curse could not be more clear,” he told the UN General Assembly last year. (There is no evidence to suggest Iran directed Hamas’ attack on October 7, let alone knew about it in advance.)
In this he has much in common with Trump, for whom preventing Iran from attaining a nuclear weapon is a key goal. Where they diverge is how to get there.
The Israeli national security sphere is awash with talk that Netanyahu is trying to get Trump on board with a preemptive strike to take out Iran’s nuclear facilities – as when Israel destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. Again and again, he insists that “pressure, pressure, and more pressure” is the only acceptable response to Iran’s nuclear ambitions – hoping that a revolution will upend the regime there.
Trump, on the other hand, has clearly expressed a desire for some sort of deal with Iran – despite his derision for the agreement reached by Barack Obama in 2015. “President Trump made it clear to Ayatollah Khamenei that he wanted to resolve the dispute over Iran’s nuclear program diplomatically – and very soon – and if this was not possible, there would be other ways to resolve the dispute,” a spokesman for the US National Security Council, Brian Hughes, told CNN earlier this month.
An Israeli official denied that there was any disagreement between the two leaders.
“I don’t see the daylight,” the Israeli official told CNN. “Both leaders have expressed explicitly that they will not tolerate a nuclear Iran, and the clock is ticking.”
CNN’s Alayna Treene contributed to this report.
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