Netanyahu’s latest war goal risks accelerating Israel becoming a pariah state
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This week, Israeli
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu accelerated the Jewish state’s travels towards
international pariah status by declaring that the Gaza war aims to expel Gazan
Palestinians from their homeland.
Mr. Netanyahu
added resettlement of Gaza’s 2.1 million Palestinians to his war goals after
earlier adopting as official Israeli policy a plan to move Gazans out of the
Strip first put forward by US President Donald J. Trump in February.
Earlier, Mr.
Netanyahu insisted that he would only end the Gaza war once the Israeli
military has destroyed Hamas or if the group agrees to disarm and send its
leadership and fighters into exile.
This week, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu accelerated
the Jewish state’s travels towards international pariah status by declaring
that the Gaza war aims to expel Gazan Palestinians from their homeland.
Mr. Netanyahu added resettlement of Gaza’s 2.1 million
Palestinians to his war goals after earlier adopting as official Israeli policy
a plan to move Gazans out of the Strip first put forward by US President Donald
J. Trump in February.
Earlier, Mr. Netanyahu insisted that he would only end
the Gaza war once the Israeli military has destroyed Hamas or if the group
agrees to disarm and send its leadership and fighters into exile.
By making Mr. Trump’s plan a war goal Mr. Netanyahu
has officially changed the nature of the century-old Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
Mr. Trump’s
plan envisions Palestinians being resettled in Egypt, Jordan, and elsewhere
so that Gaza could be turned into a high-end real estate development.
The international community has virtually unanimously condemned his plan. Many charge that it would amount to ethnic cleansing and violate international law.
Even so, Israel has sought to gradually implement the
plan and placate Israel’s remaining supporters by relaxing
rules governing departures from Gaza.
In recent months, Israel allowed some 1,000
Palestinians with foreign citizenship and their families, as well as students
with foreign scholarships, to leave Gaza. They included people who Israel had
barred from travel for security reasons.
Supporters of Mr. Netanyahu’s latest war goal hope the
departures are the tip of the iceberg.
A recent Palestinian opinion poll
suggested that Israel’s 19-month-long decimation of Gaza to a pile of rubble
and its blocking of the unfettered entry of humanitarian goods into the Strip
has persuaded almost half of the territory’s population to consider
resettlement.
Forty-three per cent of those surveyed said they were
willing to leave Gaza. Forty-nine per cent suggested they would be willing to
ask Israel to allow them to depart through Israeli air and seaports.
Israeli officials were likely also encouraged by
mounting Gazan resentment of Hamas.
Forty-eight per cent of those surveyed supported
recent anti-Hamas protests demanding that the group surrender control of the
Strip, even though a majority believed external forces had instigated the
demonstrations.
Nevertheless, Netanyahu’s adoption of the Trump plan
as a war goal ensures that there will be no resolution of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It will force Israel to continue to live by the
sword indefinitely – a prospect already envisioned by legendary Israeli
chief-of-staff and defense minister Moshe
Dayan in the 1950s.
The adoption will likely fuel Israel’s further
isolation, with some of its closest European allies distancing themselves,
given broad international support for a two-state resolution of the conflict,
involving the creation of an independent Palestinian state next to Israel.
Adding resettlement or ethnic cleansing to Israel’s
war goals, cements Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim beliefs that resettlement was
Israel’s unofficial goal from day one.
They point to the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians during the 1948 and 1967 Middle East wars and Israel’s post-1967
policy of establishing settlements on occupied Palestinian lands.
“Neither the IDF (Israel Defence Forces) nor the
government seems to understand the depth of the
looming international crisis,” said journalist Amos Harel.
Compounding the risk of further isolation and becoming
a pariah state, Israel’s adoption of the Trump plan as a war goal guarantees
that no Arab state, including Saudi Arabia, will recognise Israel and could put
the country’s peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, fearful that West Bank
Palestinians could be next, in jeopardy.
That may be where the rub is in Mr. Trump’s attitude
towards Israel’s policy change, even though Israel’s war goal is based on his
plan.
Mr. Trump sees engineering Saudi and Arab recognition
of Israel as a pillar of his Middle East policy.
Moreover, making the expulsion of Palestinians dressed
up as “voluntary” departures a war goal casts a different light on Israel’s
almost three-month-long
blocking of the flow of any humanitarian aid into Gaza,
including food, medicine, and fuel, and Mr. Netanyahu’s campaign to undermine
Qatari efforts to mediate a Gaza ceasefire.
The blocking of aid may be the straw that breaks the
camel’s back by widening the emerging gap between Messrs. Trump and Netanyahu
and sparking the harshest criticism of Israel to date by some of its closest allies.
Countries recognising Palestine. Credit: Al Jazeera
Mr. Netanyahu’s added war goal could sway countries
like Britain, Canada, and France to recognise
Palestine as a state.
The three countries have for weeks said they were
discussing possible recognition in response to Israel’s blocking the flow of
humanitarian goods into Gaza since March 2.
Israel has, in recent days, allowed a minuscule number
of trucks carrying humanitarian goods into Gaza, far below the Strip's minimal
needs. UN officials described the flow as "a drop in the ocean."
Recognition of Palestine as state is likely to be high
on the agenda of a June 18 gathering convened by France and Saudi Arabia under
the auspices of the United Nations to promote a two-state solution to the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
So is a
muted French-Saudi plan intended to break the stalemate in
the Gaza ceasefire talks that would require Hamas to disarm but allow it to
retain political influence by functioning as a political group rather than a
militia.
With the destruction of Hamas as one of his war goals,
Mr. Netanyahu accused Britain, France, and Canada of being “on the wrong side
of history” and wanting
“Hamas to remain in power."
Mr. Netanyahu didn’t mention Saudi Arabia, but his
assertion presumably also applies to the kingdom.
The
French-Saudi proposal builds on Hamas’ declared willingness to walk away
from governing post-war Gaza in the face of widespread popular resentment of
the group and the knowledge that it would be an obstacle to reconstruction and
incapable of attracting the funding and international support needed.
Hamas’
willingness was in the making long before the group attacked Israel on October
7, 2023, sparking the Gaza War.
Israel’s blockade
of Gaza since the group took control of the Strip in 2007 with
Egypt’s de facto support undermined
Hamas's ability to legitimise its rule by effectively providing goods and
services.
Writing about the blockade in place since Israel’s
2008 attack on Gaza, dubbed Operation Cast Lead, historian
Erik Skare noted that "the blockade could never produce
Israeli security, only immense Palestinian suffering.”
Seventeen years later, that is truer than ever.
Mr. Netanyahu’s encouragement of Qatari
funding of Hamas’s Gaza administration as a way of
keeping the Palestinian polity divided so that it would be incapable of
negotiating a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict came to haunt the
prime minister with the group’s deadly October 7 attack.
Referring to Israel’s long-standing blockade, Mr.
Skare noted n a just-published book, " Governing Gaza under a blockade and
international isolation deepened (Hamas hardliners") conviction...that
there was no political or diplomatic solution.”
True to Israeli policy since the 1967 Middle East war
that strengthened Palestinian hardliners rather than moderates, Mr. Netanyahu
balanced funding of Hamas with policies that favoured hardliners in the group’s
internal politicking.
“October 7 happened because the moderates in Hamas had
few if any, victories to show after the movement won the legislative elections
in 2006,” Mr. Skare asserted.
Like the West Bank-based, internationally recognised
Palestine Authority, Hamas realized that government created a different
reality, in which it was responsible for securing Gaza’s borders, and, with it,
Israel’s borders, despite upholding the principle of armed struggle.
“The legitimacy of Hamas in Gaza no longer derived
solely from its status as an armed resistance movement, but…as a service
provider to the Gazan population as well,” Mr. Skare said.
Hamas’ dichotomy, exploited by Israel with its
blockade, frames the group’s attitude towards disarmament.
The group has spoken about the issue from both sides
of its mouth. At times the group has insisted it will not disarm.
Yet, Hamas officials have also suggested they would be
willing to put
their arsenal under the supervision of a third party,
possibly the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) or Egypt, as part of a
ceasefire that ends the war and guarantees an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.
Lebanon could provide a precedent even though Hamas is
likely to be more amenable to disarmament in a third country like Lebanon as
opposed to Gaza, which it insists is part of the Palestinian homeland.
Hamas this week suggested it would conditionally
disarm in Lebanese Palestinian refugee camps under an
agreement with the Lebanese government to remove the weapons of all Palestinian
factions negotiated by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during a three-day
visit to Lebanon.
Hamas reportedly insisted that disarmament would
depend on granting Palestinians their civil and human rights, a reference to
the lifting of restrictions on Palestinians’ rights in Lebanon, including free
access to the labour market.
The push to disarm Hamas, alongside other Palestinian
factions in Lebanon, also serves a broader US and Israeli effort to replicate
elements of the 1982 model that forced Yasser Arafat’s PLO to evacuate Beirut
and move to Tunis, 3,500 kilometres away from Israel’s borders.
Sixty-four per cent of the Gazans polled by the
Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research opposed disarmament of Hamas,
while 64 per cent were against exiling the group’s leaders despite a
substantial number of Gazans’ resentment of Hamas.
Mr. Netanyahu’s elevation of Gazan resettlement to a
war goal takes Israel’s US-backed multi-pronged effort to empty the Strip of
its indigenous population and squash Palestinian national aspirations to a new
level.
Beyond Israel’s demand that Hamas abandon Gaza, the
effort involves Syria’s recent expulsion
of Hamas and other Palestinian operatives under US and
Israeli pressure and pressure on Lebanon to halt the flow of funds to Hamas
through Lebanon.
Dr. James M.
Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S.
Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated
column and podcast, The Turbulent
World with James M. Dorsey.
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