Don’t dismiss talk of Israel occupying Gaza. This time, Netanyahu means what he says

A march by supporters of establishing Israeli settlements in Gaza, May 2024

Aluf Benn writes in Haaretz on 20 May 2024:

Critics of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tend to disdainfully dismiss his speeches and public statements, seeing them as idle remarks designed to serve the needs of the political moment. The reflexive responses can almost write themselves – liar, crook, servant to Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. They typically assume that the prime minister has no plan, and even if he did have one, he would not be able to get it approved.

But if Netanyahu is nothing more than a robot programmed in Miami, or a soccer ball kicked between the White House and Otzma Yehudit, then what exactly is he guilty of?

Netanyahu has always hidden behind powerful figures, preferring to appear as spineless and loath to take stands on controversial issues. There will always be Sara and Yair, the American president, the coalition, and the defense establishments that will absorb the criticism in place of him. Without a doubt, his habit of shirking blame has grown since he led Israel to the October 7 disaster and the wars of attrition in Gaza and the north. But instead of falling for the prime minister’s evasive antics, it would be wise to simply listen to him and understand where he is heading.

From the moment he recovered from the shock of the outbreak of the war, Netanyahu has been consistent about his “day after” policy – the renewed Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip. This, he declared last December, “after we have destroyed Hamas, Gaza will be demilitarized under Israeli security control, and there will never be another organization that threatens us and educates its children for terror.”

In February, he added to his repertoire the slogan “total victory,” which has often provoked laughter and imitations. But does Netanyahu mean what he says, namely the conquest of Gaza, the exodus of many of its Palestinian residents to Arab and European countries, and the re-establishment of Jewish settlements? In fact, such a scenario corresponds to the opening clause in the basic guidelines of the current government: “The Jewish people have an exclusive and indisputable right to all areas of the Land of Israel.”

It is hard to claim that it is all talk. Israeli military actions in Gaza are enabling all this to come about – expulsion of Gazans, the destruction of cities and towns, the difficulty of delivering food and fuel to the refugees, the splitting of the enclave into halves and the establishment of Israel Defense Forces bases there, and the gradual entry into Rafah. The military government that Netanyahu is now proposing (as usual hiding behind his military secretary, Maj. Gen. Roman Gofman, “who only wrote a private paper”) represents another stage in the operation to “Judaize Gaza.”

While the right wing openly talks about a second Nakba in Gaza, the government’s opponents have consoled themselves that this is a messianic fantasy that will never come true. They are counting on the “world” to prevent Israel from staging a second “Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” as in the title of the canonical book by Benny Morris about the 1948 war.

Without a doubt, the international community, led by the United States, will forcefully oppose a permanent Israeli occupation and certainly the ethnic cleansing of its Palestinian population and its replacement by Jewish settlers. The threats of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court in The Hague and the freezing of ammunition shipments from America are aimed at deterring Netanyahu from going all the way.

But Netanyahu understands history well and knows that the Americans have opposed time after time actions that Israel saw as critical, and ultimately caved in the face of Israeli stubbornness. That is what happened with the establishment of the state in 1948, the development of the nuclear plant in Dimona, the establishment of West Bank settlements, and today the operation in Rafah.

In each case, Israel listened to the Americans and did the opposite. Just as Netanyahu is now “listening” to U.S. President Joe Biden’s emissaries, who badger him about “return of the Palestinian Authority to Gaza.” For him, the talk of a deal to return hostages in exchange for a cease-fire and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza is just a way to pass the time until the world gets used to the new reality he is creating in Gaza – just as it learned to accept the results of the Syrian Civil War.

And what if Benny Gantz, the hope of the Kaplan Street protesters, does indeed quit the war cabinet and stands at the head of the movement like Russia’s Alexei Navalny or medieval France’s Joan of Arc?

The problem with this scenario is not only Gantz’s inability to bring down the government and force an early election, or his easy-going nature, but his stance regarding Gaza. As he showed again in the “ultimatum speech,” Gantz supports the policies of the government in which he sits. He is also calling for Israeli security control in Gaza – no different than in the West Bank – and opposes both Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas.

The difference between Netanyahu and Gantz is that the latter wants to “hold discussions” and Netanyahu does not. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is more courageous than Gantz in his public statements and criticism of Netanyahu, but he also supports the continuing the war. His opposition to a military government in Gaza is based on money and personnel considerations, not in the belief that an occupation will harm Israel.

And so Israel is marching confidently towards reversing the 2005 disengagement and returning to Gaza, in the spirit of Netanyahu’s promises and the hopes of his coalition partners. “Of course, why didn’t I realize it from the outset? Our own Khirbet Khizeh,” wrote S. Yizhar, “Questions of housing and problems of absorption! And, hooray, we’d house and absorb – and how! We’d open a cooperative store, establish a school, maybe even a synagogue. … Long live the Hebrew Khizeh! Who, then, would ever imagine that there had been a Khirbet Khizeh that we emptied out and took for ourselves. We came, we shot, we burned; we blew up, we expelled, drove out and sent into exile.”

You can start writing the draft for the sequel. One can only imagine that this time the synagogue will be built before the cooperative store.

This article is reproduced in its entirety