You cannot think straight when you’re in pain. That’s truer still when the pain is combined with fury at those who caused it. There’s a reason we speak of “blind rage”: when anger descends, we cannot see what’s in front of us. And if that’s true of individuals, it’s truer still of nations.
That was the message Joe Biden brought when he travelled to Israel this week. Drawing on his own experience of multiple bereavements, he consoled Israelis grieving for the more than 1,400 civilians killed by Hamas in the 7 October massacre and those waiting for word on the 203 hostages, including young children and the elderly, still held in Gaza. In what has become his signature style, Biden shared in their pain.
But he also drew on his memory of how US leaders reacted to America’s collective trauma in September 2001, and here he offered something closer to a warning. “I caution you, while you feel that rage, don’t be consumed by it. After 9/11 we were enraged in the United States. While we sought justice and got justice, we also made mistakes.”
He did need to spell out that, in its fury at al-Qaida, the US did not simply hunt down that one network, but invaded the country that harboured it, Afghanistan, and one that had nothing to do with it, Iraq – both with devastating, lasting consequences. After 9/11, the US declared a global “war on terror” that cost hundreds of thousands of lives, brought al-Qaida into places where it did not previously exist – Iraq among them – and birthed a new and even darker terror, in the form of Islamic State.
It is a warning from recent history that should be preying on the minds of Benjamin Netanyahu and Israel’s military commanders, as the hours count down to an expected ground incursion into Gaza. Israel and its advocates stress that the country has the right, indeed the duty, to defend itself against an enemy that proved its cruelty a fortnight ago. But this is to risk America’s post-9/11 error: convinced that a chosen course of action is legitimate, it’s easy to forget to ask if it is wise.
Already, in its rage, Israel has made decisions it may come to regret. Its mission should be clear: to ensure that Hamas is stripped of the capacity ever to repeat what it did two weeks ago. That means Israel’s war should be with Hamas alone, not the people of Gaza. And yet by imposing a near-total blockade on the territory, denying its more than 2 million citizens food, water and medicine, it has inflicted pain on the entire population – pain that will be only partially alleviated under the terms of a concession negotiated by Biden.
Such action falls foul of both morality and international law, but it also runs counter to Israel’s own interests – weakening overseas support at the very moment it should be at its strongest – and to its stated goal. Because if recent years have shown anything, it is that making life more hellish in Gaza does not loosen Hamas’s grip – it tightens it.
Coming after relentless bombing from the air, a full-scale Israeli ground invasion could be an even greater gift to the organisation, handing it exactly what it wants. Indeed, the extravagant sadism of the crimes Hamas committed in the sabbath of blood on 7 October – the rape, torture and mutilation – was surely designed to goad Israelis, to drive them so crazy with grief that they would storm into Gaza, blindly walking into the very trap Hamas had so carefully set for them.
That may be literally the case, with Israeli troops lured into tunnels and back streets that amount to one giant booby trap. On that terrain, Israel will suffer heavy casualties and it will inflict them – and both outcomes will suit Hamas just fine. The latter because they see a rising Palestinian death toll as an asset in the propaganda war; the former because it will validate their claim that it is Hamas alone, not the secular nationalists of rivals Fatah, who represent the true resistance against the Israeli enemy.
A long, bloody war is what Hamas and its Iranian backers – desperate to derail recent moves towards “normalisation” of relations between Israel and several of its neighbours, most crucially Saudi Arabia – yearn for. It will mean that, even if the infrastructure of Hamas is destroyed, the hatred that powers it will not be: on the contrary, it will grow in the hearts of a new, bereaved generation of Palestinians. Not for nothing did the scholar Hussein Ibish write this week: “In trying to fulfil the pledge to ‘eliminate Hamas’, Israel could well deliver everything Hamas is counting on.”
That notion might seem counterintuitive and yet, when it comes to Netanyahu himself, it is unexpectedly on-brand. Prime minister for most of the last 15 years, Netanyahu has been an enabler of Hamas, building up the organisation, letting it rule Gaza unhindered – save for brief, periodic military operations against it – and allowing funds from its Gulf patrons to keep it flush. Netanyahu liked the idea of the Palestinians as a house divided – Fatah in the West Bank, Hamas in Gaza – because it allowed him to insist that there was no Palestinian partner he could do business with. That meant no peace process, no prospect of a Palestinian state, and no demand for Israeli territorial concessions.
None of this was a secret. In March 2019, Netanyahu told his Likud colleagues: “Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas … This is part of our strategy – to isolate the Palestinians in Gaza from the Palestinians in the West Bank.”
That catastrophic misjudgment alone should seal Netanyahu’s fate. Taken together with the fact that it was on his watch that Israel suffered the deadliest attack in its history, the greatest single loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust, the verdict on Netanyahu should be clear. Most Israelis admit as much, accepting that once the current war is over, he will have to go.
But that is a curious logic. If he is so obviously culpable for the calamity of 7 October, if it was his serial strategic errors that created the vulnerability exposed and exploited so fatally on that day, what possible qualification does he have to lead Israel’s response now? Speak to Israelis, even on the right, and they will tell you that, as Yaakov Katz, former editor of the Jerusalem Post, put it this week, “the government is not functioning”.
The basic duties of the state – whether rehousing the stricken families of the south or getting essential equipment to army reservists at the front – have been taken up instead by a range of civil society groups that have sprung up in the last two weeks. They are filling a void left by Netanyahu, who has overseen an era of cronyism and corruption that has turned the machinery of the state to rust.
For all these reasons, Israelis can’t wait until the war is over. Changing leaders in wartime is not unheard of: it worked out well for Britain in 1940. Admittedly, such a move is unlikely, given Netanyahu’s absolute control of his party. But Israel needs to be rid of the man who led them to this bleak crossroads, and to replace him with someone who will take the right path – one not paved by the country’s mortal enemies.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
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