“The crisis unfolding in the Middle East is a mix of high strategy and low politics.” This observation by John Sawers, successively foreign policy adviser to Tony Blair, director general of the British foreign office, UK ambassador to the United Nations and then chief of the intelligence service MI6 until 2014, shrewdly summed up the dynamics at play in Binyamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the Gaza and Lebanon wars.
Which way he turns now after Israeli troops killed the Hamas leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, on Thursday will crucially affect those dynamics.
The low politics allowing Netanyahu to survive as prime minister by prolonging the Gaza war to avoid taking blame for the October 7th Hamas atrocities, as well as to keep his far-right government together and avoid criminal prosecutions, are well known. He could now claim victory over Hamas and go for a ceasefire and hostage release.
Netanyahu’s strategy and escalatory logic pull against that. The chief Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, was assassinated in Tehran shortly after Israel scuppered Joe Biden’s Gaza ceasefire deal. The deal had been negotiated by Haniyah with Qatari, Egyptian and US diplomats, but Netanyahu ended it by insisting on a continued Israeli presence in the Philadelphi corridor. This was followed by the assassination of Hizbullah’s military chief, Fuad Shukr, and then of its political leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in Beirut.
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The consistent strategy pursued by Netanyahu has been to provoke Iran into a retaliation, allowing Israel to mount a counter-attack sufficient to suck the US into a regional war with the Islamic state. That puts a reluctant and outmanoeuvred Biden administration further on the back foot in advance of the presidential election and bolsters Donald Trump’s argument about his weak opponent. That strategy informed the September pager bombs against Hizbullah fighters in Lebanon, and the current ground war in Lebanon, which is intended to eliminate the Hizbullah threat so that 63,000 northern Israelis can return to their homes.
Sawers says Trump “was the most easily manipulated US president Israel has ever enjoyed”. After recognising Israel’s illegal annexation of the Golan Heights and taking the US out of the Iran nuclear deal (encouraged by Netanyahu’s lobbying of the US Congress and in a direct snub to his predecessor Barack Obama), Trump then allowed his proposals for a Palestine settlement to follow Israel’s script.
Netanyahu made the 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalised Israeli relations with the UAE, Egypt, Sudan and Morocco, the basis of his address to the UN in September 2023, in which he held up a regional map without Palestine. In his speech to the US Congress on July 26th this year, he proposed making the accords into a wider regional alliance with the US pitched against Iran.
The recent speech to the US Congress clearly spells out Netanyahu’s fundamental positions. He wants to see a demilitarised and deradicalised Gaza similar to conditions imposed on Germany after the second World War, firmly under Israel’s security control. He does not mention a Palestinian state, which he has always opposed. He pursues total military victory against Hamas and Hizbullah, after which a new strategic reality for the Middle East can be forged. It would be predicated on, and organised towards, victory over Iran, where he wants to topple the Islamic regime – in his eyes, a victory of western civilisation over barbarism. He warns Israel’s allies this is the issue at stake, stoking Islamophobia and voicing worldwide right-wing tropes.
Despite boycotts and protests, the Congress speech attracted standing ovations from republican members. He reminded those assembled: “we help keep American boots off the ground while protecting our shared interests in the Middle East.”
Netanyahu brushes off criticisms of extreme disproportion between Israeli and Palestinian deaths and casualties. The only way to secure Israel – and Judaism – from existential danger, he believes, is by full military superiority and permanent control of the West Bank and Gaza. That is in line with the ideology of revisionist Zionism he inherited from his father, a historian of Spanish Judaism, and from Vladimir Jabotinsky, its founder in the 1920s. Jabotinsky battled against social democratic currents of Zionism and became the chief ideological inspiration for Netanyahu’s Likud party – and now of the far-right parties in his coalition. Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” policy described the overwhelming military force he said is needed to defeat Arab resistance.
Netanyahu’s high strategy of calculated risks and provocative escalation has paid off for his low politics. Taking on Hizbullah and Iran by showcasing Israel’s mastery of intelligence boosted his popularity, forestalling an early Israeli election and a political reckoning. Balancing US, European and Israeli pressure for a ceasefire after Sinwar’s death against his plan to provoke Iran is a fateful choice for Netanyahu.