Why Israel's Gaza Hamas War 'Won't Save' Netanyahu

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under mounting pressure as Israel counts the cost of the deadliest militant attack in its history, and a shocked nation asks how one of the world's foremost intelligence and security powers failed to stop a surprise attack from a well-known, less sophisticated, and blockaded enemy.

Netanyahu—the great survivor of Israeli politics who partially built his legendary career on national security prowess—may yet see his career ended by Hamas' "Operation Al-Aqsa Flood," even as he leads the new emergency coalition government in its bid to "eradicate" the Islamist militant group.

A Dialog Center poll published on Thursday found that 86 percent of respondents believe the Hamas attack represented a failure of national leadership. The same was true of 79 percent of those who are supporters of Netanyahu's coalition government.

Ninety-four percent said they believe the government is responsible for the lack of preparedness, with 56 percent saying Netanyahu should resign at the end of the war.

The divisive prime minister has vowed to "crush and destroy" Hamas. Doing so—to the extent that it is possible—might prove his final campaign.

Farewell 'Mr. Security'?

"I think he's doing his retirement job," H.A. Hellyer—a senior associate fellow in international security studies at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London—told Newsweek.

"There will be a massive price to be paid within Israeli politics. There will be some sort of big national inquiry about this, and with that intelligence failure the buck will have to stop somewhere. 'Mr. Security' Netanyahu is going to be up the creek without a paddle."

The veteran prime minister presided over—and drove—polarization in politics. Netanyahu's own legal controversies, divisive judicial reform efforts, and formation of the country's most right-wing government ever all helped put Israeli society on the edge. This, Hellyer said, has left "Bibi"—as he is colloquially known—with little wiggle room.

"He expended all of this political capital and investment on 'judicial reform' and avoiding jail," Hellyer said. "What's he got to show for it? A security apparatus that seems to have been completely caught unawares and by surprise. And the price of it, the cost of it: humongous."

Michael Milshtein, an expert on Palestinian militant groups working at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies at Tel Aviv University, told Newsweek he concurs that "this leadership will not stay in the same position after this war ends," though said that will be a question to be answered when the Gaza dust settles.

"The voices in Israel, even voices of Likud supporters, are very, very much disappointed," Milshtein said. "They do understand that [its] own leadership actually failed."

"The main problem here is the lack of confidence in Netanyahu's leadership. The military leadership, the social leadership, they're very strong. But regarding the political leadership, there are a lot of question marks."

'War Psychosis'

For Milshtein, Israel's failure is collective.

"The main failure here in Israel was really to understand what Hamas is," he said, criticizing the past two governments—that of Netanyahu and the preceding coalition headed by Naftali Bennett—for what he called a "twisted" Gaza policy, in which Israeli leaders sought to incentivize calm via economic investment.

"In Israel, until Saturday morning, the main assumption was that Hamas is very much deterred, and Hamas would never promote any escalation," Milshtein said. "Now we're paying the price for not understanding this organization at all."

The emergency wartime coalition has been formed with the expressed intention of wiping out Hamas. The group's latest operation has killed more than 1,300 people in Israel, wounded more than 3,000, and saw more than 150 people taken back to Gaza as hostages, according to the Associated Press (AP), citing Israeli authorities. A ferocious response appears a necessity for Netanyahu.

"I think he will do that," Hellyer said. "But I don't think it will save him."

The prime minister won't be alone. Several top politicians have only agreed to the new emergency government in exchange for promises that Hamas will be eradicated.

"There will be a lot of people egging him on within his own government, within Israeli society," Hellyer said.

Israel, in the words of journalist Lisa Goldman, "is going into war psychosis."

"This is more than Israel's 9/11," Hellyer said. "All of the rhetoric from the 'war on terror' from 2001 onwards, I think we're going to see exponentially worse when it comes to Israel at the present moment."

Israel's Gaza campaign has already killed at least 1,500 Palestinians, wounded more than 6,000, and displaced nearly 340,000, according to the AP, citing Palestinian authorities. The coming ground offensive will swell casualty figures among Hamas, the Israel Defense Forces, and Gaza civilians, who are routinely caught in the withering crossfire.

The IDF is now demanding that Gazans evacuate the northern portion of the Strip within 24 hours, an apparent portent to a ground offensive. The United Nations has dismissed the proposed evacuation as "impossible."

Newsweek has contacted Hamas and the IDF by email to request comment.

Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, Lebanon, told Newsweek that a punitive offensive into Gaza may slake some thirst for vengeance, but will not address the underlying problems driving repeated cycles of conflict with Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups.

"The new Israeli Cabinet, the emergency Cabinet, has to demonstrate to its own people that it's taking action," Sayigh said. "But I think that doesn't resolve the dilemmas and problems that Israel faces in terms of what do they do about hostages, and what they will do with Gaza at the end of all this."

"Israeli policy has failed; the previous policy has demonstrably failed and can't be put back together again," Sayigh added. "Everyone is to blame for a particular outcome like this.

"The colonization of the occupied territories—the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip, in other words—continued throughout the 1990s despite there being an official peace process. It's continued since then, under every single government.

"And for the last 16 years of tightened siege and blockade of Gaza, basically all Israeli political parties have been complicit because they've allowed the issue to slip, and they've all lived comfortably with the status quo."

"In terms of creating an explosive situation, pretty much every Israeli prime minister has contributed to that for a long, long time," Sayigh said. "Netanyahu, of course, has done more than most, to make sure there cannot be a Palestinian state."

Hunting Hamas

For all Israel's might, Hamas may well survive the onslaught in some form.

"Hamas may be destroyed in Gaza but cannot be eradicated fully," Murat Aslan—a Turkish security expert, associate professor at Hasan Kalyoncu University and senior researcher at the SETA think tank—told Newsweek. "Such organizations can hide themselves easily among the people."

Hamas is present in the occupied Palestinian West Bank and abroad. Senior figures do not live in Gaza, instead basing themselves in safer foreign countries. Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas' political leader, for example, calls Qatar home. Israel would have to reach far and boldly to dismantle the whole organization.

"I'm not sure if Israel would resort to doing targeted assassinations of all of the leadership that's outside," Hellyer said. "It would mean picking a lot of fights with different countries that they may not want to pick fights with."

The extent of Israel's ground invasion remains to be seen. Past incursions were launched with limited goals, for example, finding and destroying Hamas' network of tunnels used to launch attacks and smuggle weapons. The cycle of escalation, limited response, and return to relative calm—known as "mowing the grass," in Israeli military parlance—became routine.

Destroying the whole organization would necessitate a longer, more violent, and more costly campaign. If Hamas is wiped out, it may be replaced by Israeli occupation, another militant organization, or a chaotic failed statelet fragmented between armed groups. Officials have expressed no desire to re-establish the permanent Israeli presence in Gaza that ended in 2005.

"Do we want, as Israel, to take the place of Hamas and to be the one who controls Gaza?" Milshtein asked. "I'm not sure it's such an optimistic scenario," he added, noting a hypothetical future Israeli presence reminiscent to the disastrous U.S. occupation of Iraq.

"The other alternative is to actually to finish Hamas and to get out from Gaza immediately, but the vacuum that will be created inside Gaza I think will be filled by those even worse," Milshtein added. "The 'least worst' alternative," he said, might be a "very much defeated" Hamas "with no or with very little military capability."

With Lebanese Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, various militias in Syria and Iraq, and their great benefactors in Tehran all watching on, there is a danger that the war will escalate. American aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean may dissuade anti-Israel opportunists, but a punitive Israeli operation against Hamas and the civilians of Gaza might foment unrest elsewhere.

"Once there is no limit to this operation, Israel, and the region in general, will witness an influx of radical organizations," Aslan predicted. "Israel will be dealing with these organizations not only around Gaza, but also to the north, east, and so on. We should not focus only on what's going on in Gaza in predicting the future."

Whether confined to Gaza or not, the outcome of the Israeli-Hamas clash seems assured given the gulf in capability.

"If Hamas survives, it's going to be tremendously degraded," Hellyer said.

Gazans, he added, will be left in a true "open air prison," one even more devastated and restricted than before.

The trajectory of Israeli-Palestinian relations—and of the two-state solution, which has been de facto defunct for years—is bleak, Sayigh said. "But again, this is a trajectory that goes back nearly a quarter of a century.

"All this time, there's been a retreat in the European position, increasing disengagement by the U.S., and a rightward drift in Israel driven partly by the confrontation with Palestinians, of course, but also driven by the same things that are producing right-wing populism and even fascist movements across the western world, in India, or elsewhere."

Disclaimer: The copyright of this article belongs to the original author. Reposting this article is solely for the purpose of information dissemination and does not constitute any investment advice. If there is any infringement, please contact us immediately. We will make corrections or deletions as necessary. Thank you.