Israel is up against a regional superpower, Iran, that has managed to put Israel into a vise grip, using its allies and proxies: Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and Shiite militias in Iraq. Right now, Israel has no military or diplomatic answer. Worse, it faces the prospect of a war on three fronts — Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank — but with a dangerous new twist: Hezbollah in Lebanon, unlike Hamas, is armed with precision missiles that could destroy vast swaths of Israel’s infrastructure, from its airports to its seaports to its university campuses to its military bases to its power plants.
But Israel is led by a prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who has to stay in power to avoid potentially being sent to prison on corruption charges. To do so, he sold his soul to form a government with far-right Jewish extremists who insist that Israel must fight in Gaza until it has killed every last Hamasnik — “total victory” — and who reject any partnership with the Palestinian Authority (which has accepted the Oslo peace accords) in governing a post-Hamas Gaza, because they want Israeli control over all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including Gaza.
And now, Netanyahu’s emergency war cabinet has fallen apart over his lack of a plan for ending the war and safely withdrawing from Gaza, and the extremists in his government coalition are eyeing their next moves for power.
They have done so much damage already, and yet not President Biden, the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC, nor many in Congress have come to terms with just how radical this government is.
Indeed, House Speaker Mike Johnson and his fellow G.O.P. mischief makers decided to reward Netanyahu with the high honor of speaking to a joint meeting of Congress on July 24. Pushed into a corner, the top Democrats in the Senate and the House signed on to the invitation, but the unstated goal of this Republican exercise is to divide Democrats and provoke shouted insults from their most progressive representatives that would alienate American Jewish voters and donors and turn them toward Donald Trump.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Netanyahu knows that this is all about domestic U.S. politics, which is why his acceptance of the speaking invitation is such an act of disloyalty to Joe Biden — who flew all the way to Israel to hug him in the days after Oct. 7 — that it simply takes your breath away.
Israel needs a pragmatic centrist government that can lead it out of this multifaceted crisis — and seize the offer of normalization with Saudi Arabia that Biden has been able to engineer.
They immediately proceeded to add settlement housing units in the heart of that occupied territory by record numbers to try to block any Palestinian state there.
And that is why I agree with every word that former Prime Minister Ehud Barak wrote in Haaretz last Thursday: Israel faces “the most serious and dangerous crisis in the country’s history.
Biden should be telling Israel that it should accept Hamas’s key demand: Totally end the war now and withdraw from Gaza in exchange for the return of all Israeli hostages.
That is: pause, rethink, strategize and not do exactly what Iran and Hamas wanted it to do — i.e., charge head just like America did after Sept. 11, 2001 — and sink into an endless war without any plan or partner for the morning after.
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