Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. Photo / Getty Images
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel. Photo / Getty Images
Opinion by Thomas L. Friedman
Thomas L. Friedman is the foreign affairs Opinion columnist for The New York Times. He joined the paper in 1981 and has won three Pulitzer Prizes. He is the author of seven books, including “From Beirut to Jerusalem,” which won the National Book Award.
THE FACTS
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification has warned that “the worst-case scenario of famine” is unfolding in Gaza.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says they are working to allow in “large quantities of aid”.
In January Israel and Hamas had agreed to a three-phase ceasefire deal that involved a hostage exchange and a prisoner swap but Israel broke the ceasefire in March.
On July 26, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz ran this headline: “Israel at War Day 659. Gaza Medical Sources: At Least 25 Killed by Israeli Gunfire, Some While Waiting for Aid.”
If you had been following this Gaza story closely, you would know that Haaretz was running asimilar headline almost every day for weeks – only the number of Palestinians killed while waiting for food aid handed out by Israel in the Gaza Strip changed. As I watched these stories pile up, the thought occurred to me that roughly a month earlier Israel had managed to assassinate 10 senior Iranian military officials and 16 nuclear scientists sitting in their homes and offices. So how was it that Israel had the capacity to destroy pinpoint targets in Iran, some 1200 miles from Tel Aviv, and could not safely deliver boxes of food to starving Gaza residents 40 miles from Tel Aviv?
That did not seem like an accident. It seemed like the product of something deeper, something quite shameful, playing out within the extremist Government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Key figures in Bibi’s extreme-right ruling coalition, like the National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, openly pushed a policy that would result in the starvation of many Palestinians in Gaza – to the point where they would leave the strip entirely. Bibi knew the United States wouldn’t let him go that far, so he provided just the bare minimum of aid to prevent being toppled by the Jewish supremacist thugs he’d brought into his Government.
A Palestinian woman holds her severely malnourished 1.5-year-old son, Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, inside a tent shelter in Deirl Al-Balah, Gaza. Photo / Getty Images
Alas, that turned out to be a little too bare, and terrible pictures of malnourished children started emerging from Gaza, prompting even President Donald Trump to declare on Monday that there is “real starvation stuff” happening in Gaza. “You can’t fake that. We have to get the kids fed.”
How did we get here, where a Jewish democratic state, descended in part from the Holocaust, is engaged in a policy of starvation in a war with Hamas that has become the longest and most deadly war between Israelis and Palestinians in Israel’s history – and shows no sign of ending?
My answer: What makes this war different is that it pits what I believe is the worst, most fanatical and amoral government in Israel’s history against the worst, most fanatical, murderous organisation in Palestinian history.
But they are alike not just in the awfulness of their goals – each seeking to wipe out the other to control all the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. They are also guided by leaders who have consistently prioritised their own political survival and ideological obsessions over the basic wellbeing of their own people – not to mention the interests of the United States.
You may have noticed that this war has no generally accepted name – like the Six-Day War, the Sinai War or the October War. Well, I personally have always had a name for it. It’s the War of the Worst.
This is the first Israeli-Palestinian war where the worst leaders on both sides are calling all the shots. The moderate Israeli opposition parties and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank have no influence. And that is why I cannot tell you how or when it will end. Because Netanyahu still insists on “total victory” over Hamas, which he will never achieve, and the Hamas leadership still insists on surviving this war in order to still control Gaza the morning after, which it does not deserve.
Displaced Palestinians waiting for food at a charity kitchen in Gaza City. Photo / Saher Alghorra, The New York Times
Let’s go to the videotape: For months Hamas has been fully aware of the acute food and housing shortage in Gaza – shortages it helped trigger by launching a savage attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, without any plan for the morning after other than to kill as many Jews as it could and with no strategy to protect civilians in Gaza from what Hamas knew would be a savage Israeli retaliation. For months now Hamas has also known that if it released its Israeli hostages, agreed that its leadership would leave Gaza and invited an Arab peacekeeping force blessed by the Palestinian Authority to run Gaza instead of Hamas, the suffering of Gaza residents would stop immediately.
But Hamas refuses to do that. It not only wants to keep control of Gaza after any ceasefire; it also wants the United States to guarantee its safety from a resumption of Israeli attacks if and when it gives up the last Israeli hostages, whom Hamas has stashed in tunnels and elsewhere for more than 21 months. This is a sick, twisted organisation that bears huge responsibility for the suffering in Gaza.
But what too many people still have not grasped is just how sick this current Israeli Government is. Too many American officials, lawmakers and Jews keep trying to tell themselves that this is simply another right-wing Israeli Government, but just a little more right. Wrong.
As I have argued since my column on November 4, 2022, the morning after this Israeli Government was elected, which was titled “The Israel We Knew Is Gone,” this Israeli Government is uniquely awful.
Gazans gather around aid trucks in Khan Younis Credit: Planet Labs/AFP via Getty
It has empowered the likes of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who suggested last year that blocking humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is “justified and moral” even if it causes 2 million civilians to die of hunger, but that the international community won’t allow him to. “We bring in aid because there is no choice,” Smotrich told a conference hosted by the right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper. “We can’t, in the current global reality, manage a war. Nobody will let us cause 2 million civilians to die of hunger, even though it might be justified and moral, until our hostages are returned.”
This language is worth parsing, because it goes to the core of what Netanyahu has done to Israel. He has brought into the halls of power people like Smotrich, representatives of a dark, long-repressed minority strain in Jewish history. There has been a deep struggle in the Jewish tradition between those who believe that all humans are created in the image of God, and therefore there is something called “humanity” – and that part of the Jewish covenant with God involves protecting all of humanity – and a minority view that argues there is no humanity, per se; there is just “us” and “them”. For the Jewish people to survive and thrive in this region, according to this line of thought, Jews must overcome their humanism, not be guided by it.
This minority strain of thinking has always been there, but it had never been given the power it has today. It has never been allowed to direct Israel’s huge advanced war machine. This is Bibi’s unique contribution. He has not only empowered the worst of the worst in Israel but also simultaneously sought to unshackle them from the rule of law. He has engaged in a nonstop campaign to strip power from Israel’s independent, ethical gatekeepers, like the former heads of the Shin Bet security service and the Israeli army. As I write, Netanyahu is trying to oust Israel’s high-integrity, independent attorney general, after a two-year campaign to undermine the oversight powers of Israel’s Supreme Court, precisely to do something no Israeli government has ever done: formally annex the West Bank, if not Gaza, too – and push out as many Palestinians as possible – without any legal restraints.
Trump and his Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, have never understood this. They think everyone is just as transactional as they are – whether it’s Vladimir Putin or Netanyahu – and that deep down everyone wants “peace” first and foremost and not “a piece” of Ukraine or “a piece” of the West Bank or Gaza. That is how Bibi and Putin have, each in their own way, managed to play Trump and Witkoff for fools for so long.
What is an example of that? In January, Israel and Hamas agreed to a three-phase ceasefire deal that involved a hostage exchange and a prisoner swap. But Trump and Witkoff let Netanyahu unilaterally break the ceasefire in March, before the last two phases could be negotiated. Bibi cited Hamas’ refusal to meet Israel’s demand to release more hostages before negotiations would resume – even though Hamas was never obligated to do so in Phase 1 of the US-brokered deal.
US President Donald Trump shakes hands with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a meeting in the Oval Office in April. Photo / Getty Images
An analysis this week by Amir Tibon in Haaretz, headlined “How Trump Facilitated Netanyahu’s Gaza Starvation Policy and Failed to Bring the Hostages Home,” argued that there was no military rationale for Bibi to restart the war because Hamas as a military force had been defeated.
It was all to serve Bibi’s political needs. Smotrich and the other extremists effectively told Bibi he had to restart the war or be toppled, and Bibi duped Trump and Witkoff into believing he could free the hostages with harsher military blows on Hamas and more hardship for Gaza civilians, and by confining the population to a small corner of the strip.
It all turned out to be wrong. Hamas was not defeated, and when Israel eventually had to resume supplying food through its distribution organisation, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, it was so bungled that countless Gaza residents were dying each day swarming the Israeli distribution sites.
Hamas, Tibon noted, having seen “that Netanyahu’s blockade and starvation strategy had become a PR disaster for Israel, raised its demands in the ongoing hostage negotiations.” The bottom line, he concluded, is this: “Netanyahu dragged Trump and Witkoff into adopting a failed policy – one that returned no living hostages, cost the lives of nearly 50 Israeli soldiers since the war was resumed in March, led to the deaths of thousands of Palestinian civilians and precipitated a full-blown humanitarian disaster. The consequences of this failure will haunt Israel for years.”
Alas, it will haunt Palestinians as well, because I fear it has improved the chances that Hamas will come out of this war without having to cede power in Gaza. Bibi and Hamas have been tacitly enabling each other’s political survival for decades. It is quite possible that this disastrous war will end with both of them still in power.
If that is the case, say goodbye to any two-state solution and hello to a forever war. Because, to paraphrase philosopher Immanuel Kant, out of the crooked timber of Bibi and Hamas no straight thing will ever be made.
