Why Benjamin Netanyahu Is Going Back to War

As if the Israeli people’s losses from October 7th are not grievous enough, their fears for the hostages not haunting enough, and the miseries of the Gazans not shaming enough, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is bringing his country back to war. He’s also exacerbating its divisions, pitting orthodoxy and coercion against the rule of secular law. “Netanyahu’s true objective appears increasingly clear,” Haaretz’s senior defense analyst Amos Harel wrote, “a gradual slide toward an authoritarian-style regime, whose survival he will try to secure through perpetual war on multiple fronts.”

On March 18th, with the Trump Administration’s approval, Israeli aircraft renewed the bombing of Gaza. Raids killed at least five senior Hamas officials. They also killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, some four hundred people, more than two-thirds of whom were women and children. Since then, both Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen have resumed firing rockets and missiles at Israel, setting off air-raid sirens in the center of the country; and Israeli ground forces have pushed into the Netzarim Corridor, once again cutting Gaza in half. Rockets were also fired from Lebanon at the northern Israeli town of Metula. It’s hard now to see what will stop the escalation.

Netanyahu’s office said that the strikes were necessary because Hamas had rejected proposals—advanced by the Trump Administration’s envoy, Steve Witkoff—to extend the ceasefire agreement, which had been in place since January 19th, by negotiating the release of more hostages. “Israel will, from now on, act against Hamas with increasing military strength,” the Prime Minister’s office said in a statement. From now on. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group representing almost all the families of the remaining hostages, was having none of it. It called for mass demonstrations and issued a statement accusing Netanyahu of “abandoning” their loved ones while engaging in “complete deception.”

On Saturday night, more than a hundred thousand people joined those demonstrations in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Two major opposition leaders, the Democrats’ Yair Golan and Yair Lapid, of the centrist party Yesh Atid, each called for civil disobedience: a mass refusal to pay taxes and a general strike. On Channel 12, a third, center-right party leader, National Unity’s usually circumspect Gadi Eisenkot, endorsed their stand. The three pledged to form a single democratic bloc to bring down the government. “We are stopping the economy, the ports, transportation, the schools, academia, businesses and the streets,” Golan, who was shoved to the ground by police at a recent demonstration, said. “We are stopping the country—to save it.”

The ceasefire agreement consisted of two phases, the first of which ended at the beginning of March. Hamas (and Islamic Jihad) released thirty-three hostages (and the bodies of eight more) in return for nearly two thousand Palestinian prisoners. The second phase, which should have been under negotiation by now, was meant to arrange for the return of the remaining living hostages, believed to be twenty-four people, in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza—and a change of government there. Notionally, Hamas would be replaced by a new regionally supported Palestinian administration. Once it was in place, the Saudis were expected to join in the underwriting of Gazan reconstruction and in normalizing relations with Israel.

But, from the start of the war, Netanyahu has obstructed any effort to set up a new Palestinian governing structure, because that would inevitably engage the Palestinian Authority, and would thus be a step toward eventual Palestinian independence. Harel told me that Netanyahu’s government is now not only authoritarian in style but also “brazenly theocratic,” aiming for, among other things, incorporating into Israel “Judea and Samaria”—the occupied West Bank. An alternative administration for Gaza is not, though, entirely hypothetical. Earlier this month, Western-aligned Arab states assembled in Cairo, where they detailed plans for a government of Palestinian “technocrats”—adjacent to and legitimatized, but not chosen, by the P.A., which controls parts of the West Bank, under the auspices of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Egypt and Jordan pledged to offer security support. Some fifty-three billion dollars, presumably in large part from the Gulf states, would be funnelled into reconstruction. Hamas would consent to an interim administration, though it was left unclear what would be done about its armed units.

“All Palestinian parties see the P.L.O. as the unifying umbrella for the struggle against occupation,” Samir Hulileh, the former C.E.O. of the huge Palestinian conglomerate PADICO (and a potential candidate “technocrat” for a new government), told me. “Hamas could be integrated into the P.L.O., once it agrees on its charter and past agreements with Israel.” It would then be “a political party, not a militia, and even compete in future elections.” Its guns would be handed over to a Palestinian police force to be established in Gaza and commanded by the P.A., which, in turn, could recruit police officers from Hamas and, crucially, pay their salaries. The business community in the West Bank as a whole is mobilized, in despair over mounting violence by settlers and the Israeli military in that territory, in addition to the violence in Gaza. (PADICO has invested more than three hundred and fifty million dollars in real estate in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The company’s chairman, Bashar Masri, independently built Rawabi, a one-and-a-half-billion-dollar planned city, near Ramallah, designed to accommodate forty thousand residents.) And for Egypt there is urgency in advancing the regional alliance that rebuilding Gaza requires. Houthi attacks have caused the diversion of most shipping from the Red Sea to a route around South Africa. This has, among other losses, reduced Egyptian revenue from the Suez Canal by about eight hundred million dollars a month.

Witkoff, however, was offering not a Phase Two but a sort of Phase One-lite: half the remaining hostages in exchange for a fifty-day truce. At that point—the hostages’ families might reasonably fear—Netanyahu could proceed to reoccupy Gaza, potentially “abandoning” the remaining hostages. (His populist and messianic coalition partners are already enthusing over Trump’s fantastical plan for U.S. custodianship of—and the Gazans’ removal from—the Strip.) In other words, Phase Two has evaporated. Netanyahu claims that Hamas has rejected all compromise—a point that Witkoff, curiously, seemed to cast doubt on in an interview with Tucker Carlson on March 21st. Meanwhile, with so many enraged youth in Gaza, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have reportedly recruited new fighters—not enough to threaten Israel but more than enough to intimidate Gazans. By Netanyahu’s logic, the bombing must continue until Hamas simply capitulates but, illogically, releases the hostages first.

Netanyahu’s justification for renewed war is a deception, also, because it is his culminating move in a political struggle that will determine whether Israel remains an open society; and the rival camps in this contest map closely onto those who fought over his government’s so-called judicial reform, in 2023. That gambit aimed to curtail the Supreme Court’s ability to set constitutional limits on the Netanyahu government’s actions. And, in both cases, the Netanyahu coalition’s transparent concern is an old one: to advance annexation and sustain theocracy—and to preëmpt, respectively, Palestinian independence and Israeli liberalism.“Establishing a religious autocracy on the ruins of Israel’s already battered democracy has always been and remains the government’s primary mission,” the Haaretz editor Aluf Benn wrote, earlier this month. The government is now “approaching this task anew,” but, this time, it is “facing less protest and a weaker opposition.”