Israel’s Netanyahu fights against Hamas, and for his future

The war in Gaza – 4 months old, imposing terrible suffering on both sides, yielding no definitive victor, and promising no visible endpoint – is being propelled by a dizzying array of regional rivalries and interests.

Yet one thing, above all, could determine how long the war rages, and how it ends.

It’s the Benjamin Netanyahu factor.

For Mr. Netanyahu, Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, the war in Gaza is not only a response to the abuse, abduction, and killing by Hamas of more than a thousand civilians across southern Israel on Oct. 7 last year.

It is also a struggle for political survival, after presiding over the single greatest security failure in Israel’s history.

With the outlines of Mr. Netanyahu’s bid to stay in office growing steadily clearer, this other war has complicated U.S. efforts this week to mediate a new cease-fire and a hostages-for-prisoners exchange between Israel and Hamas.

It’s also contributing to U.S.-Israeli tensions over a range of other issues: how the war is being fought, how best to mitigate the deepening humanitarian crisis facing Gaza’s 2 million civilians – and, critically, how Gaza will be rebuilt, and governed, when the fighting finally ends.

That’s because Mr. Netanyahu is staking his future on two political calculations.

The first: that he can dust off his unrivaled brand as a no-nonsense strongman leader, ready and willing to face down not only Israel’s enemies but also, when necessary, its key allies, including the United States.

The second: that he can defer a reckoning for the events of Oct. 7, particularly an early election, by retaining his parliamentary majority. That majority depends on far-right politicians who favor permanent Israeli control over both the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Survival won’t be easy. Mr. Netanyahu’s poll numbers have tanked since Oct. 7. A survey in January found a scant 15% of voters wanting him to remain prime minister once the war ends.

Opposition leaders who joined him in an inner Cabinet after the Hamas attack have begun questioning the viability of his declared war aim – total victory and the destruction of Hamas in Gaza; they are advocating a cease-fire deal to free the remaining Gaza hostages.

The families of the hostages have also been pressing the prime minister to prioritize their welfare.

If the U.S. and its Qatari and Egyptian partners do manage to persuade Hamas to accept such an arrangement, Mr. Netanyahu would be forced to make a difficult political choice. Refusing a deal would risk breaking up the inner war Cabinet, which could hasten a new election. Accepting it would probably prompt the defection of his extreme-right coalition partners, which could also force a reckoning with the voters.

Still, there are powerful reasons for Washington to keep seeking common ground with Mr. Netanyahu.

He is not merely the sitting prime minister. He has also proven to be Israeli politics’ great survivor.

Since the 1990s, weathering a pair of election defeats along the way, he has been in power for a total of 16 years.

When Hamas attacked last October, he was already wrestling with challenges that would have sunk many another politician.

He was – and still is – facing court cases on charges of corruption and breach of trust.

In order to assemble his governing coalition in 2022, he had included the most extreme-right ministers ever empowered in Israel. When he attempted a “judicial reform” aimed at limiting government oversight by the Supreme Court, hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest what they saw as the unraveling of Israel’s democracy.

Yet within hours of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, he redefined Israeli politics around what he portrayed as an existential war to obliterate Hamas in Gaza. And that narrative – if not Mr. Netanyahu’s leadership – has been embraced by a large majority of Israelis.

This narrative could begin to crumble, weakened by the welfare of the hostages, perhaps, or by first-hand misgivings about the war among the many reserve troops rotating out of Gaza.

Still, as long as it holds firm, the Americans and their regional allies seem to recognize that there is little chance of persuading Mr. Netanyahu to engage with them on how to bring the war to an end, much less on the question of Gaza’s, and the Palestinians’, political future.

Unless the allies appeal to his self-interest. Their main hope may well rest on convincing him of an endgame that would benefit not just Israel and the wider Middle East, but his own political fortunes as well.

The geopolitical imperative, as Washington sees it, is already clear: to revive the Gaza Strip with the help of international support and billions of dollars from leading Arab countries in the Gulf, under a reconfigured Palestinian political leadership as part of an eventual two-state peace arrangement.

That formula, it is hoped, would bring regional stability – and offer a viable, long-term alternative to the “resistance” message from Iran and proxy armies like Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

But at its core would also be a formal peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia, the leading Arab and Islamic state.

That prize, long sought by Israeli leaders, would lift Mr. Netanyahu into the ranks of historic peacemakers.