Netanyahu’s walls are caving in

James M Dorsey

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s walls are caving in. His multiple battles fall into two categories: keeping his increasingly fragile government in place and fighting a war he has already lost in the court of public opinion and possibly on the ground in Gaza if measured by the prime minister’s war goals.

On Monday, Israel suffered its most significant international setback since 2016 with the US allowing the United Nations Security Council to call for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. The United States abstained in a 2016 Council vote that condemned Israeli settlement activity

The US Gaza vote strains Israel’s relations with the United States, its main backer that prevented the Security Council from demanding a ceasefire for the past six months, as well as Europe, and most of the rest of the international community.

US ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield controversially attempted to soften the blow by declaring the resolution “non-binding,” even though UN Security Council resolutions are legally binding and constitute international law. In doing so, Thomas-Greenfield was also trying to create a buffer against likely pressure on the United States to sanction Israel if it refuses to abide by the resolution.

The State Department said hours before the UN vote that the United States deemed Israel in compliance with President Joe Biden’s national security memorandum requiring recipients of US weapons to guarantee that they adhere to international humanitarian law and will not block the provision of humanitarian assistance.

That did not stop Netanyahu from responding to the US abstention in the UN vote by cancelling a visit to Washington by an Israeli delegation headed by Strategic Affairs Minister Ron Dermer, who lacks a military background, to discuss Israel’s planned ground offensive in Rafah, the southern Gazan city that is home to more than a million Palestinians displaced by the war.

With Defence Minister Yoav Gallant already meeting with senior US officials in Washington in a separate visit, Netanyahu’s defiance is largely symbolic. Nevertheless, Gallant, responding to the UN vote, warned that Israel “will act against Hamas everywhere, even in areas where we have not been yet.” Gallant stopped short of naming potential target countries, but Qatar, the main ceasefire and prisoner exchange mediator, and Turkey are likely to top the list.

Israel has accused Qatar, home to several exiled Hamas leaders, of funding Hamas, although the US and Israel acquiesced in their presence in the Gulf state to maintain a back channel with the group. Netanyahu for years solicited Qatari funding in a bid to prevent a breakdown of law and order in Gaza and keep the Palestinian polity, split between Hamas and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestine Authority, divided.

The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), founded by Yigal Carmon, a former advisor to Israel’s West Bank and Gaza occupation authority and Prime Ministers Yitzhak Shamir and Yitzhak Rabin, has produced in recent months a series of reports designed to bolster Israeli denunciations of Qatar. This week, MEMRI took Qatar to task for hosting the Doha-based, Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS).

Palestinian and Jordanian members of the Union have called on their compatriots to join the fight against Israel and “the Jews” with protests and uprisings against autocratic rulers who allegedly enable Israel’s war, a reference to Arab countries that have diplomatic relations with Israel. The clerics also urged Arab militaries to come to the support of their Palestinian brethren.

Meanwhile, US Assistant Secretary of State William Russo warned in a readout of a phone call with Israeli foreign ministry officials earlier this month that “the Israelis seemed oblivious to the fact that they are facing major, possibly generational damage to their reputation not just in the region but elsewhere in the world. We are concerned that the Israelis are missing the forest for the trees and are making a major strategic error in writing off their reputation damage.”

Add to this the fact that the evolution of the war in recent weeks and running battles with Palestinian fighters in the West Bank suggests that even if the fighting ends today, Israel is looking at an insurgency in Gaza and the West Bank for the foreseeable future unless the ceasefire is linked to a credible effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The US intelligence community last month predicted that “Israel probably will face lingering armed resistance from Hamas for years to come, and the military will struggle to neutralize Hamas’s underground infrastructure, which allows insurgents to hide, regain strength, and surprise Israeli forces.”

In Gaza, the Israeli military increasingly is fighting in places it initially occupied and then withdrew from in the belief that it had defeated Hamas. Battles in recent days in and around Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis and Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City erupted in areas Israel earlier said had been cleared of Palestinian fighters. In addition, Hamas, hours before the UN vote, launched, for the first time in two months, rockets at the Israeli port city of Ashdod.

Israel’s seeming inability six months into the war to defeat Hamas, despite dealing it severe body blows, is compounded by its incapability or unwillingness to maintain law and order in Gaza, its effort to undermine for political rather than security reasons the United Nations Relief and Welfare Agency (UNRWA), the predominant humanitarian organisation in the Strip, and its refusal to allow unfettered humanitarian supplies to enter the territory. The power vacuum created by Israeli military tactics and policy reinforces Hamas’ resilience and its ability to return to areas vacated by Israeli forces.

Taken together, the UN setback and the evolution of the war contradict Netanyahu’s assertions that Israel is achieving its war goals, including destroying Hamas, freeing more than 100 remaining hostages kidnapped by the group in its October 7 attack on Israel, and ensuring that Gaza no longer serves as a launching pad for Palestinian resistance.

Netanyahu will have been heartened by the insistence, in response to the UN resolution, of Gallant and Benny Gantz, a member of the war cabinet, that Israel will continue the war until its goals have been realised. Nevertheless, the UN resolution weakens Israel’s negotiating position in talks mediated by Qatar, the United States, and Egypt to secure a ceasefire and an exchange of the hostages for Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.

The resolution, in effect, constitutes an attempt to force negotiating parties to reach agreement in the next two weeks by demanding an immediate ceasefire for the Muslim holy month of Ramadan that would end on April 10, but lead “to a lasting sustainable ceasefire.”

While most Security Council members will read the resolution’s demand for “the immediate and unconditional release of all hostages” as a reference to the Hamas-held hostages, it allows Hamas and others to interpret the clause as also including Palestinians in Israeli prisons. The claim would be substantiated by the ongoing ceasefire negotiations and Israel’s past willingness to exchange prisoners.

Israeli officials said before the UN vote that Netanyahu had accepted a US compromise proposal to raise the number of Palestinian prisoners that Israel would free in exchange for hostages. Media reports said Hamas had rejected the US proposal.