Tensions between the leaders of Israel and the US have boiled over, with President Joe Biden accusing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of doing more to harm than help his own country. These are harsh words to hear from your most important ally, and Biden went further still. He described the Israeli government’s plan to attack Rafah — currently home to as many as 1 million refugees from the war — as a “red line” that must not be crossed. Bibi was unimpressed.
After Biden spoke, Israel’s great political survivor doubled down on his pledge to attack Rafah, so as to finish Hamas off once and for all. In an interview with the German media group Axel Springer SE, Netanyahu also said that if Biden meant to say he’d been acting against the wishes of the majority of Israelis, and was damaging the nation’s interests, then the US president was wrong on both counts. The reply was as shrewd as it was misleading.
Biden’s Gaza policy is a mess, but on this question he is absolutely right: Netanyahu has been a catastrophic leader for the state of Israel. His core policies, focused on settling the territory of the West Bank and ensuring there could never be a Palestinian state, were responsible for shifting the attention of Israel’s security forces away from Gaza. Hamas alone made the choice to launch its savage Oct. 7 attack, but Netanyahu’s misguided policies allowed it to succeed.
Israel’s prime minister has since compounded that failure by conducting a war without any clear strategy or endgame. The campaign’s disregard for civilian lives has left his country internationally isolated and under suspicion of trying to drive not just Hamas, but Palestinians as a whole from Gaza, in what would amount to an act of ethnic cleansing. Even Netanyahu’s publicly stated policy of retaining indefinite control over the so-called occupied territories is a recipe for perpetual bloodshed and radicalization.
None of these realities are changed by the fact that most Israelis do back the war. Most Russians back Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, too, but that doesn’t make it right or good for Russia. Most Americans backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Most Serbs backed Slobodan Milosevic’s bid to carve a Greater Serbia from Yugoslavia, as it broke apart in 1991. And most Germans and Japanese backed their governments’ genocidal wars of the 1930s and ‘40s. All of these conflicts were disastrous for the nations involved, and in most cases caused them lasting shame.
What makes Gaza especially complicated is that this war was begun by Hamas, a terrorist organization committed to Israel’s destruction. So unlike Putin in Ukraine, for example, Netanyahu launched his war in response to an attack, making it a legitimate act of self-defense. Yet that is not a blank check for civilian destruction. Nor is it a road map to lasting peace and security for Israel.
To say that most Israelis still back the war tells us little. After the brutality of Oct. 7, of course, they do. But decisions of war and peace are for statesmen to make, and though Netanyahu is an extraordinarily talented politician, he is — tragically for both Israelis and Palestinians — no statesman. Ordinary citizens don’t have to make the hard choices needed to execute strategies of foreign policy; they’re entitled to hold several conflicting views at once. Leaders, meanwhile, have to choose.
According to the most recent survey on Ukraine by Russia’s Levada Center, a thumping 74% of Russians support the war. But when asked to choose between continuing the fight and negotiating a cease-fire, a majority of 57% also say they want the war to end. Similarly, a February poll by the Israel Democracy Institute found that a majority of Jewish Israelis don’t believe an absolute victory over Hamas can be won. At the same time, majorities said they didn’t want to negotiate an end to the war; didn’t want to create “an independent and demilitarized Palestinian State;” and didn’t want to allow humanitarian aid into Gaza, even when distributed by organizations unconnected to Hamas.
So what does all that mean? Not much. A poll just a month earlier by Israel’s Midgam market-research company asked the key question differently: Would you back a US-brokered deal to end the war that included the return of hostages, a normalization agreement with Saudi Arabia, and a future demilitarized Palestinian state? The answer to that was yes — 51% to 29%.
Netanyahu’s task as prime minister is to find a way out of this war that ends with Israelis, and therefore also Palestinians, at peace. It is a job that he and Hamas have made immeasurably harder over the decade and a half that both have been in power. It’s also something that neither side has seemed interested in achieving — and now less than ever, since Hamas showed its true nature on Oct. 7, and Netanyahu became reliant for his political survival on ultra-nationalist and religious fundamentalist parties that openly call for Gaza to be emptied of Palestinians and resettled by Jews.
But there is one thing that’s in the power of ordinary Israelis to effect, and which a solid majority have told pollsters since the war’s start five months ago: They won’t be voting for Netanyahu, or his Likud party, again.
