Wissot: Criticism never bothered Netanyahu before, but it should now
I once heard Benjamin Netanyahu say in a speech on television that he would prefer “bad press to a good obituary.” Now with Israel engaged in a six-month-long war in the Gaza Strip with no end game in sight, the Palestinian death toll surpassing 33,000, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, and world opinion increasingly opposed to how Israel has prosecuted the war, the question becomes just how much bad publicity can Israel’s prime minister stomach?
One outspoken critic, Matthew Brzezinski, has written that Israel can “no longer be seen as David fighting the giant Goliath, it has become Goliath.” Sen. Chuck Schumer has called for new elections in Israel to wrest power away from Netanyahu. The Senate majority leader went on to add, “Israel cannot survive if it becomes a pariah.”
With all due respect to the good senator from New York, Israel can and will survive no matter what the world thinks of it as long as the United States, its staunchest ally, has its back. The U.S. is in a symbiotic relationship with Israel. It needs Israel to serve as its proxy in the Middle East to curb Iranian aggression and prevent the region from becoming a precursor to Armageddon. The political survival, however, of Israel’s prime minister is in grave doubt because of the intelligence and security failures that took place on Oct. 7. The Israeli public largely blames Netanyahu for those failures.
There has always been a point in the relationship dating back to Israel’s founding where its superpower pal placed limits on how far it is willing to allow its valued ally to go in pursuing military objectives. Israel has repeatedly stopped combat operations when instructed to by the United States. This was true in the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948, during the Suez Crisis with Egypt in 1956, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the war with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006. The message has always been: We’ve got your back but you must withdraw your forces when we feel you are risking the possibility of a larger regional conflict.
The war in Gaza is the first time Israel has ignored admonishments coming from its most important geopolitical supporter. Netanyahu picked the worst possible time to do that. As I write this, Iran has launched over 300 missiles and drones at Israeli targets in retaliation for Israel’s killing of a top Iranian general in Damascus on April 1. The fear the U.S. had when Israel launched its retaliatory attack on Gaza was that a wider regional conflict involving Iran could happen is more pronounced than ever.
Support Local Journalism
Netanyahu mistakenly calculated that the barbaric slaughter of Israeli civilians committed by Hamas on Oct. 7 would arouse world sympathies to the point that Israel would be given the green light to wipe Hamas off the face of the Earth without regard to the risk to defenseless Gazans. The Israeli military’s battle plan called for the bombing of buildings, hospitals, and refugee camps where Israeli leaders believed Hamas was hiding. The civilian death toll climbed rapidly because it was impossible when a specific location was targeted to avoid killing non-combatants who were being used as human shields.
Destroying Hamas was a higher priority for Netanyahu than rescuing hostages or protecting innocent souls caught in the crossfire. Israel’s prime minister failed to realize that world sympathy for the more than 1,200 men, women and children brutally murdered by Hamas on that worst day in Israel’s 75-year history would quickly fade when the killing of so many in Gaza reached numbers that were 20 times greater. Very few observers outside of Israel felt that Israel’s legitimate right to defend itself included the right to do it any damn way it pleased.
Netanyahu has been seriously outmaneuvered by Hamas. The terrorist group’s ability to escape detection by Israel’s vaunted intelligence and security systems which resulted in the horror of Oct. 7 did devastating damage to Netanyahu’s reputation as the leader the country could count on to keep it safe. This failure was compounded by his decision to launch a full-scale military response that did nothing to defend Israel in the future but fed instead his nation’s understandable desire to exact revenge for the heinous crimes committed by Hamas. Netanyahu is waging a payback campaign and if it was only limited to killing Hamas fighters the world wouldn’t care how many of them were left dead on the field of battle.
If this was a chess match, Hamas would have Netanyahu in check because, with no victory in sight and no clear political solution for what happens when the fighting ends, both Israel and Hamas are bunker buddies trapped in the rubble of Gaza. Neither side can resolve their historically numerous conflicts peacefully, so launching retaliatory strikes that take a tragic toll on both adversaries’ civilian populations is sadly all they are accomplishing.
Criticizing Netanyahu for his tone-deafness doesn’t imply any defense of Hamas — which has never recognized Israel’s right to exist — and is hell-bent on expelling Jews from the land of Moses so they can be replaced by Arabs in the land of Mohammad. But Netanyahu can’t claim the moral high ground by simply declaring at least I’m not as bad as Hamas. That unflattering comparison is not cause for celebration.
The cruel irony of all the suffering this war has caused is that none of this would have occurred if Gaza was an oil-saturated oasis and not a God-forsaken stretch of sand between Israel and the Mediterranean Sea. Hamas would have had less need to provoke Israel into going bonkers if it had its version of Dubai to develop and protect. Human greed dictates that you don’t risk the destruction of oil supply chains and the disruption of the flow of billions of dollars in oil-driven revenues by goading a formidable adversary into attacking you.
Jay Wissot is a resident of Denver and Vail. Email him at jayhwissot@mac.com
