How Netanyahu stole defeat from the jaws of victory

David Hearst

Netanyahu's brutal response to 7 October has undone decades of increasingly successful efforts by Israel and the US to convince Arab governments to abandon the Palestinian national cause

No commentator on 7 October last year - myself included - would have predicted that the war would still be being fought with the utmost ferocity a year on.

No one would have predicted a year ago that Israel would be fighting for longer than it did when it established its state in 1948. All wars Israel has fought since have been brief shows of absolute strength.

Not for want of trying. 

Israel has bombed Gaza into the stone age. More than 70 percent of its homes have been damaged or destroyed. Israel is in the process of doing the same to Tyre, the southern suburbs of Beirut and many other parts of southern Lebanon.

No one is raising the white flag. Nor are there significant signs of revolt from a population - now living in tents - that has lost over 41,000 people directly from bombing, and three or four times more in indirect deaths.

The Lancet said the real death toll could exceed 186,000 if other factors, such as disease and lack of healthcare, are taken into consideration.

These people are being starved. They are disease-ridden. They are about to face a second winter in tents. They are being bombed daily. And still, they will not submit. This scale of suffering has never been visited on any previous generation.

Every Palestinian alive today knows the stakes. And yet they will not flee. Most would rather die than surrender their land and homes to the occupation.

Two strategies

From the start of this war, there have been two very clear strategies from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.

Netanyahu had four declared objectives in the aftermath of the Hamas attack on southern Israel: to return the hostages; to smash all resistance groups in Palestine and Lebanon; to end Iran’s nuclear programme and weaken its axis of resistance; and to re-order the region, with Israel at the top.

As it quickly became obvious to the families of the hostages, as well as his own negotiating team, Hamas and William Burns, the director of the CIA who oversaw the talks, Netanyahu had no intention of getting the hostages back home. 

He tried to make Israel believe that pressurising Hamas would ensure a quicker release of hostages. This was patent nonsense, as the vast majority of hostages - there are only 101 still in Gaza - die from the bombs and missiles dropped by Israel. Three were shot dead trying to surrender.

Under Netanyahu’s right-wing government, the lives of the hostages were secondary to the aim of smashing Hamas. Had the hostages returned, Netanyahu could now be facing a long term in prison.

But he has demonstrably failed to smash Hamas, hence the speed with which he has started a new war with Lebanon and Hezbollah. Hamas is still in control of Gaza and, until now, and despite two attempts at replacing it as the government of the Strip, no other credible force in Gaza has emerged.

Hamas re-emerges wherever Israeli troops are not. Plain clothes police officers emerge to settle disputes  within a matter of hours.

At first, Israel tried to wipe out Hamas’s leadership. It has killed the first and second ranks of officials running the government, most of them in a massacre outside al-Shifa hospital.

But an insight into what is actually going on in Gaza was offered by Israel's latest announcement that it had killed three senior Hamas officials - Rawhi Mushtaha, the head of government and de facto prime minister; Sameh al-Siraj, who held the security portfolio on Hamas’s political bureau; and Sami Oudeh, commander of Hamas’s General Security Mechanism.

The air strike happened three months ago, and no one had noticed their absence. This is because Hamas continued to function regardless of which leaders were alive or dead.

In the past, assassinations had led to a period of uncertainty for Hamas. This happened after the killing of Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi in 2004. But it does not work today and nor does it work with this generation of fighters.

Decapitation is strictly tactical, and short-term. It provides the killers with temporary relief. Hezbollah’s leadership has indeed been knocked sideways by a series of intelligence coups, starting with the explosion of thousands of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies.  

But it has not been incapacitated as a fighting force, as the reconnaissance unit of the Golani Brigade is finding out.

In the long term, leaders are replaced, stocks are replenished, and memories are avenged.

Iran's role

For this, Israel is principally to blame, for it has deliberately trashed past norms of fighting. One suspected target is now deemed sufficient  cause to kill 90 innocents around him, whether he is there or not. An air strike on a cafe in the West Bank wiped out an entire family. Eighteen Palestinians died, including two children torn to pieces. If firing missiles into cafes is intended as a message, it is having the opposite effect.

Martyrs make the most effective of recruiting sergeants.

The same is true of all resistance groups, big or small, long-established or newly born. Every time Israeli troops leave Jenin, Tulkarm or Nablus, they think they have killed its resistance off for good. Every time, they return to face more fighters. 

Israel’s terror only begets more terror. The destruction of West Beirut in 1982 inspired Osama bin Laden’s attack on the Twin Towers in 2001.

Netanyahu’s third goal is to finish Iran off as a nuclear and regional power, an aim that predates 7 October by several decades. 

At the time of writing, we are awaiting Israel’s response to the firing of 180 Iranian ballistic missiles, some of which got through to their targets.

US President Joe Biden had to swiftly row back comments about letting Israel attack Iran’s oil installations after it was pointed out to him that Iran could close the Strait of Hormuz at a stroke.

The historical truth is that Iran was never central to the Palestinian cause. It only entered the fray after its revolution in 1978

No one is more nervous about an Israeli attack on Iran than US Gulf allies. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have already had a taste of what would happen to Aramco and oil exports should Iran’s oil installations come under attack. 

This is why the Gulf states produced a statement declaring neutrality, adding that they would not allow the US to use any of their airbases for an attack on Iran.

But the historical truth is that Iran was never central to the Palestinian cause. It only entered the fray after its revolution in 1978. For over 100 years the Palestinians have fought alone. Sometimes with the help of Arab states, first Egypt, then Syria, then Iraq, but mostly their fight was alone.

Iran’s nuclear programme is irrelevant to the Palestinian struggle. The biggest factor is the determination of the Palestinian people to live in their own land.

The real threat to Israel is not from Iran. It is from a young Palestinian in Jenin, or a former presidential security guard in Hebron, or a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship in Nakab. 

All these have formed their own conclusions from the hopelessness of the occupation under which they lived. None needed any prompting from Tehran.

Vicious dictatorships

Netanyahu’s fourth goal is to re-order the region with Israel at its head. Israeli officials just love to brief US journalists about the private words of support Israel is getting for its agenda of regional dominance from “moderate Sunni" Arab leaders. By moderate, they mean pro-western. All of them are vicious dictatorships.

But, here again, Israel and the US make the same mistake repeatedly by conflating the private words of support from the rich and pliant with the will of the people they claim to represent.

The shining example of rich and pliant,  the arch pragmatist Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, was largely misquoted to support the view that in their hearts Arab rulers cared little for Palestine.

The headline from this talk with Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, was this quote: "Do I care personally for the Palestinian issue? I don’t.”

But the full quote went thus: “Seventy percent of my population is younger than me,” the crown prince explained to Blinken. "For most of them, they never really knew much about the Palestinian issue. And so they’re being introduced to it for the first time through this conflict. It’s a huge problem. Do I care personally about the Palestinian issue? I don’t, but my people do, so I need to make sure this is meaningful.” 

The more autocratic the regime, and the more unsteady its ruler feels at times of regional crisis, and the more he has to pay attention to popular anger over Palestine. It's his Achilles Heel. Autocracy does not suppress or divert support for Palestine. It amplifies it.  

Consequently, Faisal bin Farhan al-Saud, the foreign minister of Saudi Arabia, announced that the kingdom would only normalise relations with Israel after the establishment of a Palestinian state.

This can be walked back, but for now, at least, the effect of the Abraham Accords in establishing a pro-Israel regional alliance is fading.

Sinwar’s goals

Now let’s look at Sinwar’s strategic goals on 7 October and see which, if any, have survived the passage of time.

He had two strategic goals. What he thinks comes from two speeches he made in the year before the Hamas attack. In one, in December 2022, Sinwar said the occupation must be made more costly for Israel.

“Escalating the resistance in all its forms and making the occupation [authority] pay the bill for occupation and settlement is the only means for the deliverance of our people and accomplishing their objectives of liberation and return,” he said.

In another speech, Sinwar said Palestinians had to present Israel with a clear choice.

“Either we force it to implement international law, to respect international resolutions, (that is) withdraw from the West Bank and Jerusalem, dismantle the settlements, release the captives and (allow) the return of the refugees," he said.

"Either we, together with the world, force it to do these things and accomplish the establishment of a Palestinian state on the occupied territories, including Jerusalem, or we render this occupation in a state of contradiction with the entire international will, thus isolating it robustly and immensely, and put an end to the status of its integration within the region and in the entire world.”

On the first count, Hamas has certainly made the occupation more expensive for Israel. 

Since the war started, 1,664 Israelis have been killed, of which 706 were soldiers, 17,809 were wounded and some 143,000 people have been evacuated from their homes, the Jerusalem Post reported.

Money has begun to flee the country. Despite the return of many of the 300,000 reservists to their jobs, the Economist reports: “Between May and July, outflows from the country’s banks to foreign institutions doubled compared with the same period last year, to $2bn. Israel’s economic policymakers are more worried than they have been since the start of the conflict.”

Biggest effect of 7 October

But it is on a psychological level that 7 October delivered its sharpest blow. 

The sudden and complete collapse of the Israeli military a year ago delivered a huge shock from which Israel has yet to recover. It fundamentally challenged the state’s principal role in defending its citizens.

It made all Israelis feel less safe and it alone can explain the brutality of the military’s response, despite the deep misgivings of security chiefs. 

If a video of a Hamas fighter phoning home to his mother in Gaza boasting about how many Jews he has killed is etched on David Ignatius’ memory, what about the thousands of TikTok posts Israeli soldiers have posted bragging of their war crimes ? What effect do they have on the Washington Post columnist? He, likes others, have blacked these out.

Because to accept the narrative that 7 October was Israel’s Holocaust is to put on blinkers.

It is to exclude and justify everything that Israel has visited on all Palestinians regardless of family, clan or history, a barbarism and inhumanity far greater than anyone could have thought possible of an advanced, urban, educated state on 6 October.

Here, finally, we arrive at the biggest effect of the Hamas attack. 

On 6 October, the Palestinian national cause was dead, if not buried. After more than 30 years of Oslo accords, Gaza was totally isolated. Its siege was permanent, and no one cared.

Netanyahu claimed victory, in September 2023 waving a map at the UN in which the West Bank did not exist.

There was only one item on the regional agenda and that was Saudi Arabia’s impending normalisation with Israel. The region was the quietest it had been for decades, or so Jake Sullivan, the US national security adviser, confidently wrote in his original version of his essay for Foreign Affairs.

“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges, the region is quieter than it has been for decades,” he wrote in that original version. Needless to say, it had to be hastily amended.

Cusp of victory

Under the most extreme and right-wing leadership in its history, land for peace had been jettisoned and so too had separation. By seizing land and holding it, Israel was on the cusp of victory. 

After 7 October, support for armed resistance is at an all-time high in the West Bank. The Hamas attack put armed resistance back on the agenda as a way to enforce its liberation agenda.

If the Oslo Accords had succeeded in producing a Palestinian state within five years of its signing, a movement like Hamas would not have existed. Or, if it had, it would have performed like an IRA splinter group, unable to change the course of events. 

Today, Hamas has changed the course of events, because the peaceful path to a viable Palestinian state was blocked. All talk of a peace process was a Potemkin-size mirage.

Oslo not only failed to deliver a Palestinian state. It created the conditions for the Israeli state to expand and thrive as never before in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

This has been the biggest single factor in persuading a new generation of Palestinian youth to sell their taxis and shops for guns. 

By the time the Qassam Brigades attacked southern Israel, this youth did not take a lot of convincing. A year on, the armed wing of Hamas has achieved hero status in the West Bank, Jordan, Iraq and, I suspect, large parts of Egypt and north Africa. 

Hamas right now would blow Fatah away if an open election was ever allowed to take place, as it did in 2006.

Regionally, the axis of resistance, which for much of the period since the Arab Spring, was a rhetorical device, has become a functioning military alliance. 

Hezbollah, which for so long, tried to distance itself from the Hamas operation, is now under attack and in the war as much as Hamas ever was. Millions of Lebanese have fled their homes and Beirut is experiencing much of the same terror from Israeli drones and bombers as Gaza City did.

Palestine has returned to its rightful place, which is to occupy the key role in determining the stability of the region.

Decades of US and Israeli efforts reversed

Israel’s brutal response to 7 October has reversed decades of Israeli and US efforts to convince Arabs that Palestine could no longer have a veto on Israeli-Arab relations. 

Today that veto is stronger than ever before.

The change has been even more pronounced globally. This has been helped by the overwhelming urge for the western alliance to find an enemy. Until recently, it was the Soviets.

Then radical Islamism briefly took the place of a global threat. 

Palestine has become the world’s number one human rights cause, and it tops the agenda of efforts to secure international justice

Now it is the alliance of the dictators of Russia, China and Iran, all seeking spheres of interest, which undermine the world order, according to US Secretary of State Blinken's latest essay in Foreign Affairs.

As if the US was not seeking a global sphere of interest? Neither Sullivan’s nor Blinken’s assertions in Foreign Affairs age well.

But as a result of its war, Israel has lost the Global South and a large part of the West as well.

Palestine has become the world’s number one human rights cause, and it tops the agenda of efforts to secure international justice, with ongoing cases in the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice.

It has sparked the biggest protest movement of recent history in the UK.

A matter of time

Of the two strategies, Sinwar’s seems to be working. Whether he lives or dies, that agenda already has an unstoppable momentum of its own.

Emboldened by Biden’s weakness, the possible arrival of Donald Trump, who now says Israel is too small, Netanyahu may well be fooled into thinking he can occupy northern Gaza and southern Lebanon.

The annexation of Area C, which comprises most of the West Bank, is almost certainly next.

But what Netanyahu will not be able to do in Gaza, Lebanon or the West Bank is to finish what he has started. 

What forced Ariel Sharon to withdraw from Gaza, or Ehud Barak from Lebanon, will apply to the Israeli forces Netanyahu attempts to install in Gaza and Lebanon all the more vigorously. It's only a matter of time.

This war has stripped Israel of its liberal Zionist image, the image of the new kid on the block trying to defend itself in a “tough neighbourhood”. 

This has been replaced by the image of a regional ogre, a genocidal state, with no moral compass, using terror to survive. Such a state cannot live in peace with its neighbours. It crushes and dominates to survive. 

Netanyahu’s war is short-term and tactical. Sinwar’s war is long-term. It is to make Israel realise it can never keep the lands it has occupied if it wants peace.

Netanyahu’s war is a year old and can only continue in the same way it started by meting out the same devastation to south Lebanon that Gaza received. It has no reverse gear. Sinwar’s war has only just started.

Who will win? That will depend on the degree of resilience of the oppressed. I would be surprised if there were not those who say: “We have had enough, we want to stop.”

But one year on, the spirit of resistance is high and still growing. If I am right, this fight is only just beginning. 

The power equation in the Middle East has indeed changed, but not in Israel's or America’s favour.