On Monday, US Middle East envoy Jared Kushner visited Israel and met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The focus of the discussion was reportedly US President Donald Trump’s peace plan for Gaza, which the Israeli leader rejected last week after Hamas accepted it.
Unfortunately, such initiatives from the White House to try to jump start the stalled peace plan for Gaza amid growing criticism that the Board of Peace is failing are unlikely to work. Netanyahu will not step back from his insistence that Hamas has to disarm first before Israel fulfils any of its commitments. He holds the same position on Lebanon – a position that is seen as largely obstructive by those involved in the negotiations.
The ultimate goal of the Israeli prime minister is to delay future negotiations and especially the closing of any deal. This is because he does not gain anything politically from a concentrated effort to end Israel’s wars.
As long as Netanyahu is able to keep Israel fighting in any conflict – whether with Iran, the Palestinians, Hezbollah or Syria – he can pass himself off as “Mr Security”, the only one capable of dealing effectively with the multifront security threat. Maintaining this image before the elections in October is particularly important.
Opinion polls indicated that 45 percent of Israelis oppose a peace deal for Gaza, 37 percent want a return to fighting in the strip while 17 percent want the status quo to be maintained. Two-thirds of Israelis want Israeli occupation of parts of southern Lebanon to continue to retain a “security belt”. Nearly half of Israelis want major military action against Iran to continue. Many of these pro-war voters are part of Netanyahu’s potential supporters.
Does it matter to them that the prime minister has failed abysmally at nearly all of his plans and attempts to vanquish Israel’s enemies? Not so much. He is still seen as the only one with sufficient experience and toughness to face a broadly hostile world.
Many Israelis believe that the world at large has set its sights on the destruction of Israel. Anyone who does not automatically “stand with Israel” is Israel’s enemy. For his supporters, Netanyahu is the only Israeli politician to correctly identify this situation. They see him as the only one who would be able to separate the sheep from the goats and establish proper and effective defence alliances for Israel.
Netanyahu is also credited with a vast knowledge of American politics. Many Israelis believe he has taken everything Trump can give but has also allowed the Israeli public to see that even the US president is not to be trusted.
The fact that Israel is generally considered to have lost the United States as a significant partner is in many ways irrelevant to Netanyahu’s image. Now, as his rejection of the peace plan shows, he is the only one who can say “no” to the US.
Undermining any progress towards ending any of the conflicts is important for Netanyahu also because it allows him to shape his criminal trial. He can request recesses for “important political meetings”, for example. His legal team can claim it must break because of a scheduled office trip just as he can claim medical examinations and other such interruptions. War breeds anomalies and irregularities. Who but the prime minister would be responsible for seeing to the proper resolution of such interruptions?
While Netanyahu keeps pushing for perpetual war, he does not seem to be too worried about the Israeli economy. Indeed, conflict has proven beneficial for business, especially defence companies. The Israeli stock exchange is seeing record highs while the shekel has appreciated. Projected growth for 2027 is 5.6 percent.
But a report released in June by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) predicted that any return to intense military activity would exact “large fiscal costs” on the Israeli economy as businesses are forced to shut down and reservists are mobilised.
But OECD warnings can do little to dissuade a prime minister who has hedged his political survival on war. Nor can apparently special visits of White House envoys.