Raymond J. de Souza: Netanyahu goes it alone
Such comments are not hard to find among Israel's stalwart defenders — Oren is one — in Israel and abroad. The conclusion has been reached, by a significant number of Israelis, and by a wide consensus of Israel's longstanding friends, that the Netanyahu government's policies, and perhaps even disposition, are inhumane. All Israeli advocates make the distinction between support for Israel's existence and security in general and the particular policies of any specific government, but it is lamentable that the current government has so damaged Israel's standing.
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We have arrived then at the 30-year and 20-year consequences of that most consequential figure, Benjamin Netanyahu. Next year, astonishingly, he will mark the 30th anniversary his first election as prime minister, an opponent, then and now, of a Palestinian state, and the Oslo Accords of 1993 as a step towards that. Twenty years ago this week, he resigned as finance minister in the government of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, objecting to the Gaza withdrawal policy executed that summer.
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Along the way, Netanyahu has won many arguments and achieved strategic and military victories, as even his political opponents would concede. Yet now he is losing friends even more quickly than he is defeating enemies.
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This week, 20 years to the day after his 2005 resignation from cabinet, he announced that Israel would retake all of Gaza, fully occupying the territory. At what cost in Israeli and Palestinian lives he cannot know.
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Twenty years ago Sharon withdrew from Gaza on the grounds that the continued Israeli presence could not justify the cost in material, security and international esteem. Netanyahu is now back, bigger than ever, willing to bear higher costs in material, security and international esteem.
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Israel's military leadership and most Israelis disagree, but Netanyahu is determined to vindicate his position of 20 years ago. This time there is no danger that the finance minister will resign. Bezalel Smotrich has made little secret of his desire to drive Palestinians out of Gaza. Just this week, he posed in front of a ' Death to Arabs ' graffito — which he disavowed after it was widely criticized.
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Thus Netanyahu plans on a more intense war and a more intense crisis of displacement and hunger, to achieve goals that the previous 22 months of war, displacement and hunger have not completely achieved.
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