Germany stops military exports that could be used in Gaza
The move from Germany, which has been a supporter of Israel for decades, came after the Israeli cabinet announced plans to take over Gaza City.
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In a statement, Mr Merz emphasised that Israel 'has the right to defend itself against Hamas's terror' and said the release of Israeli hostages and 'purposeful' negotiations towards a ceasefire in the 22-month conflict 'are our top priority'.
He added that Hamas must not have a role in the future of Gaza.
'The even harsher military action by the Israeli army in the Gaza Strip, approved by the Israeli cabinet last night, makes it increasingly difficult for the German government to see how these goals will be achieved,' he added.
'Under these circumstances, the German government will not authorise any exports of military equipment that could be used in the Gaza Strip until further notice.'
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The German government remains deeply concerned about the suffering of civilians in Gaza, he said, adding: 'With the planned offensive, the Israeli government bears even greater responsibility than before for providing for their needs.'
He called on Israel to allow comprehensive access for aid deliveries — including for UN organisations and other non-governmental organisations — and said Israel 'must continue to comprehensively and sustainably address the humanitarian situation in Gaza'.
Germany also called on Israel's government 'not to take any further steps toward annexing the West Bank'.
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Scotsman
an hour ago
- Scotsman
Readers' letters: Israel's war in Gaza is not and act of 'self-defence'
A reader says it's ludicrous to sugest Israel's actions in Gaza are defensive or a proportionate response to Hamas's terrorism Sign up to our daily newsletter – Regular news stories and round-ups from around Scotland direct to your inbox Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... It might help dispel some misconceptions about Israel/Hamas if the news media would resist the urge to repeat clichés such as 'Israel has the right to defend itself'. Obviously all countries have that right, but in the case of Israel, one might reasonably ask 'defend itself against what?'. Hamas are a group of murderous thugs who live in burrows like animals, and they never had the capability to inflict serious damage on Israel, as has been demonstrated by the ease with which they have been crushed. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Yes, they were able to inflict occasional damage but their greatest military triumph was the cowardly killing of a thousand youngsters at a music festival. Hamas are no more of a threat to the continued existance of the state of Israel than the IRA were to the UK. Israeli soldiers organise military equipment while standing on armoured personnel carriers near the border with the Gaza Stip (Picture:) The notion that the war crimes being carried out in Gaza by the IDF are defensive actions, or a proportionate response to Hamas terrorism, is transparently ludicrous. The removal of the threat from Hamas is being used by Israel as a pretext for the killing and displacement of the civilian population of Palestine, and the ultimate goal is the annexation of Palestinian land. We all know it is wrong, but beneath our breath we mutter the old clichés to comfort ourselves. Graham M McLeod, Kinross, Perth & Kinross Action stations Today marks the largest protest ever against the ludicrous proscription of Palestine Action as a presumed terrorist group. Amnesty International are the latest to plead for a reversal of this act and for the police to show a light touch in dealing with the protesters. While I wouldn't condone their recent vandalism at an RAF station, I can understand why they did it, out of support for the Palestinians' desperate plight. After all, it's surely shameful that we're supporting Israel by supplying parts for F35 jets, among other things. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Carrying placards bearing the message 'We oppose genocide, we support Palestine Action' is hardly a terrorist offence. Extreme acts, like the unimaginable starvation of the Gazans, inevitably result in extreme responses. The right to protest, albeit peacefully, lies at the very heart of democracy. This weekend's protesters in London stand on the right side of history. Imprisoning protesters simply for opposing genocide is is a sad day for everyone, save those criminals for whom there's no room in our already overcrowded prisons. Ian Petrie, Edinburgh Blame shared Once again Scottish Green MSP Ross Greer has pontificated about Israel. Despite the many problems Scotland has this seems to be a 'cause célèbre' for his party and even the SNP too. The attacks upon Israel are incessant and now it is a boycott that is in Mr Greer's sights. The Greens seem to approach everything by looking only at half of the problem. Gender reforms and bottle deposit return schemes failed because of this. Blaming only Israel for the situation in Gaza is exactly the same. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Mr Greer utterly ignores Hamas's role in the pain inflicted upon ordinary Palestinians. Hamas brooks no political interference, it has a 'net zero' policy for gay people, it takes most of the food aid and ransoms it back to the people at huge profit as well as issuing somewhat questionable casualty figures and not allowing any publicity that damages this. Then there is the hostage taking and their subsequent ill-treatment. Is this all to be ignored? This is the regime Mr Greer prefers to back. Recent pronouncements from Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney appear to be siding with Mr Greer too. Is it any wonder Scotland is in such a mess when this is a sample of the 'clever advice' our Scottish governments, past and present, can offer as Holyrood has no power in foreign affairs? Gerald Edwards, Glasgow Cliff edge For months now it's felt like the economy has been teetering on a cliff edge: swirling headwinds never easing, only ever strengthening. The feeling of vertigo inescapable. And the magic elixir of economic growth only ever elusive. Now influential think tank the National Institute of Economic and Social Research has calculated the Chancellor is facing a £50 billion 'black hole' in the public finances. Apparently powerless to control day-to-day expenditure or effect meaningful reform of public services, taxes on working people – most likely by stealth – will inevitably rise in the Autumn Budget. Moreover, government debt is at a post-war high of 110 per cent of GDP. This is imposing an additional cost on the taxpayer of around £110bn annually (roughly twice the defence budget). Not sustainable! Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Surely the 0.25 per cent cut in interest rates announced by the Bank of England must be good news – at least for borrowers, especially the 900,000 households coming off fixed mortgages in the second half of 2025. And surely this must put more money back into the economy, giving it a much-needed boost. Consumption is the single biggest component driving UK growth, accounting for 60 to 65 per cent of GDP. The complicating factor here is the UK's historically high savings ratio of 11 per cent of GDP. Changed household behaviour now means less consumption as budgets are adjusted to account for ongoing risks and uncertainties. Moreover, at 3.6 per cent inflation continues to run well above the Bank of England's annual target of two per cent. We pray for easing economic headwinds and the return of growth. Meanwhile a head for heights will be needed as the economy continues its precarious cliff-top journey. Ewen Peters, Newton Mearns, East Renfrewshire Focus on land Scottish Secretary Ian Murray is partially right to claim a wealth tax 'doesn't work' (Scotsman, 8 August) as the wealthy tend to emigrate. Our horribly cash-strapped Chancellor should instead focus on recovering far more of publicly-created site values, as advised by the Labour Land Campaign. This would boost the economy by deterring land speculation, making it more affordable for our SMEs. George Morton, Rosyth, Fife Economic insanity Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'The Scottish Government's own estimate suggests a MIG (Minimum Income Guarantee) could cost around £8 billionn and as much as £10bn, with the total proposed tax changes amounting to more than £6bn each year' (Scotsman, 8 August). And all this so that those who can't be bothered to work won't have to get out of bed in the morning! A wealth tax has been abandoned by every country where it's been tried. The very fact that such crackpot policies are even being considered demonstrates the SNP's continuing retreat into insanity. No wonder Kate Forbes has joined the growing exodus. Martin O'Gorman, Edinburgh School lessons The broadly constructive comments about the contribution of pipe band participation of pupils at Preston Lodge High School by Rev Dr Robin Hill (Letters, 7 August) provided a positive perspective on education at the school. In stark contrast, while making a few seemingly valid comments about disruption caused by some pupils in school corridors, Cameron Wylie, in the same edition regrettably descended into some misleading generalisations to round off his apparently negative view of Scottish education. 'Are we surprised that Scotland is falling away in international lists of education success.' This simplistically sweeping comment fails to enlighten in a number of different respects. Presumably Mr Wylie is not referring to private schools in his criticisms but according to the latest PISA rankings, maths, science and reading test scores have dropped across the UK, including England, which has not yet adopted a broader 'Curriculum for Excellence'. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The narrow approach still taken in England may now finally be changing given Keir Starmer's recent remarks on the value of music in school, indicating a recognition that there is more to education than simply doing well in selected academic tests. Furthermore, Mr Wyllie's added comment 'are we surprised that we are now trailing England' fails to acknowledge that the OECD, which favours Scotland's approach to education, questioned the validity of the English scores given that the selection of schools for testing did not meet the broad criteria recommended. Perhaps Mr Wyllie should take a little time out and visit Dr Hill's church in Longniddry, or Gladsmuir, for some positive enlightenment. Stan Grodynski, Longniddry, East Lothian Strangers' kindness After attending a morning concert at the Queen's Hall in Edinburgh on Tuesday, 5 August I, an 82-year-old man, was walking along South Clerk Street, just beginning to cross the road, when I tripped and fell, driving my face into the pavement. Profuse bleeding ensued. Remarkably, there was instant help from an assortment of strangers. A woman walking her dog had first-aid skills, someone produced a large roll of paper from a nearby pub to catch the blood, another a cup of water, another a pack of tissues for pushing into my nostrils. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad The first-aider strongly advised a trip to A&E. A young man parking his car nearby volunteered to take me at once. Treatment at the Royal Infirmary was empathetic and effective. I was home in Morningside by late afternoon. I had no chance to adequately thank all those who helped, so through your pages I send gratitude. There is a good side to human nature! Robert Stephens, Edinburgh Write to The Scotsman
New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
Why the American right turned on Israel
Photo by Stefani Reynolds / AFP So much has shifted in US politics during the six months Donald Trump has been in the White House that it is easy to forget the origins of those changes. It is easy to see the upheaval as unprecedented and unexpected. It is also easy to see it as largely serendipitous. Rather than Trump being the result of entirely novel historical forces that he has unleashed into the world, it could well be that he stumbled into the presidency for a second time simply because woke sentiments appalled decent people, Joe Biden was faltering, and Kamala Harris arrived too late to the race. Likewise, if Zohran Mamdani becomes mayor of New York in autumn, it might well be not so much because left populism has come into its moment, but because his rivals, Andrew Cuomo and Eric Adams, are even more inadequate than Harris was. To paraphrase a Russian proverb, for a hungry electorate, even a half-baked loaf tastes good. The same might apply to what appears a sea change among the right with regards to Israel. For generations, the standard perception goes, the right has stood behind Israel through thick and thin. Today, more and more Democrats, appalled by the war crimes in Gaza, seem to have turned against Israel. Meanwhile, the right, in a weird convergence of usually polarised sentiment, is doing the same. Most recently, the prominent political scientist, John Mearsheimer, appeared on Tucker Carlson's podcast, declaring that the Zionist project was racist and about ethnic cleansing from the beginning. Leave aside that the Zionist project, which has now, in the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu and his executioners, arrived at a racist and potentially genocidal dead end, was not racist and potentially genocidal from the beginning. There was absolutely nothing surprising about Mearsheimer's assertion, or about Carlson's openness to it. Mearsheimer was merely reprising one of the themes of The Israel Lobby, a sensationally controversial book that he published with Stephen Walt in 2007, and which grew out of an essay by both men that had appeared in the London Review of Books the previous year. This is not the place to examine that book's thesis and the reaction to it, though my own belief is that the book was factually impoverished and inaccurate in its argument that pro-Israel factions in Washington were responsible for what Mearsheimer and Walt saw as the US's self-defeating allegiance to the Jewish state. The Cold War had been the cause of America's allegiance to Israel. (Just as the greed of American oil men pushed America to invade Iraq, not, as Mearsheimer and Walt maintained, the far less remunerative Israel lobby.) Now though, 18 years further along in the post-Cold War period, and nearly two years into the slow extermination of the Palestinians from Gaza, the two authors' fundamental premise seems correct. [See also: The political symbiosis of Eric Adams and Donald Trump] Mearsheimer and Walt took particular aim at the neoconservatives, whom they accused of an attachment to Israel's interests that undercut American ones. But the neoconservatives were one branch of the conservative movement, the one that happened to prevail among and draw closest to power. But there were also, as they were known at the time, the 'paleoconservatives', on the hard right of US politics. That term now seems quaint, for the simple reason that the extreme right wing of the party that it represented has become its dominant wing. Compared to their Dick Cheney-era pomp, the neocons have to share office space with the kind of Tea Party figures they once arrogantly dismissed as fruitcakes. Unlike the mostly Jewish neoconservatives, the hard right hailed The Israel Lobby as 'an extraordinary accomplishment'. At least that was the judgement of the American Conservative, a paleoconservative magazine founded by one of the fathers of American right populism, Pat Buchanan. It was Buchanan who made the once notorious remark about 'the Israeli Defence Ministry and its amen corner in the United States', which was attacked as anti-Semitic, though his perception was accurate. It might still have been anti-Semitic. No one could say for certain. What has always haunted modern Jews is that no one can say for sure whether, in any given instance, an anti-Zionist is also an anti-Semite. 'Everybody hates the Jews,' as the late, great Tom Lehrer once sang. Is it true? Is it more true now than it was pre-Gaza? Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe The hard right's enthusiasm for The Israel Lobby seemed less grounded in conscientious agreement with the book's premises – which, of course, was possible – than in an instinctive expression of an animosity towards Jews on the right that dated back to the anti-Semitic Catholic priest (later defrocked) Father Charles Coughlin in the 1930s. Afterward, Senator Joseph McCarthy continued the hard right's anti-Semitism, with the large majority of his victims in the anti-communist hearings of the 1950s being Jewish. Indeed, McCarthy seems to have created the template for Trump's own simultaneous courting of anti-Semitism on the right and his disingenuous 'defence' of Jewish university students. Even as McCarthy was winking at the Jew-hating right in his persecution of mostly Jews, he was vociferously accusing critics of his hatchet man – the Jewish Roy Cohn, later Donald Trump's mentor – of anti-Semitism. The radical right, especially the Catholics among them, had always been rife with anti-Semitism. The so-called father of modern conservatism, William F Buckley, spent years associating with virulent anti-Semites, even as he gradually distanced himself from them – a ritualistic radical right double motion – as well as opposing Israel, until he later very publicly denounced anti-Semitism in 1991. In light of America's conflict with the Soviet Union, he became an ardent supporter of Israel. These days, the fractured feelings on the right with regard to Jews are no less intense. Tucker Carlson invites Nazi apologists on his podcast, Laura Loomer lashes out at Muslims in the name of Jews, Candace Owens calls Israel a 'demonic nation', the National Review defends Israel's actions in Gaza, Joe Rogan denounces Israeli actions in Gaza and calls Jews 'greedy'. In my home state of New Jersey, the Maga candidate for governor, Jack Ciattarelli, is an ardent defender of Israel, while his Democratic rival, Mikie Sherrill, called what Israel is doing in Gaza 'genocide', then played her remarks down. What is clear is that, because the radical right has become mainstreamed and has all but engulfed conservatism's moderate strains, it should not come as a surprise that the anti-Semitism that was always a central element of the radical right should also be in the process of being mainstreamed. This is accompanied by a whole new set of phenomena. One is that, despite Trump's occasional gestures of impatience, he will keep America behind Netanyahu whatever the Israeli leader does in Gaza, merely nudging him from time to time to appear moderate in order to soften Israel's critics. The other is that, as Trump well knows, such criticism of Israel as he occasionally emits will gratify those anti-Semites on the hard right whose anti-Zionism is seamless with their anti-Semitism. Another feature of this new status of Jews is the right's manipulation of what they pretend is the pro-Palestinian fervour sweeping the left and constituting a basis for a left populism. That is a red herring. Palestine, even the atrocity and torment of Gaza, plays little role in Americans' moral imagination. Vietnam unified the left 60 years ago; Americans are not dying in Gaza, and American liberals will not be drawn away from their differences by a foreign conflict that has no real consequences for them. What the right does achieve, though, by pretending that the pro-Palestinian passion on the progressive left is a threat to its own populist success, is two-pronged. The first is to saddle the left with the appearance of anti-Semitism. The second is to feed the growing anti-Semitic wing of Maga the red meat of making Jews seem at the heart of every foreign and domestic turbulence. No Israeli war crimes in Gaza, no pro-Palestinian outrage unifying the right. The Jews are slowly being positioned by the right as a kind of Skinnerian stimulus meant to provoke one sort of reaction or another among the electorate. The most dangerous aspect of Trump to Jews, and to Israel, is his seeming philo-Semitism. He will not abandon Netanyahu. He will abet Netanyahu in his atrocities and then use him to titillate the Jew-hatred on the right, all while protesting undying love for Israel and for the Jews. It is hardly a coincidence that Mike Huckabee, an evangelical Christian, is Trump's ambassador to Israel. Many evangelicals are in thrall to 'dispensational millenarianism', in which, simply put, Jews who do not accept Christ in the end time will be destroyed during a seven-year 'tribulation'. A new book, Antisemitism in the End Times by Olivier Melnick, coming out this autumn, makes this very case. As the dispensationalists would have it, fighting anti-Semitism is vital as a path to either the mass conversion, or the collective destruction, of the Jews, which is a precondition for the arrival of the messiah. In this sense, both the attachment to Israel and the anti-Zionism on the right are the perfect complements to the rising anti-Semitism on the right. This complicated right-wing death hug of Israel is lightyears away from the neoconservatives' unrealpolitik embrace of Israel. As with so much else, Trump is not inventing anything new. He is taking what was once unspeakable – witness his public support of Poland's new president, a Holocaust revisionist – tossing it into the chaotic maelstrom he has created, and making it central, and vital. [See also: Letter from Gaza: 'What I feel isn't just hunger. It's slow, internal erosion'] Related
New Statesman
an hour ago
- New Statesman
Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu are trapped
An Israeli army infantry fighting vehicle (IFV) leaves a cloud of dust as it moves at a position along the border with the Gaza Strip and southern Israel. Photo by Jack Guez/AFP Israel faces one of its most difficult dilemmas since the beginning of its war with Hamas. The occupation of Gaza City, announced by prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Friday (8 August) marks a major expansion of a war that has already gone on for almost two years. But it only replicates the binds that Israel has faced since this war began: waging a conflict that is existential for the Israeli nation, with no national consensus around its prosecution. After 7 October, Israel has sought to achieve two goals, each one entirely reasonable on its own. First, it has sought to eliminate Hamas in Gaza, ending its 18-year rule of the enclave. And second, it has sought to liberate the 251 Israelis abducted into Gaza on the morning of the 7 October attack. The problem all along has been that it is nearly impossible to achieve both of those ends. While some hostages have been recovered, mostly in two ceasefire deals that were effected in November 2023 and January 2025, Hamas will not give away the last ones without a guarantee that it can hold on to its weapons and some measure of political power in the Strip. This would leave it in a position to claim victory, bide its time and prepare for the next enormity in five or ten years, a shock to all that will instantly be remembered as inevitable in retrospect. On the other hand, destroying Hamas by moving forces into its last redoubt in the centre of the Gaza Strip would be a death sentence on the 20 living Israelis still held in Hamas tunnels for nearly 700 days, starved and abused by their captors. To that end Israel has pursued a series of ground offensives, wearing down and destroying Hamas battalions along the Strip's perimeter and along key corridors. Early in the war it ordered an evacuation of the northern part of the Gaza Strip and conducted a massive offensive there – and then left. After the first ceasefire, it extended its perimeter deeper into Gaza, and in May 2024 the IDF moved into Rafah and captured the strip of land where Gaza borders Egypt. Israeli forces vacated much of this land too during the second ceasefire earlier this year. After that ceasefire ended, the IDF moved even deeper into Gaza, facing off against a Hamas fighting force that was able to marshal only a small fraction of the firepower that was at its disposal in 2023 when the war began. Hamas' territorial losses this time around are greater than at any point in the war so far. The IDF holds more than 75 per cent of the Strip's land. Most of Gaza's civilian population is concentrated in the remaining 25 per cent, including in Gaza City and the camps around Deir al-Balah. With them, or below them, are the 20 Israeli hostages believed to still be among the living – and their captors. From May to July this year, officials from both sides engaged in intensive talks around the proposal of US envoy Steve Witkoff for a 60-day ceasefire. The Witkoff plan would have seen a significant withdrawal of Israeli forces and a release of ten of the 20 living hostages in exchange for over a thousand Palestinian prisoners and detainees held by Israel, including convicted terrorists, as well as a ramping up of aid provisions into Gaza. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Just before the deal was due to be inked in Doha on July 23, a flurry of international initiatives directed against Israel, convinced Hamas that it could get for free what it nearly paid for with ten of its captives. The deal fell apart, with the Israelis and Americans convinced that Hamas has no intention on releasing the hostages anytime soon – and even the Egyptians and Qataris quietly hinting that they have reached the same conclusion. If there is no way to liberate the hostages by negotiations, then Israel's biggest reason for forbearance outside the gates of Gaza becomes considerably less forceful, and the temptation to move in grows larger. The risks are still enormous. Any military operation in Gaza City would incur losses for Israeli forces and risk soldiers being taken hostage themselves. Forces would be moving into a dense urban environment that they either haven't operated in at all or that they vacated months ago in the previous ceasefire. Either way, booby traps and mines are a guaranteed danger. It's impossible to assess what the capabilities of the IDF to operate in such an environment are, especially after nearly two years of nonstop combat, though there are reasons for concern. It is even more difficult to assess what the defensive capacities of Hamas are after two years of attrition. This was equally true on the other fronts where Israel fought. Anyone could have pontificated in advance about the wisdom of an Israeli strike on Iran or on Hezbollah, but without clear intelligence about the degraded state of Iran's anti-aircraft capabilities or prior knowledge of the Israeli beeper operation in Lebanon, it would have been impossible to make a coherent cost-benefit analysis of Israel's decision to launch an offensive. There was one big difference, however, between Israel's military operations in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Yemen on the one hand and its war in Gaza on the other. Israel could nowhere afford embarking on a military adventure where it might lose or where its soldiers or civilians would be killed in numbers so high as to render any gains wasted. But in Iran and Lebanon and Yemen and Syria, Israel could make do with efforts that brought about significant strategic gains and call it day. In Gaza, this option simply doesn't exist. Anything that leaves Hamas in power will be a victory for Hamas and a vindication for its gamble that the invasion and killing spree of 7 October would benefit the Palestinian cause. An end to the war that not only leaves Hamas in power but leaves it still holding some of the Israelis it took hostage that Saturday morning nearly two years ago would be a double victory. This would seem to indicate a straightforward path for Israel, even in light of international opposition. If after 22 months of attrition in Gaza, and after campaigns and operations elsewhere in the Middle East have shattered the regional axis that Hamas might have needed as a deterrent reserve, Israel can actually carry its campaign into Hamas's lair in the Gaza Strip's centre and bring about the comprehensive defeat of the militia that initiated this war at a bearable cost to itself, then it should. That at least, would be the obvious strategic consideration. But, of course, there are more than strategic considerations at stake here. There is also a domestic political consideration. In fact, there are two. But they are so different from each other in their claims, their goals, their methods, their moral valence and their electoral impacts that it can be hard to make sense of them. First is the dependence of Netanyahu on far-right coalition partners who are committed to Israel's West Bank settler movement. For them, 7 October was both a tragedy and an opportunity. For 20 years, they have nursed the bitter pain of Israel's 'disengagement' from Gaza, when Israel withdrew all its armed forces and dismantled all 21 settlements inside the Gaza Strip. Settler leaders fantasise about restoring Jewish settlement to the Strip and, more importantly, definitively winning the argument against any future withdrawals in the West Bank. In normal coalition politics, a prime minister has to take into account the priorities of his more extreme flank, but can always play them off the demands of potential partners from the centre. Netanyahu is no normal prime minister, however. His criminal indictments have meant that centrist parties have effectively boycotted him (except conditionally in two emergency situations), meaning that the far right, despite holding only about 10 per cent of the seats in Parliament, can exercise a veto on policy. This isn't just a rhetorical burden, though it is that too. Each time a middling MP from a far-right faction makes an inflammatory statement about the Gaza war or the push to resettle Israelis in the Strip, it becomes a propaganda victory for Israel's enemies. But the problem is more than rhetorical. The government has refused in the last 22 months to formulate any plan for governing Gaza after the war, rendering even impressive military achievements hollow. It hasn't refused to do so because it is lazy. It has refused to do so because any credible plan for post-war Gaza that doesn't involve Hamas will necessarily prefigure a post-war plan for the West Bank as well, and this is something the radical settler movement cannot tolerate. With no alternative partners to replace the far right in his coalition, and no credible threat to them to find a replacement if they don't grant him some space on the issue they care about most, Netanyahu can't risk alienating them. Then there is the issue of the hostages. Entrenching the settlement enterprise doesn't inspire any overriding moral commitments outside the religious right, but securing the release of the hostages is a paramount moral imperative as far as nearly all Israelis are concerned. Israelis struggle to make sense of the comparative indifference of Western governments to the fate of hostages taken by ISIS in the previous decade. The ransom demands ISIS made were much less onerous than those that Hamas has sought impose on Israel, but Western and allied governments only rarely gave in, and their hostages were gruesomely tortured in captivity and beheaded or immolated on camera. But the sociological profile of the hostages couldn't be further from the current coalition's electoral base. The men and women and children abducted on 7 October and their families look nothing like this government's supporters. People taken from their homes after watching their family members murdered were overwhelmingly kidnapped on a kibbutz, where voting preferences lean heavily to the left. Not many religious conservatives were to be found at an outdoor rave on a Saturday morning, not just because of the music or the drugs, but because an observant Jew wouldn't be out on shabbat. And soldiers can have all sorts of political leanings, but Netanyahu's cabinet comprises a large number of religious ministers who avoided the draft for religious reasons and seek to entrench in legislation draft exemptions for the growing ultra-Orthodox minority. This is the opposite kind of political problem which Netanyahu's dependence on the far-right settlers presents. He can't openly place any military needs above the release of the hostages because he has no moral authority to do so. Not just because they do not come from his public or his political partners' publics, but because he spent the months leading up to the massacre in 2023 pursuing a constitutional reform that alienated the liberal Israeli public from him to an extreme degree. And because the very failure to protect those who were taken hostage and the failure to recover them so far stand as the ultimate symbols of his overall failures on 7 October. And just as his bargaining position with his coalition partners is weakened because they know he has nowhere else to go, so too is his bargaining position with Hamas over a hostage release weakened because they know that he can't take Israel into an offensive that could see the hostages sacrificed without tearing Israeli society apart. This then is the dilemma Israel faces as it stands outside the gates of Gaza preparing to move in for a final offensive. The dilemma could be attenuated somewhat if international actors applied pressure on Hamas and on the states which support and protect it, not least Turkey and Qatar, to release the hostages. But at present they seem more inclined to indulge inflamed publics at home and take actions which only harden Hamas' position. And it could be attenuated somewhat if Israel's government made some minimal steps to achieve a consensus at home before taking any broad action, especially one that could put hostages and soldiers at risk. But the domestic political machinations of the past week, with the government seeking to oust an attorney general leading investigations into its own corruption and its parliamentary faction ousting a committee chair who had blocked legislation to protect ultra-Orthodox draft deferments, only achieved the opposite. In the meantime, the Israeli cabinet has approved the new offensive into Gaza. It will take some time before such an operation gets underway. Only a comprehensive deal that sees the release of all Israeli hostages can stop it before it starts. [See also: Israel's calculus on Syria] Related
