But the lack of a good story is hurting Israel in other ways. Israelis are being asked to send their sons and daughters to fight every day against Hamas and Hezbollah foes — yet cannot be sure if they are going to war to save the state of Israel or the political career of their prime minister.
Because there is more than enough reason to believe that Bibi wants to keep this war going to have an excuse to postpone testifying in December at his corruption trial, to postpone an independent commission of inquiry as to how his government failed to prevent the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, as well as to forestall new Israeli elections and maybe even to tilt our presidential election to Donald Trump. Netanyahu’s far-right Jewish supremacist partners have told him they will topple his government if he agrees to stop the war in Gaza before an undefined “total victory” over Hamas and if he tries to bring the West Bank’s Palestinian Authority, which has embraced the Oslo peace process, to help govern Gaza in the place of Hamas — something that Hamas greatly fears.
This absence of a story is also hurting Israel strategically. The more Israel has a legitimate Palestinian partner, like a reformed Palestinian Authority, the better chance it can get out of Gaza and not preside over a permanent insurgency there, the more allies will want to help create an international force to fill any vacuum in Southern Lebanon and the more any Israeli military strike against Iran would be understood as making Israel safe to try to make peace with the Palestinians — not safe for an Israeli annexation of the West Bank and Gaza, which is what some of Netanyahu’s far-right partners are seeking.
I cannot guarantee that there is a legitimate Palestinian partner for a secure peace with Israel. But I can guarantee that this Israeli government has done everything it could to prevent one from emerging — by strengthening Hamas in Gaza at the expense of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.
The truth is, Israel does not and has never wanted an actual state in Gaza or the West Bank. Israel’s long-term strategy in the West Bank is to perform a slow ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population via illegal settler expansion and zoning laws. They’re literally using building permits to commit ethnic cleansing - ethnic cleansing by bureaucracy. Israeli settlers can murder Palestinians with impunity, while any reciprocal violence against Israeli settlers or soldiers results in horrific retaliatory collective punishment. Kill one Israeli settlers? They will respond by murdering a dozen innocent Palestinians.
Israel wants their ethno-state. At this point, they’ve made a Palestinian state in the West Bank completely nonviable. They’ve already seized most of the land there, and the remaining Palestinian ghettos are a disjointed Swiss cheese that can never be an effective territory. They’ve moved so many of their own population into the West Bank that at this point Israel itself likely couldn’t remove them, even if they wanted to. The Israelis living in the West Bank are the most fundamentalist of the population; they’re heavily armed, and they are willing to fight the Israeli state if there is any attempt to dislodge them.
A two state solution is now dead at this point. Israel’s long term goal is to bit by bit, shrink the available land that Palestinians can live on. At the same time, they will impose ever-harsher conditions on the Palestinians. Peaceful protests are met with bullets. Armed resistance is met with carpet bombing. The ultimate goal is to drive all the Palestinians out of the West Bank, via either emigration to Jordan or to the main Palestinian ghetto in the Gaza strip. And even the Gaza strip is being whittled away.
And this doesn’t even account for Israel’s long-term mode of border expansion. Israel has a very clear long-term method of expanding its borders:
Drive the native population out of lands you currently hold, via forced expulsion or by making conditions unlivable. This expelled population moves over the border.
The expelled population retains animosity against Israel, so occasional retaliatory attacks are inevitable.
Respond to low-level retaliatory attacks with bombing campaigns, which create a lawless zone across the border that armed militias can thrive in.
When the armed resistance across the border gets big enough, declare that ground forces need to be sent in to secure a “buffer zone.” Seize land across the border and expel any remaining native civilians.
Allow ‘settlers’ to move into the seized territory that was supposed to be a military buffer zone.
Israel civilians are now once again living right next door to enraged locals, and once again in range of retaliatory attacks.
Rinse and repeat.
Israel uses the native population it expels as means to expand its own borders. It antagonizes expelled populations until retaliatory violence is inevitable, and then it uses that violence as an excuse to further expand its borders. In many ways, Israel operates very similar to how the US slowly expelled Native Americans in its Westward expansion; the same kind of dynamic was at play. The US would make a treaty with the natives, expelling them from a chunk of land. It would then look the other way as US settlers moved into Indian lands. When the natives attacked these settlers violating the treaty, the US military would respond with overwhelming collective punishment and retaliatory violence. They would drive the natives further out, establish a “buffer zone,” and then allow settlers to move in to what was supposed to be an empty buffer zone.
Maybe it’s no surprise the US and Israel are such close allies. Israel is repeating Manifest Destiny right in front of our eyes. And they also justify it with similar religious and mythological overtones.