When I first observed Israel’s youngest-ever prime minister up close in the 1990s, Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu was explaining his vision for the country’s future to a small gathering at a Washington think tank.
An MIT graduate as well as a combat veteran in an Israeli special forces unit, the erudite Netanyahu was a persuasive speaker even then. He patiently explained why his hawkish Likud Party supported expanding Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories occupied by the military after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, decades after that conflict ended and in defiance of accepted international law as well as U.S. policy.
What I most remember about Netanyahu’s presentation that day was his description of the land that many in his right-wing party referred to by its biblical name as “Judea and Samaria.” According to Netanyahu, it was mostly barren hills peopled by scattered farmers and nomadic Bedouin tribesmen. In his telling, pioneering Israeli settlers cultivated modern, high-tech oases in that arid and sparsely populated countryside.
Later, I would have the opportunity to report on the reality of life for the millions of inhabitants of those occupied territories, and the experience left me with a disquieting realization: Bibi Netanyahu didn’t see the Palestinians.
Today Netanyahu is the longest-serving prime minister in Israel’s history. After nearly three decades, his blinkered vision has steered the country down the strategic dead end where it now finds itself. Before the horrors of Oct. 7, most Israelis had similarly come to view their Palestinian neighbors mostly as an abstraction; vague figures who lived behind a high wall in a shadowy land not even marked on many classroom maps inside Israel.
After the depravity of Hamas’s rampage of rape, murder and hostage-taking on Oct. 7, Palestinians are now primarily seen as terrorists or their enablers, implacable enemies or expendable human shields that must be sacrificed in Israel’s search for retribution. In the fever dreams of Netanyahu and members of his cabinet, the most far-right in Israel’s history, the great mass of Palestinian civilians will simply have to disappear into exile as someone else’s problem.
But as a people with legitimate aspirations of self-determination or equality before the law like their neighbors, the Palestinians remain invisible to the current Israeli government. And the legacy of Netanyahu’s willful blindness over so many years is soaring radicalization on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide, a fracturing consensus in the United States in support of Israel and nearly unprecedented isolation of the Jewish state on the world stage as it continues to execute a scorched-earth campaign in Gaza after seven long months, with no plausible exit strategy.
Last week, President Joe Biden publicly embraced a three-part plan proposed by Israel that would lead to a cease-fire in Gaza and the release of all hostages, followed by talks on a permanent ceasefire and Gaza’s future in a second phase. In an unmistakable sign of the dead-end corner that he has painted himself and his country into, Netanyahu was forced to quickly distance himself from Israel’s own proposal after far-right members of his cabinet threatened to resign and collapse his governing coalition.
On the other side, Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz has likewise threatened to resign unless Netanyahu finally announces a “day after” plan for civilian administration of Gaza following hostilities, warning that “If you choose the path of fanatics and lead the entire nation to the abyss, we will be forced to quit the government.”
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, the third member of the War Cabinet, has likewise repeatedly pleaded with Netanyahu for a postwar strategy for Gaza that includes empowering a Palestinian civilian leadership.
Yet Netanyahu has not agreed even to those limited demands, knowing they run counter to his lifelong mission to sabotage a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite backing for that solution by the international community and by successive U.S. administrations, both Republican and Democratic, dating back decades.
Such a plan would amount to a tacit acknowledgment of the bankruptcy of Netanyahu’s strategy to “divide and conquer” the Palestinian national movement by enabling Hamas’s rule in Gaza, and relentlessly undermining the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, viewed in the 1993 Oslo Accords as the government-in-waiting for a future Palestinian state.
Any realistic “day after” plan would also thwart the designs of his far-right cabinet members for Israeli settlers and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to reoccupy Gaza and subjugate or displace more than 2 million Palestinians there, nearly half of them children.
Netanyahu is also unlikely to abandon his vision for Israel’s future when it is so close to realization. After Hamas’s Oct. 7 outrages and Israel Defense Forces’ Gaza campaign, polls show that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians now also strongly oppose a two-state solution to the conflict, nearly a complete reversal of where they stood on the issue just a decade ago. Hopes for a negotiated peace are even lower.
The majority of Israelis also overwhelmingly approve of Israel’s brutal campaign in Gaza, which includes the killing of many thousands of women and children, the destruction of hospitals and the withholding of food and medicine from a civilian population facing famine.
Predictably, Netanyahu’s radical government has used the opportunity to accelerate the land grab designed to foreclose the possibility of a Palestinian state. Far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has publicly called for the “total annihilation” of Palestinian cities within Gaza, recently announced the single largest appropriation of land in the West Bank in 30 years.
Meanwhile, since Oct. 7, more than 460 Palestinians in the West Bank have been killed by Israeli soldiers and settlers in a campaign of intimidation and state-sanctioned violence.
The current crisis has finally crystalized Netanyahu’s view of Israel’s future, its razor-sharp edges no longer easily obscured by evasive euphemisms. Yuval Noah Harari, an author and professor of history at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recently described that vision in the Washington Post:
“The Netanyahu coalition envisions a single state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, which would grant full rights only to Jewish citizens, partial rights to a limited number of Palestinian citizens, and neither citizenship nor any rights to millions of oppressed Palestinian subjects,” he wrote.
“That is not just a vision. To a large extent, this is already the reality on the ground.”
Netanyahu has long perceived Israelis and Palestinians as two stubborn tribes locked in a death grip that only one can survive. He has thus pledged that Israel will “stand alone” if that’s what is required to achieve “total victory.”
The International Criminal Court’s recent misguided announcement that it is seeking arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defense minister and the leaders of Hamas for “war crimes,” last week’s move by Spain, Norway and Ireland to formally recognize a Palestinian state, widespread U.S. campus protests and polls showing that a younger generation of Americans now has a more favorable opinion of Palestinians than Israelis and Israel’s decision to trample on the red line drawn by U.S. President Joe Biden against the current military offensive in Rafah — all point to just how lonely Israel is becoming in the darkness of Netanyahu’s vision.
Meanwhile, Israel’s close friends in the United States and around the world continue to offer a way out of this Manichean nightmare, one that illuminates a path towards what both Palestinians and Israelis so desperately need — hope for a more just and peaceful future.
But Bibi Netanyahu cannot see it.
James Kitfield is a book author and awardee of the National Press Club’s Edwin Hood Award for Diplomatic Correspondence and a three-time recipient of the Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense.