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(LifeSiteNews) — The editor of a major Israeli newspaper has spoken out to warn of “Israel’s Self Destruction” under the policies of the Netanyahu government.
Writing in Foreign Affairs, the house journal of Deep State organization The Council on Foreign Relations, Haaretz editor in chief Aluf Benn has produced an account of a nation divided as it faces extinction – as a consequence of the career choices of its leader.
Published on February 7, it is titled “Israel’s Self Destruction – Netanyahu, the Palestinians, and the Price of Neglect.”
In it, Benn makes the arresting claim that “Netanyahu does not want to resolve the Palestinian conflict.”
“The war has caught Israel at perhaps its most divided moment in history. In the years leading up to the attack, the country was fractured by Netanyahu’s effort to undermine its democratic institutions and turn it into a theocratic, nationalist autocracy,” Benn argues.
In a further sign of the distance between Israel’s own media and the representation of Israel in that of the West, Benn warns that Israel’s political culture “will only lead to more catastrophe.”
Domestic disapproval
Benn is not alone in denouncing Netanyahu as a threat to Israel. The former head of the national security service, Shin Bet, was reported by the Jerusalem Post on October 6th, 2023 as saying “Netanyahu severely damaged Israel and his own legacy.”
The Former Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen said that “the greatest threat to the State of Israel today is… that the deepening of the social rift will lead to internal violence.”
“This is a threat of an immeasurably greater magnitude than all other threats – including the security threat,” Cohen said.
Cohen also noted the presence of convicted criminals in the cabinet, describing one – the National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, as unfit for office.
“He is not ready for the job, and does damage,” Cohen said, before bracketing him with Heritage Minister Belazel Smotrich. Cohen said it “saddened” him, that “the two leaders who currently represent religious Zionism in the Knesset were involved in illegal security activities in the past.”
In a prescient remark the day before the October 7 attacks, he added that their presence was damaging the international perception of the right to a Jewish homeland
“They also contribute to the increasing negative image of religious Zionism as a whole,” he added.
Numerous reports in the Israeli press carry far more controversial views on the culpability of Netanyahu and the policies of his government than are commonly seen in the West.
On October 7, Israel’s third-biggest newspaper said that the conflict “is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu.” The Times of Israel reported on October 8 “For Years, Netanyahu has Propped Up Hamas – Now it has Blown Up In Our Faces.”
The following week, on October 15, the Jerusalem Post led with “Israelis Blame government for Hamas massacre,” citing a poll which showed “86% said the surprise attack from Gaza is a failure of the country’s leadership,” and that “Netanyahu must resign after [the] war’s conclusion.”
Few reports have the ambit of that published by Benn, whose piece is an appeal to learn from the abject lessons of Israel’s troubled history.
Lesson from 1956
Benn’s sweeping narrative begins with the startling remarks of Moshe Dayan, the Israeli general who once said “Israel must be seen as a mad dog: too dangerous to bother.”
Dayan spoke in April 1956 at the funeral of a Jewish youth who had been horrifically mutilated – with his eyes gouged out – before being murdered by Palestinian farmers.
“Let us not cast blame on the murderers,’’ Dayan said. “For eight years, they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages where they and their fathers dwelt into our estate.”
To invoke Dayan’s words is to remind the world of a time when Israel was not itself blind to the causes of barbarism.
As Benn notes, Dayan went on to warn that the Palestinians would never forget the “Nakba” – the violent expulsion by the Israelis of the Palestinians from their land.
“Dayan realized what many Jewish Israelis refuse to accept: Palestinians would never forget the Nakba or stop dreaming of returning to their homes.”
Benn reminded his readers of the close of Dayan’s speech:
‘Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs living around us,’ Dayan declared in his eulogy. ‘This is our life’s choice—to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.’
Benn argues, “To live in peace, Israel will have to come to terms with the Palestinians.”
No apologist for Hamas
Like Moshe Dayan, Benn does not excuse terrorism. Nor do the articles and reports in the Israeli media which have proven that many of the atrocities reported on October 7 were fabricated.
Israel’s own Channel 13 News broadcasted the following segment, noting the broadcast of “fictional stories” which “simply did not happen.” It appears they may have been invented by government/military propagandists to demonize the Hamas fighters to gain acceptance for the now ongoing, massively disproportionate revenge campaign in Gaza.
Benn does not mention the measures in the Israeli parliament to criminalize questioning this narrative, nor does he touch on the long standing campaign by Netanyahu to undermine the freedom of the Israeli press, which is ongoing.
READ: Uncovering the truth behind Israel’s Justification for its war in Gaza
Israeli government measures to directly license broadcast media are seen as a move towards promoting pro-Netanyahu outlets, and suppressing those which are not.
Benn instead points to a long cycle of revenant revenge which he argues will remain unbroken – as long as Israel refuses to acknowledge Palestinian grievances.
He writes, “October 7 was the worst calamity in Israel’s history. It is a national and personal turning point for anyone living in the country or associated with it.”
Benn argues that Dayan’s warning had been realized in the attacks.
“They killed around 1,200 civilians and soldiers and kidnapped well over 200 hostages. The descendants of Dayan’s refugee camp dwellers—fueled by the same hatred and loathing that he described but now better armed, trained, and organized—had come back for revenge.”
Netanyahu ‘coup’
It is remarkable that Foreign Affairs – the journal of an organization set up in the 1920s to manage Western democracy through the coordination of propaganda – should publish a piece which claims to evidence a coup in Israel.
Nevertheless, Benn details how Netanyahu has proceeded to destroy any realistic chance of peace with the Palestinians.
Benn begins with two facts: that Netanyahu is held responsible by many Israelis for the events of October 7, and that he has no plan for a future beyond the current war.
Netanyahu has promised to “destroy Hamas,” but beyond military force, he has no strategy for eliminating the group and no clear plan for what would replace it as the de facto government of postwar Gaza.
Why did Netanyahu “fail to strategize” – to avoid the attacks, and to provide a future for Israel?
Benn writes that this goes beyond Netanyahu’s own plans for his political survival:
His failure to strategize is no accident. Nor is it an act of political expediency designed to keep his right-wing coalition together.
Benn says instead that Netanyahu has built his career on the ruin of any chance of peace.
“To live in peace, Israel will have to finally come to terms with the Palestinians, and that is something Netanyahu has opposed throughout his career. He has devoted his tenure as prime minister, the longest in Israeli history, to undermining and sidelining the Palestinian national movement.”
READ: Warnings of ‘mass starvation’ in Gaza as Western powers freeze UN relief funds
The recklessness of this policy is outlined further by Benn:
He has promised his people that they can prosper without peace. He has sold the country on the idea that it can continue to occupy Palestinian lands forever at little domestic or international cost. And even now, in the wake of October 7, he has not changed this message.
Benn warns that Israel faces a permanent state of war as a result.
This could make October 7 the beginning of a dark age in Israel’s history—one characterized by more and growing violence. The attack would not be a one-off event, but a portent of what’s to come.
Protests and political crisis
If you care little for the protests which accompanied Netanyahu’s capture of the Israeli judiciary, nor for Israeli government attempts to enforce state control of the media, you may be interested to learn that support for Hamas was a personal policy of Netanyahu.
You may also be surprised to learn that it is Qatar, and not Iran, whose money has bankrolled the Hamas regime in Gaza.
“In the West Bank, Netanyahu maintained security cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, which became Israel’s de facto policing and social services subcontractor, and he encouraged Qatar to fund Gaza’s Hamas government,” writes Benn.
Benn quotes a speech given by Netanyahu in 2019 to his parliamentary caucus:
‘Whoever opposes a Palestinian state must support delivery of funds to Gaza because maintaining separation between the PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza will prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.’
As Benn remarks, “It is a statement that has come back to haunt him.”
Five elections in three years
Six years ago Netanyahu began a process of national transformation, sidelining its five million Palestinians in favor of its seven million Jews. Benn reports:
In 2018, he won passage of a major, controversial law that defined Israel as ‘the Nation-State of the Jewish People’ and declared that Jews had the ‘unique’ right to ‘exercise self-determination’ in its territory. It gave the country’s Jewish majority precedence and subordinated its non-Jewish people.
Following this came five elections in three years.
“Israel sank into a long political crisis, with the country dragged through five elections between 2019 and 2022—each of them a referendum on Netanyahu’s rule,” Benn explains.
A “change government” was elected in 2021 under Naftali Bennett – which included Israeli Arab representation. Bennett notably helped negotiate a peace accord between Russia and Ukraine in March 2021. But he could not do the same for Israel. Benn explained:
The ‘change government’ collapsed in 2022 after it failed to prolong obscure legal provisions that allowed West Bank settlers to enjoy civil rights denied their non-Israeli neighbors. For some of the Arab coalition members, signing on to these apartheid provisions was one compromise too many.
This crisis was resolved by partnership with parties such as Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power.
Benn reminds the reader that Netanyahu was thrown this lifeline precisely when he faced imprisonment on charges of corruption.
For Netanyahu, still facing trial, the government’s collapse was exactly what he had been hoping for. As the country organized yet another election, he fortified his base of right-wingers, ultra-Orthodox Jews, and socially conservative Jews.
To secure his return to power, Netanyahu had to bargain with the likes of Ben-Gvir and Belazel Smotrich. So what did these men want in return? Benn explains:
The extremists had two principal demands of Netanyahu. The first, and most obvious, was to further expand Jewish settlements into even more Palestinian occupied regions. The second was to establish a stronger Jewish presence on the Temple Mount, the historic site of both the Jewish Temple and the Muslim mosque of al Aqsa in Jerusalem’s Old City.
Operation Asqa flood
Why does the Al-Aqsa mosque matter? It is the third holiest site in Shia Islam, and is built on the ruins of the third Jewish temple – destroyed by the Emperor Hadrian in AD 70.
Many Zionists believe that rebuilding the temple will usher in the appearance of the Jewish Messiah, bringing about Armageddon.
Netanyahu is aware of this, and has been personally involved in provoking what could lead to a “cataclysmic religious conflict” over the site. As Benn says:
Since Israel took control of the surrounding area in the Six-Day War in 1967, it has given the Palestinians quasi-autonomy at the site, out of fear that removing it from Arab governance would incite a cataclysmic religious conflict.
Netanyahu first provoked violence in this way in 1996.
But the Israeli far right has long sought to change that. When Netanyahu was first elected in 1996, he opened a wall at an archaeological site in an underground tunnel adjacent to al Aqsa to expose relics from the times of the Second Temple, prompting a violent explosion of Arab protests in Jerusalem.
Then the former Likud leader Ariel Sharon did the same four years later.
The second Palestinian intifada in 2000 was similarly sparked by a visit to the Temple Mount by Sharon, then the opposition leader as the head of Netanyahu’s party, Likud.
Provoking reprisals
More recently, the actions of Itamar Ben-Gvir are cited as leading to reprisals from Hamas. As Benn outlines:
In May 2021, violence erupted again. This time, the main provocateur was Itamar Ben-Gvir, a far-right politician who has publicly celebrated Jewish terrorists.
Ben-Gvir had opened a ‘parliamentary office’ in a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem where Jewish settlers, using old property deeds, have pushed out residents, and Palestinians held mass protests in response.
After hundreds of demonstrators gathered at al Aqsa, Israeli police raided the mosque compound. As a result, fighting erupted between Arabs and Jews and quickly spread to ethnically mixed towns across Israel. Hamas used the raid as an excuse to target Jerusalem with rockets, which brought yet more violence in Israel and another round of Israeli reprisals in Gaza.
Netanyahu returned to power in November 2022, with a coalition relying on extremists determined to “humiliate” the Palestinians, and deprive them of their right to be in Israel.
The key figures in the new government were Bezalel Smotrich, the leader of a nationalist religious party representing West Bank settlers, and Ben-Gvir. Working with the ultra-Orthodox parties, Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben-Gvir devised a blueprint for an autocratic and theocratic Israel.
It is widely charged in the Israeli press that Ben-Gvir’s repeated incursions into Al-Aqsa sparked the attacks of October 7.
As Benn notes:
Netanyahu’s humiliation of the Palestinians helped radicalism thrive. It is no accident that Hamas named its operation ‘al Aqsa flood’ and portrayed the attacks as a way of protecting al Aqsa from a Jewish takeover. Protecting the holy Muslim site was seen as a reason to attack Israel and face the inevitably dire consequences of an IDF counterattack.
Permanent conflict
Netanyahu, Benn reports, has succeeded in moving Israeli public opinion behind the policies which endanger the state of Israel with permanent war. The New York Times, however, claims he has lost the support of the Israeli people themselves. Their February 5 report is titled, “Many Israelis Want Netanyahu Out – But There Is No Simple Path to Do It.”
The report says Netanyahu is doomed, but that there is no clear way for Israel to release itself from his grip – without an end to the war.
“Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is on his last legs, it is widely believed, and will be forced to relinquish his post once the war against Hamas in Gaza ends,” the outlet wrote.
“He is historically unpopular in the opinion polls and blamed for the governmental and security failures that led to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, the killings of an estimated 1,200 but, according to some Israeli sources, likely fewer Israelis, and the difficult war that has followed. He faces a long-running trial on a variety of corruption charges.”
Faced with mounting unpopularity and widely blamed for the failures leading to October 7, Netanyahu also remains bitterly opposed to the chief of his own army, having sacked Yoav Gallant, only to reinstate him days later.
Benn thinks the chances for any resolution of the crisis on past lines is slender. With whom could negotiations take place?
“There is no Palestinian group or leader accepted by Israel in the way Egypt and its president were after 1973. Hamas is committed to Israel’s destruction, and the PA is weak,” he argues.
Crucially, he points to the frailty of Israel itself. Faced with growing international isolation over a war charged as genocide in the International Court of Justice, domestic divisions are worsening – with no solution in sight.
READ: UN’s top court rules genocide charge against Israel is ‘plausible’
“Israel, too, is weak: its wartime unity is already cracking, and the odds are high that the country will further tear itself apart if and when the fighting diminishes,” Benn writes.
Benn paints a dark picture of the political future of Israel.
The anti-Bibists hope to reach out to disappointed Bibists and force an early election this year. Netanyahu, in turn, will whip up fears and dig in.
He reports that enraged relatives of the hostages continue to be frustrated at the lack of effort made to release those still held captive.
In January, relatives of hostages broke into a parliamentary meeting to demand that the government try to free their family members, part of a battle between Israelis over whether the country should prioritize defeating Hamas or make a deal to free the remaining captives.
Haaretz reported one media commentator in Israel saying this week that “Netanyahu wants the hostages dead” – in response to Netanyahu’s rejection of an exchange deal with Hamas.
The only sign of agreement is on denying any land for the Palestinians in a negotiated peace.
Perhaps the only idea on which there is unity is in opposing a land-for-peace agreement. After October 7, most Jewish Israelis agree that any further relinquishment of territory will give militants a launching pad for the next massacre.
Benn concludes his sobering lesson in Israeli history and politics with an appeal to reason.
This is the lesson the country should have learned from Dayan’s age-old warning. Israel must reach out to Palestinians and to each other if they want a livable and respectful coexistence.