View in browser
Isabel Fattal: What exactly did the Israeli cabinet decide, and what do we know at this point about what it means for the region?
Yair Rosenberg: The Israeli cabinet approved a decision to occupy Gaza City—a part of the Gaza Strip where many civilians are still sheltering and that Israel had until recently not entered—in order, it claimed, to root out Hamas and its last bastions in the area.
The Israeli military has said that it currently controls some 75 percent of the Strip. Netanyahu’s hard-right Israeli coalition partners have pushed for full occupation of the area; the military and security establishments were against that entirely. Netanyahu split the difference and said, Okay, we’re not going to occupy all of Gaza, and we’re not going to do anything right away. The cabinet instead voted to allow the prime minister to approve a Gaza City–occupation plan from the Israel Defense Forces, which will likely happen in a few weeks. So it’s not entirely clear what the timeline is for everything here. It’s also not clear whether Netanyahu intends to go through with all of it or if he is actually trying to create pressure on Hamas to negotiate a hostage deal. He probably doesn’t yet know what he’s going to do, which is why he’s kicking the can down the road—his specialty. But if you had to put odds on the options, you should always bet on Netanyahu doing what the hard-right portion of his base wants him to do, which in this case would mean pushing deeper and deeper into Gaza.
Isabel: Talk me through why Netanyahu is so deferential to this part of his coalition, and what exactly it wants.
Yair: After being ousted from office for a year, Netanyahu returned to power in 2022 with an extremely narrow coalition that received less than 50 percent of the vote. If he loses the support of the hard-right anti-Arab parties that are propping him up, they can force the country to elections, which almost every poll shows Netanyahu and his allies would lose. The goal of these hard-right parties is to ethnically cleanse Gaza, annex it, and repopulate it with Jewish settlements. That’s not a goal that most Israelis support. But Netanyahu is beholden to these people for his political survival, and that has inflected all of his decision making.
Isabel: The Israeli security establishment and the Israeli public do not support annexing Gaza. Can you explain the tension here between what the military and the people want and what Netanyahu seems to be doing?
Yair: Significant majorities in Israel oppose the hard right’s vision of taking over Gaza—and have opposed it since the war started. Almost all the polls we have on the subject have shown strong Israeli opposition to annexing and settling Gaza, and also that some 70 percent of Israelis want to end the war with a hostage deal, not continue it in the way that Netanyahu is doing right now.
The other major contingent that has been opposed to the settler right’s vision is the Israeli security establishment, which sees occupying more and more of Gaza as a trap that will drain Israel’s resources, force the IDF to manage millions of Palestinian civilians who don’t want Israel to rule over them, and cause many more soldiers and hostages to be killed. Netanyahu’s former defense minister Yoav Gallant publicly called for Gaza to be returned to non-Hamas Palestinian control, and criticized his boss for refusing to wind down the war. He was later fired. The IDF chief of staff, who was handpicked by Netanyahu, reportedly opposed the current Gaza-occupation proposal. This past week, 19 living former leaders of Israel’s major security agencies—its equivalents of the FBI, the CIA, and the Pentagon—put out a video saying that the war needs to end, that it has crossed moral and strategic red lines, that it’s serving only a messianic minority and not what the majority wants.
Isabel: How have President Donald Trump’s actions pushed events closer to the far right’s vision? And what could he do to change things if he wanted to?
Yair: Trump has a kind of power over Netanyahu’s political future that most American presidents haven’t had, because Netanyahu has tied his political cachet to Trump. The prime minister has presented himself as somebody who can get what Israel needs from the U.S. relationship—a singular statesman who can manage a mercurial president, unlike his rivals on the Israeli political stage. But that pitch doesn’t work if Netanyahu is at loggerheads with Trump. So whatever Trump says, Bibi is going to have to do, especially with elections looming next year.
But despite holding this leverage, in practice, Trump has largely permitted Netanyahu to do whatever he wants in Gaza. In fact, the one major intervention that the president has made since entering office was not to oppose the Israeli settler right’s plans but to supercharge them. He proposed this idea of a “Riviera on the Middle East,” in which all of the people of Gaza would be relocated, and then someone else would take over Gaza and build something new there. As ever, Trump was not very clear on the details, but the Israeli settler right filled in its own. Before Trump, the Biden administration was very explicit that the territory of Gaza had to be handed back to the Gazan people, and that it would remain under Palestinian control. Trump switched sides, and in so doing, he tilted the entire playing field toward these absolutist outcomes. He could change that by disavowing his plan, but he has not done so.
Isabel: Netanyahu has said that he wants to take control of Gaza but doesn’t want to keep it. What does this mean, and how seriously should we take his purported plan?
Yair: In recent statements explaining his new policy internationally, Netanyahu has claimed that although Israel is going to occupy much of Gaza, after it roots out Hamas, it will turn the territory over to Palestinian governance that is neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority—Hamas’s rival in the West Bank—in partnership with Arab states. But this is essentially a fantasy scenario; it’s not clear that such a coalition exists.
So he’s telling the international community what it wants to hear—I will not actually do what the hard right in my coalition wants to do, which is annex Gaza and resettle it. But talk is cheap, and nothing Netanyahu has done so far suggests that he has the ability or even the interest to do what is necessary to hand Gaza over to third parties. Outside pressure could make that outcome more likely. But right now, the pressure is coming primarily from the hard right in his own government, and combined with Trump’s neglect, that suggests the hard right will keep getting the things it wants.
Further reading:
Today’s News
- President Donald Trump has ordered the Pentagon to use military force against Latin American drug cartels that his administration has designated as terrorist organizations, according to people familiar with the matter.
- Last night, the Canyon Fire, in California, grew to nearly 5,000 acres. Thousands in northern Los Angeles and eastern Ventura Counties are under evacuation orders as firefighters continue to battle the fast-moving blaze.
- According to people familiar with the matter, Trump is removing Billy Long as IRS commissioner; Long, who has been in the role for two months, is expected to be nominated for an ambassadorship. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will serve as acting commissioner, according to a senior administration official.
Dispatches
Explore all of our newsletters here.
More From The Atlantic
