Netanyahu's toxic temptations | Countercurrents

Regardless of our political views, there is no denying that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to navigate his way through the worst crisis to hit Israel since 1948.

As the crisis gained momentum, Netanyahu became increasingly inclined to believe that he was “chosen” for this once-in-a-lifetime moment! In this respect, he likes to compare himself to Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt, and compares October 7 – Hamas's brazen major attack on Israeli settlements around the Gaza Strip – to the American attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Before this disastrous development, Netanyahu was busy with some other things. For example, he considered Iran's nuclear ambitions as a life-threatening element for Israel. He never missed an opportunity to emphasize this. In all his speeches on international platforms, his picture holding the diagram showing Iran's progress in creating its own nuclear weapon became familiar to the eyes of the world.

At the same time, he was involved in disputes with critics and allies over the future of the territories occupied by the Arabs since the 1967 war, especially the West Bank, which he and his like-minded Israeli politicians tirelessly want to incorporate into “little Israel”!

De facto factor

Netanyahu and his clique believed that international public opinion in the late 1940s tolerated Israel's de facto encroachments on territories originally allocated to the Palestinians under the UN Partition Plan (181). Today, he hopes that Israel's continuous attempts to acquire more Palestinian territories will also be tolerated and eventually ignored and forgotten!

To put this plan into action, he followed the example of Israeli governments since the 1967 war, when they began building settlements for immigrant Jews from all over the world. Today, the West Bank is home to more than half a million settlers, compared to three million Palestinians. East Jerusalem is home to 220,000 Israelis, compared to 372,000 Palestinians.

Dawn of October 7

Then the dawn of October 7, 2023 will break to destroy all the above plans and dreams of Netanyahu and his like-minded right-wing allies!

Hamas' surprise major attack shocked the world and humiliated Netanyahu, who was the man behind the strategy to strengthen and enrich the Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip while undermining the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah in order to widen the gap between the two competing representatives of the Palestinian people.

Netanyahu cannot pardon himself, as he was the man who approved the release of current Hamas leader Yehya Sinwar and 1,000 other Palestinian prisoners in 2011 in exchange for Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, who was kidnapped by the Islamic movement in 2006.

By driving a wedge between the two rival Palestinian groups, Netanyahu wanted to tell the world that there is no reliable Palestinian partner with whom to make peace. According to his logic, the Palestinian Authority is corrupt, weak and unpopular, and Hamas is a “terrorist” organization with which Israel is not allowed by law to hold talks!

With such an argument, the fate of the West Bank would be solely in the hands of Netanyahu's Likud party and the other far-right parties, whose main goal is the annexation of the West Bank, while at the same time constantly using different tactics to expel as many Palestinians as possible from beyond the 1948 Green Line – what the world unanimously calls “ethnic cleansing”!

The year after!

If we could penetrate Netanyahu's mind in the years to come, Israeli schoolchildren would learn that Theodor Herzl was the founder of Zionism in 1889, David Ben Gurion was the founder of “Little Israel” in 1948, and that Netanyahu was the man who tried to outmaneuver the waves of the storm!

Who can resist such a poisonous temptation? Netanyahu, a war criminal as some Israeli liberals call him, seems to care little about what others think or say about him!

This commentary was written specifically for Crossfire Arabia by Saleem Ayoub Quna, a Jordanian author who writes on local, regional and international affairs and has published two books. He holds a BA in English Literature from Jordan University, a diploma from Paris and an MA from Johns Hopkins University in Washington. He also has a good knowledge of French and German.