Netanyahu's bloody endgame envisions a future without Palestinians

By Richard Falk

Israel in the year since the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 has claimed to be motivated by anti-terrorist goals to exterminate Hamas, and more recently, to destroy Hezbollah as a credible adversary, and in the process weaken its feared adversary, Iran.

Its additional purpose has been to cast Hamas, Hezbollah, and Yemen's Houthis as proxies for arch-enemy Iran, which stands accused of being the main enabler of "anti-Israeli terrorism" in the Middle East, a coalition contemptuously described in the West as "the axis of resistance."

Casting new dark clouds over the observance of the grim anniversary of October 7, is the Gaza-like onslaught carried out by Israel in recent weeks against alleged Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon.

This latest phase of Israeli hyper-violence culminated in the deadly pager/radio attacks followed days later by the assassination of Hezbollah's longtime leader, Hassan Nasrallah on September 27. And this was one year after the United Nations Secretary General spoke of the world "as becoming unhinged as geopolitical tensions rise."

Amid this preoccupation with daily reports of atrocities and prolonged civilian suffering, a question is beginning to be posed in reaction to the prolonged excessiveness of Israeli violence coupled with its stubborn refusal to accept the near-universal support for a ceasefire/prisoner swap deal in Gaza: What is Israel's strategic objective that is worth this much sacrifice in its global reputation as a dynamic and legitimate, if controversial, state?

And lurking behind this unnerving question is a related anxious query: does Israel have an endgame that might vindicate, at least in its eyes, this sacrifice along with a sullen acceptance of the criminal stigma of credible allegations of apartheid and genocide, as well as the laundry list of crimes against humanity?

Netanyahu's endgame

Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared in New York and delivered a strange speech before a UN General Assembly gathering empty of most of its delegates, blending bitterness with an Israeli vision of peace.

In a diversionary attack, he referred to the UN as "a swamp of anti-Semitic bile," through which any allegation against Israel, however perverse, could gain "an automatic majority" against the world's only Jewish-majority state "in this flat-earth society" that is the UN.

It was in this strained atmosphere that Netanyahu chose to announce his grandiose vision of an Israeli endgame that claims to bring peace and prosperity to the region.

What Netanyahu presented to the almost empty UN chamber (because many delegates left in protest of his speech) was a geopolitical package tied together with the verbiage of "the blessings of peace."

It was essentially a manifesto in which stage one involved the destruction of Israel's active adversaries, the proxies of Iran. It was to be followed by a stage two "historic peace agreement with Saudi Arabia" presented as a dramatic sequel to the Abraham Accords reached in the last period of Donald Trump's presidency four years ago.

These words proclaiming "a new Middle East" were hyped by Netanyahu, who said, "what blessings such a peace with Saudi Arabia would bring."

Other than those who wanted to be fooled by such an envisioned endgame, most informed persons realised it was little other than a crude example of state propaganda.

Netanyahu displayed a map of his new Middle East that assigned no presence to Palestinian statehood, even though Saudi Arabia had indicated that it would not establish peace with Israel until a Palestinian state existed.

Such an omission was not an oversight. The Netanyahu coalition with the far-right religious parties led by such extremists as National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich would collapse the instant any genuine commitment to Palestinian statehood was officially endorsed.

It is impossible to believe that Netanyahu was unaware of this constraint, and so it seems unlikely, to put it mildly, that he expected any enthusiasm even in Washington for his vision of a peace-building endgame.

Probing Israel's real endgame

Underneath the public relations idea of Israel's endgame lies a worrisome reality.

Even before the Netanyahu government took over at the beginning of 2023, it was evident that Israel's political agenda had an undisclosed endgame that would complete the Zionist Project after a century of settler colonial endeavour.

This first became clear to me when Israel's government introduced a quasi-constitutional Basic Law in 2018. With it, Jewish supremacist rights were written into Israeli law as conferring the right of self-determination exclusively on the Jewish people, establishing Hebrew as Israel's sole official language, and extending Israeli protective sovereignty to the occupied West Bank settlements.

It was this legislative action by the Knesset that confirmed an Israeli endgame of a one-state solution widely known as "Greater Israel," a formula for extending Israel's sovereignty over the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem in violation of international law and the UN consensus, including that of Western countries.

Such a Basic Law cannot be changed by normal legislative action, but only by a later overriding Basic Law.

When the Netanyahu coalition took over, there were provocative signals that this 2018 Basic Law would be coercively expedited as Israel's number-one priority. It was initially signalled by the informal, yet unmistakable, greenlighting of settler violence in the occupied West Bank with the pointed frequently articulated message to Palestinian residents: "leave or we will kill you."

In September 2023, Netanyahu's UN speech featuring a map of the region with no Palestine was reinforced by feverish diplomatic efforts to secure an Abrahamic normalisation with some Arab states, further indications to establish so-called "Greater Israel".

These acts along with provocations at the Al Aqsa Mosque compound helped set the stage for the Hamas-led attack on October 7, an event itself now veiled in ambiguity that can only be removed by an international investigation.

Miscalculations on both sides

The world at first largely accepted, or at least tolerated, Israel's version of October 7, including its retaliatory rationale given an international law cover as an exercise of the "right of self-defence".

As further information became available, the original Israeli rationalisation for its response to October 7 became problematic. It was established that the Netanyahu leadership had received several reliable warnings of an imminent Hamas attack.

After months of training, it seems unbelievable that Israel's world-class surveillance capabilities were not alerted, and the immediate magnitude and severity of the response raised suspicions that Israel was seeking a pretext to induce the forced evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza followed by the occupied West Bank.

This seemed a credible prelude to the formal establishment of "Greater Israel", and the attainment of Israel's real endgame.

In retrospect, both Hamas and Israel seem to have seriously miscalculated. Israel seems to have counted on genocidal violence producing either political surrender or cross-border evacuation, and a new wave of Palestinian refugees.

Israel underestimated Palestinian attachment to the land, even in the face of total devastation. There has also been the growth of hostile public opinion around the world after an initial grace period of indulging Israeli violence, given the atrocities inflicted and hostages seized in the Hamas-led attack.

On its side, Hamas underestimated the ferocity of the Israeli response apparently because it conceived of its attack in normal battlefield action and reaction patterns, and not linked to the Israeli endgame scenario.

Israel's hollow claims of victory suggest that the Netanyahu coalition is as committed as earlier to the "Greater Israel" endgame, with the enlargement of the combat zone to include Lebanon seeming to make it more viable.

Having endured so much, it is hard to envision any kind of acquiescence by the Palestinians, however decimated by the Israeli onslaught, of an endgame that doesn't include the establishment of a viable Palestine political future. This could be either a viable Palestinian state or a new credible one-state confederation based on absolute equality between these two peoples.

In conclusion, the political conditions do not currently exist for an endgame that would satisfy the minimum expectations of both peoples.

The author, Richard Falk is Professor of International Law Emeritus, Princeton University, former UN Special Rapporteur for Occupied Palestine, and co-author of recently published "Liberating the United Nations: Realism with Hope" (2024). He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times since 2008.

Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect the opinions, viewpoints and editorial policies of TRT Afrika.

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