In a conversation with Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin is said to have expressed concern about Israel’s role in escalating tensions along the border with Lebanon, fearing this could lead to a regional war. And so he should. There is as yet no strategic necessity for Israel to widen the scope of the Gaza conflict, but the political logic shaping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct makes continuation of this conflict and escalation on other fronts his default option. Therein lies the real danger for all.
Netanyahu has provided considerable evidence since the Hamas attack on October 7 that he is making policy on the hoof. He has blamed Israel’s top security echelon for the dramatic failure of his own past policies toward Hamas, in a post on X that was later deleted, but not before conveying the message to his intended domestic audience. In a statement on October 28, he reminded soldiers preparing to enter Gaza to “[r]emember what Amalek did to you.” In the current political climate, the invocation of a biblical passage commanding vengeance for an attack on defenseless Jews in the desert would be understood by listeners to imply a related passage: “Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys.” Netanyahu later predicted that the war would be followed by indefinite Israeli security responsibility over Gaza, although both Gallant and U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken denied that this was in fact an official war aim.
That does not mean, however, that there is no inner logic or coherence to Netanyahu’s disparate statements and social media posts. Rather, they serve two purposes. First, delaying the moment when he will face the full brunt of demands for political accountability because of the failure of the policy he sold to the Israeli public for so long: promising security and prosperity for Israel, while blockading and pauperizing Gaza and expanding colonization in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. His second purpose is to hold his far-right coalition partners close and appeal to right-wing constituencies so as to ensure their support when that moment of reckoning arrives. If they enable him to retain his grip on the premiership, Netanyahu would be able to continue seeking immunity from prosecution for corruption charges that he has sought through the controversial judicial reforms pursued by his right-wing coalition since the start of 2023.
As veteran Israeli journalist Amos Harel put it, “[E]ven in the midst of the country’s most important war in 50 years, the prime minister is occupied first and foremost, above all else, with himself and with rescuing his shaky political future.” Netanyahu has a clear political interest in maintaining the tempo of military operations in Gaza, hence his repeated rejection of humanitarian ceasefires and pauses. No less worryingly, if the ongoing exchanges of fire between Hezbollah and Israeli forces across the Lebanese border shift into a large-scale confrontation, this will be due not to a decision made by Hezbollah or Iran, which seek to contain any escalation within current boundaries, but because Netanyahu feels his political survival requires an escalation on this scale.
In making escalation his default posture, Netanyahu is borrowing the tactic of “escaping by running forward” honed by his one-time nemesis Yasser Arafat, the late chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and president of the Palestinian Authority. As I wrote of Arafat at the time, his escape by running forward came in response to the start of the Second Intifada and the resort to arms by some Palestinians in 2000. It revealed not a prior strategy, but rather the absence of strategy or clear purpose. He seized upon a “dramatic event brought about by external agency to obscure and escape a strategic predicament, and then sought to intensify and prolong that event as a means of gaining ‘crisis dominance’ and ultimately of inducing an outcome to his advantage... Arafat’s instinctive reaction was to maintain this advantage, which in a crude sense required a daily death toll.”
Supporters of either man will no doubt take offense, but as with Arafat, so with Netanyahu. Netanyahu’s rhetorical posture (backed by endless photo ops with the troops) reveals a perception that the domestic political costs of shifting his government’s current course—of conducting military operations without a coherent exit strategy in Gaza, in the view of Biden administration officials—are considerably higher than those of maintaining it. Israelis who feel that the lack of clear policy thinking is unimportant so long as Israeli forces are conducting a root-and-branch elimination of Hamas, underestimate the consequences of Netanyahu’s default option. This is most evident in his policy of focusing government resources and the bulk of army units on expanding and protecting an increasingly aggressive and violent settler movement in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, at the unbearable cost paid by Israeli civilians along the Gaza border on October 7.
Developments in the West Bank and East Jerusalem show that, while Netanyahu’s short-term aim centers on his personal political survival, his longer-term goal of retaining office is both strategic and longstanding. In mainstreaming ultranationalist, right-wing rhetoric, he deepens the conviction that Israel should—and, crucially, can—extend its control over all Palestinian territories with the aim of transforming them irrevocably into the Land of Israel from “the river to the sea.” In escaping his current political crisis by running forward, Netanyahu obscures from the Israeli public’s view that his determination to make Palestinian statehood impossible while promising full peace and security for Israelis represents a circle that cannot be squared. This lies at the core of his default option.
Whether Netanyahu is eventually forced from office or ultimately reemerges victorious in his domestic political battle, he will deepen his country’s polarization considerably and embolden his right-wing allies to become ever more confrontational with fellow citizens—whether the 2 million Palestinians who hold Israeli citizenship or Jewish dissenters. The settler violence now seen in the West Bank is already manifesting itself across the 1967 borders, inside Israel. Netanyahu’s fight to keep office may so empower his far-right partners, in fact, that he will no longer be able to present himself to more centrist Israeli parties, or to Western governments, as the sensible safeguard holding back the far right. The latter will be too strong, and the balance of power will shift from him to them.
Once Arafat had locked himself into his own default option, he was hemmed in, literally and figuratively. Israeli troops besieged him in his presidential compound in Ramallah from mid-2002 until his death in November 2004. The Palestinian parliament meanwhile voted to curb his powers and, more importantly, the Roadmap for Peace issued by the U.S.-led “Quartet” in 2003 made further progress toward Palestinian statehood dependent on internal reforms and on ensuring security for Israel. But none of this prompted Arafat to abandon his default option.
Netanyahu remains considerably further from such a moment of reckoning, but is similarly locked in. The Biden administration’s deployment of significant military assets to the eastern Mediterranean may well have been intended to deter Hezbollah (and Iran) from widening the Gaza war, and additionally to dissuade the Israeli government from undertaking military action beyond Gaza. But it may in fact do the opposite: encourage Netanyahu to calculate that a military escalation in the north is again his cheaper—default—option.
