By Richard Falk
4 Oct 2024– This was initially published by TRT World on 30 Sep and has been modified to take account of subsequent developments in the region including the assassination of Hassan Nasrallah in Beirut and a widening onslaught against Hezbollah, while tensions mount with Iran. These developments have also affected the US relation to the conflict.
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Netanyahu’s bloody endgame seeks a future Israel with a Minimum Palestinian Presence
In the face of mounting global criticism, Israel is stepping up its military offensive in Lebanon, continuing its genocidal violence against the Palestinians and even intensifying its attacks on the Houthis in Yemen.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu holds maps as he speaks during the 79th Session of the United Nations General Assembly at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on September 27, 2024. that erase all traces of a Palestinian claim to statehood and the exercise of their right of self-determination.
Israel in the year since the Hamas-led attacks on October 7 has insisted that it is motivated only by anti-terrorist goals in its original pledge to exterminate Hamas, and more recently expanded by the commitment to destroy Hezbollah as a credible adversary, and in the process weaken its most feared adversary, Iran. Its evident incidental 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 of militias and political groups in the Middle East, most on Western lists of terrorist organization, and alleged linked to Iran, and less so Syria, as a so-called ‘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 months against alleged Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon, and extending to the Hezbollah controlled neighborhoods of south Beirut.
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 severe, massive civilian suffering, a question is recently being posed in reaction to the prolonged excessiveness of Israeli violence coupled with its stubborn refusal to accept the near universal call at the UN and elsewhere for a Gaza ceasefire tied to a hostage/prisoner swap deal: 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 self-sacrifice along with its sullen acceptance of the criminal stigma of credible allegations of apartheid and genocide, as well as the laundry list of crimes against humanity and its crude defamation of the United Nations?
Netanyahu’s endgame
Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appeared in New York to delivered an angry, arrogant speech before a UN General Assembly. Netanyahu managed to blend bitterness toward Israel’s UN critics with an Israeli vision of peace that seemed better treated as a delusional Israel victory speech.
In a diversionary attack, Netanyahu began his remarks by referring to the UN as “a swamp of anti-Semitic bile,” a racist filter through which any allegation against Israel, however perverse, could gain “an automatic majority” against what he pointed out was the world’s only Jewish-majority state “in this flat-earth society” that is the UN. An allegation that seemed to imply that Israel could do no wrong internationally, and if any serious charges were mounted against Israel, no matter how well evidenced, they would be dismissed as nothing more than another instance of antisemitic racist barbs.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during the 79th Session of the United Nations General Assembly at the United Nations headquarters in New York City on September 27, 2024.
It was in this strained atmosphere that Netanyahu chose to announce his grandiose vision of an Israeli endgame that he claimed would alone 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 celebrating the emergence of “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, informed persons realized it was little other than a crude example of state propaganda with little chance of happening and almost no prospect of delivering a bright, peaceful, prosperous future to the peoples of the region.
Netanyahu displayed a map of his new Middle East that assigned no presence to Palestinian statehood, even though Saudi Arabia has recently 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. The US had long hidden its Israeli partisanship behind the two-state mantra that was also a UN consensus that substituted piety for realism.
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 was in hot pursuit of a publically undisclosed endgame that would complete the Zionist Project after a century of settler colonial striving.
This first became clear as a publicly endorsed goal 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 that had been declared ‘unlawful.’
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 most Western countries.
Such a Basic Law cannot be changed in Israel, which lacks a written constitution, by normal legislative action, but only by a later overriding Basic Law.
When the Netanyahu coalition took over in January 2023 there were provocative signs that this 2018 Basic Law would be coercively expedited as Israel’s number-one priority. It was initially signaled 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.” This violence was tolerated by the IDF, which on some occasions joined in, without even producing a fake censure from Tel Aviv.
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 normalization 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-defense”.
As further information became available, the original Israeli rationalization 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 including rehearsals of the Hamas attacks, it strains credulity to accept the official version that Israel’s world-class surveillance capabilities did not detect the impending attack. Further, the immediate magnitude and severity of the Israeli response raised suspicions that Israel was seeking a pretext to induce the forced evacuation of Palestinians from Gaza to be followed by their forced exit from the occupied West Bank.
These developments established 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.
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.
Israel underestimated Palestinian attachment to the land and to the indignity of being made unwanted strangers in their own homeland, even in the face of total devastation. Israelis undoubtedly anticipate the growth of hostile public opinion around the world after an initial grace period after October 7 of indulging Israeli violence, given the widely endorsed accounts of 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 a grandiose 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, and maybe even Syria and Iran, as parts of the Israeli endgame quietly enlarged to include what is being called ‘restored deterrence.’
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 co-existing Palestinian state with full sovereign rights or a new safeguarded one-state confederation based on absolute equality between these two peoples with respect to the totality of human rights.
In conclusion, the political conditions do not currently begin to exist for an endgame that would satisfy the minimum expectations of both peoples.
Prof. Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University, Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, at Queen Mary University London, Research Associate the Orfalea Center of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Fellow of the Tellus Institute.
7 October 2024
Source: transcend.org