Israel Has a Right to Defend Itself. Maybe It Should Try Doing It.

Habima Square, Tel Aviv, November 11. Photo by Miriam Alster/Flash90 via Times of Israel.

Maybe this latest outrage, the IDF killing of three escaping Israeli hostages—they'd improvised a white flag and had their shirts off, I figure in the hope that would show they weren't suicide terrorists rushing the troops, and yet the troops fired—will really start making the Israeli public rethink what's being done in their names. "Israel has a right to defend itself," as the Hasbara always reminds us, but is that what it's doing? 

Then there's the other body count, of hostages killed with their captors under the collapsed buildings in the bombing raids, for which the latest number released by Hamas is 57 (of whom IDF has acknowledged 18, without, I think, releasing the names, if they have them). Israel is killing Hamas's prisoners!

And it's not obliterating Hamas, though some of those killed doubtless belonged to the organization—maybe as many as 40%, though that's only estimated by assuming that every male between the ages of 18 and 59 in the territory is a combatant, even though only a third of adults in Gaza expressed any support for Hamas in the October 6 survey.

New polling shows a hugely changed picture, though:

Despite the devastation, 57% of respondents in Gaza and 82% in the West Bank believe Hamas was correct in launching the October attack, the poll indicated. A large majority believed Hamas’ claims that it acted to defend a major Islamic shrine in Jerusalem against Jewish extremists and win the release of Palestinian prisoners. Only 10% said they believed Hamas has committed war crimes, with a large majority saying they did not see videos showing the militants committing atrocities.

Israel's bombing campaign is a recruiting campaign for terrorists. As usual, that's how the cycle works, but somehow seems worse than usual, and more self-defeating.

And in Israel, meanwhile? Hostility in Tel Aviv to the government over the hostage issue has grown to the point where demonstrations rival the ones against Netanyahu's judicial overhaul plans before the massacres.

What's particularly interesting to me is the degree to which US president Joe Biden, who was already pretty popular in Israel—more popular than Netanyahu, anyway—has been nourishing his relationship with the Israeli public, as if he were running for prime minister himself. When he visits Israel, he takes time to meet with the hostage families, something Netanyahu never does, and show them some of that famous Biden empathy, and it gets a response. There was a good piece on that this weekend in The Atlantic, by Yair Rosenberg, on how he's managed to manage Bibi in a way Clinton and Obama never could:

The fundamental problem for American presidents who have attempted to work with Benjamin Netanyahu is that Benjamin Netanyahu does not care what American presidents think. An exceptional English orator who was raised in Philadelphia, Netanyahu believes that he can outmaneuver and outlast American politicians on their own turf. “I know America,” he said in a private 2001 conversation that later leaked. “America is something that can easily be moved.”...

As both vice president and chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden had a front-row seat to these failures [of the Clinton and Obama administrations]. So did his close-knit foreign-policy team, including longtime staffers such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken and National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan. Recognizing the errors of the past, they have charted a different course aimed at outmaneuvering Netanyahu, seeking to succeed where their predecessors did not. This approach predates the current Gaza conflict, but has reached full expression in the past months. It explains why Biden has full-throatedly supported Israel against Hamas while simultaneously assailing the country’s hard-right governing coalition. And it offers a glimpse at the administration’s intended endgame for the war—and for Netanyahu himself.

While the media is focused (with the credulous performative "left") on Biden's public gestures of friendship with the PM ("Bibi, I love you, but I don't agree with a damn thing you had to say"), and missing the implied bless-his-heart dismissal, Biden is determined to undermine him and seek an end to the conflict that keeps Netanyahu politically alive. As with the attempted judicial coup, he avoids criticizing Netanyahu directly, but doesn't hesitate to attack the reactionary cabinet members:

In July, Biden told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that Netanyahu’s government has “the most extremist members of cabinets that I’ve seen” in Israel, noting that “I go all the way back to Golda Meir.” This past week, at a campaign event hosted by a former chair of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, Biden went even further, singling out a far-right minister by name. “This is the most conservative government in Israel’s history,” the president said. Itamar “Ben-Gvir and company and the new folks, they don’t want anything remotely approaching a two-state solution.” This was Biden’s approach in action: criticizing Israel during wartime in front of a pro-Israel crowd, and doing so in a way that nonetheless denied Netanyahu any opening.

And he's adopted the same kind of technique with regard to the West Bank settler violence, with some real teeth (he's denying offenders visas, and cutting off shipments of M-16s that might fall into their hands).

Let's add, please, that Biden can't stop the carnage in Gaza by denying Netanyahu weapons, precisely because Netanyahu doesn't care. As Dan Nexon says on Bluesky today, "the idea that Israel would stop fighting without U.S. arms is… I think, a fantasy." What if the US decides to vote for a Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire? Netanyahu has already announced he'll defy the resolution the US did vote for, calling for "extended pauses". Netanyahu doesn't believe rules apply to him. Another psychopath, and Biden knows it well. The only way Biden can really influence the conduct of the war is by going over Netanyahu's head, as it were, to the people (sort of the way Netanyahu did to Obama to shut down talk of a Palestinian state in 2015), and that is what he has been doing, together with Blinken and Sullivan (and Defense Secretary Austin and Vice President Harris), on the two-pronged approach of focusing on the hostages (which requires pausing in the fighting), which he supposes (I hope rightly) is more important to them than the continuing revenge against Hamas, and the pressure for a less "indiscriminate" battle style, by which he hopes not only to save lives, but also to recover his ability to work with Palestinians, and to work toward a much longer-term result.

This is the picture I started sketching out in late November, at the beginning of the first pause and the hostages-for-prisoners exchange. There was no chance of stopping the carnage then, 

Then, of course, the process came to an awkward end, and my idea didn't seem very sound, but Biden didn't stop working for the hostages and chiding the IDF and terrorist West Bank settlers for their abuses. Now the desire for hostage negotiations, and the popular hatred for Netanyahu, are coming back into the foreground, and I'm wondering if a better development might come. 

Biden has once again placed himself on the side of the Israeli majority, in order to undermine Netanyahu and shape the political future of the entire country. It’s one of the biggest bets of his presidency, and when the guns finally fall silent, it could determine the fate of the broader Middle East.

It's a very big bet indeed.