Opinion | Benjamin Netanyahu at War
Jerusalem
It’s 9 p.m. and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just returned to Israel’s capital from a military base near Haifa. He’d gone up north to give the troops a pep talk. An aide tells me that a young reservist stood up and asked, “What do you expect from us?”
“Total victory,” Mr. Netanyahu replied.
What does total victory mean to a country that lived through a genocidal attack on Oct. 7? What does it mean to win after suffering such loss?
“We have three war aims,” Mr. Netanyahu says in our interview. “These aims are achievable,” but the war “will take many months.” He lists the aims in his distinctive baritone. “One, destroy Hamas. Two, free the hostages”—of whom about 136 remain in Hamas’s tunnels, some of whom are presumed dead. “Three, ensure that Gaza never again poses a threat to Israel.”
That last aim will require “durable demilitarization, which can only be carried out and sustained by Israel,” along with “deradicalization,” a cleansing of the ideological poison in Gaza that most Jewish Israelis on both left and right now regard as nonnegotiable preconditions for peace with the Palestinians.
The day before we meet, Israel had suffered the worst day of its ground war: 21 soldiers killed in an explosion triggered by a Hamas rocket-propelled grenade. The mood in the prime minister’s office is somber, and an aide says he’d expected Mr. Netanyahu to postpone our interview. He didn’t.
How is the campaign going? “Better than many expected,” the prime minister says. “It took the U.S. and its allies nine months to defeat radical forces in Mosul,” he says of the 2016-17 battle against Islamic State. “Mosul is smaller than Gaza and did not have the massive terror underground infrastructure. We’re now in the fourth month, but we’ve had tough days.”
He alludes to the soldiers lost the day before, all reservists: “For us every fallen soldier is a tragedy. We pay a heavy price. We seek to minimize casualties, both of our own soldiers and Gaza’s civilians.” That’s a sore spot for Israelis who bridle at accusations that Israel kills Palestinian civilians indiscriminately.
Mr. Netanyahu, like most Israelis, is aghast at the way protesters in the West—especially on American campuses—demonize Israel and, in some cases, laud Hamas. “This is a problem not just for Israel but also for America,” he says. “Many of these supporters of Hamas are woefully informed. But this goes beyond ignorance. Twenty percent of them support bin Laden,” he says, citing a recent poll of Americans under 30. “I’m obviously concerned by these demonstrations. America is the vanguard of freedom and the guarantor of liberty in this century. If a younger generation emerges in America that supports the head-choppers, it is a problem for civilization.”
That said, he believes that America’s founding values will prevail. In addition to the ugly, often antisemitic demonstrations, he cites “the beginnings of a movement in the opposite direction. I saw it in the congressional hearings with the three university presidents. The reaction to the way in which they talked about genocide was a positive sign.”
Given Mr. Netanyahu’s reputation for abrasiveness—not entirely unearned—it’s easy to forget that he’s an effective diplomat. He served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations between 1984 and 1988. When asked if any awkwardness has ensued from Washington’s seemingly tone-deaf push for a two-state solution while Israel is in the throes of an existential war, he speaks with finesse.
“I appreciate President Biden’s support that was given from day one,” he says. He notes that Mr. Biden called Hamas “worse than ISIS,” sent two aircraft carriers to the region and supplied Israel with ammunition. The U.S. is confronting Iran-backed Houthis in the Red Sea, for which Mr. Netanyahu is grateful. “We agree on the war aim of destroying Hamas. That doesn’t mean we haven’t had differences of opinion, but we have worked to overcome them.”
The U.S. State Department, for its part, plays the two-state solution like a broken record. Secretary of State Antony Blinken raised the matter awkwardly in Davos, Switzerland, in a conversation with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. Mr. Netanyahu allows that he isn’t “the most avid and diligent reader of Tom Friedman” and says, without further naming names: “Anyone supporting Israel and who also supports a two-state solution should ask themselves some questions. Do they support the Palestinians having an army? The answer is of course not. Should the Palestinians be able to bring in weapons? The answer is of course not. Should they be able to make military pacts with Iran? Of course not.”
His “formula for peace has been consistent,” he says. “In any future agreement, the Palestinians should have all the power to govern themselves and none of the powers to threaten Israel.” In any agreement, “Israel must retain overall security control over territory west of the Jordan River, and that includes Gaza.” Oct. 7 brought a “massive shift in Israeli public opinion in recognizing Israel’s overwhelming need for security control. This necessarily detracts from Palestinian sovereignty. Any solution to this conflict in the future begins by recognizing this reality today.”
Mr. Netanyahu gets a bad rap in America’s liberal press. “Some in the United States,” he says, “believe that the obstacle to peace with the Palestinians is—me. They don’t realize that I reflect the view of most Israelis.” Polls confirm Mr. Netanyahu’s assertion and indicate that Israelis, far from clamoring for a two-state solution, are adamant that the war should be fought with intensity. In late December, 75% of Jewish Israelis opposed U.S. demands to reduce the heavy bombing then under way in Gaza.
Most of his compatriots “understand that the problem is that the Palestinians don’t want peace with Israel but peace without Israel. There has been a persistent opposition among Palestinian leaders to the very existence of the state of Israel.” It’s “not the absence of a Palestinian state but the opposition to a Jewish state that is the obstacle to peace.”
Mr. Netanyahu thinks peace is possible through a strategy he calls “outside in”: “The way to achieve it is to go to the Arab states and then circle back to the Palestinians.” But the latter appear to be in no mood for peace. “Unfortunately,” Mr. Netanyahu says, “85% of the Palestinians in Judea and Samaria—the West Bank—support the massacre done by Hamas on Oct. 7.”
Israel also faces a startling lawsuit at the International Court of Justice, in which South Africa accuses the Jewish state of genocide. “What South Africa did was shameful,” Mr. Netanyahu says. Israel was established in the aftermath of genocide and was one of the earliest signatories of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. “South Africa is basically aligning itself, in the name of opposing genocide, with the genocidal murderers of Hamas. The only difference between what Hamas did and the Nazis did is capability, not intent.” (On Friday the court rejected South Africa’s plea that it order a cease-fire while the case proceeds.)
No subject energizes Mr. Netanyahu more than Iran. America got a taste of his singlemindedness on the subject in 2015 when he addressed a joint session of Congress and opposed President Obama’s nuclear deal with Tehran. Mr. Netanyahu says Israel has “taken consistent action to ward off Iran’s nuclear ambitions. We delayed them by many years, perhaps a decade, but we haven’t stopped them. The jury is still out on all of us.” It would be “catastrophic,” he says, “if they got nuclear weapons. Look at what they’re doing without nuclear weapons. They’ve blocked international maritime routes with their Houthi proxies, they subvert states across the Middle East, they are the foremost state sponsor of terror across the world, and they and their proxies have repeatedly attacked American targets.”
He points to the malign consequences of failing to prevent North Korea from acquiring nuclear arms. “Iran is much more powerful and much more dangerous than North Korea. It promotes radical Islam and chants ‘Death to America.’ You don’t want such a regime to threaten the U.S. with ballistic weapons armed with nuclear warheads.”
He also worries about Russia’s partnership with Iran. Israel has reached a modus vivendi with Vladimir Putin over Syria, Moscow’s vassal state. “I acted against Iran’s plans to build a second Hezbollah base in Syria,” he says. “We have been taking forceful military action to prevent that—this while Russia has had a strong military presence in Syria.”
Years ago, he says, he “told President Putin that Iran’s military buildup in Syria would pose an unacceptable security threat to Israel.” That would raise a real possibility of Israel’s air force clashing with Russia’s. “Thankfully, so far, we’ve avoided such a clash.” But now “Iran has become the chief arms supplier to Russia, and we’re obviously concerned about Russian reciprocation.”
But the Iranian threat has also led to improved Israeli relations with Saudi Arabia. “I’m sure no one in Riyadh has any illusions about Iran’s ambitions and aggressions,” Mr. Netanyahu says. He appears sanguine about the prospects of a deal with Saudi Arabia along the lines of the Abraham Accords, by which Israel normalized relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
“The prospects are good,” he says, “and I intend to work for it. The United States wants it. Saudi Arabia wants it. And we want it.” But that’s all he’ll say. “Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at” was the first of Woodrow Wilson’s 14 Points. “I believe in open covenants, secretly arrived at,” Mr. Netanyahu says. “If we make any progress, it will require important consultations, and if those are to succeed, they need to be done discreetly. That is exactly what happened with the Abraham Accords.”
Mr. Netanyahu believes that the war in Gaza isn’t Israel’s alone. “We have an opportunity to change the Middle East, but that requires total victory against Hamas. We are not dealing just with a terrorist organization. We are engaged in a battle between Israel and the moderate forces in the Middle East, backed by the United States, against Iran’s axis of terror.” If the Middle East “were to go down,” he says, “Europe will be next, and the U.S. will be threatened as well. This is a battle between civilization and barbarism, and civilization has to win.”
Few in Israel would disagree with Mr. Netanyahu when he says that Oct. 7 was the worst day in Israeli history. “We have had other days, other times of barbarity and sorrow, but we hadn’t seen anything like this since the Holocaust. In the European death camps, the Jews were utterly helpless.” Not today, when “we have brave soldiers fighting back.” Jews “had that ability in ancient times. Read the biblical stories of Joshua, David, the Maccabees. We didn’t always win, but we had the capacity to fight back. We lost that capacity in exile. The desire to destroy the Jews hasn’t gone away. What has changed is the ability to fend off attacks.”
Mr. Netanyahu ends with a message to America: “Our fight is your fight.” The war against Hamas is “part of the larger struggle between the pro-American forces in the Middle East and the anti-American terror axis led by Iran.” If Iran gets nuclear weapons, “every American will be held hostage to an ideological enemy with an implacable hatred for America.”
“If we lose, you lose. If we win, you win.”
Mr. Varadarajan, a Journal contributor, is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and at New York University Law School’s Classical Liberal Institute.