Under Netanyahu, Israel is in existential danger
Facing a genocidal Iranian regime and its proxies, Netanyahu’s new obsesssion with the Philadelphi Corridor risks the lives of the hostages and, ultimately, the future of our country
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
It is truly unthinkable.
That the prime minister of Israel would manufacture an unwarranted demand, and present it as existential, in order to thwart a potential deal for the release of the hostages held for almost a year by Hamas in Gaza. And to do this because he fears that the extremists with whom he built his government, who are hellbent on plunging Israel into regional war, would otherwise force him from power.
And yet that is precisely what Israel’s defense minister, its security chiefs, its opposition leader, and two former IDF chiefs of staff who sat in the war cabinet with Netanyahu warn he is doing right now.
Negotiating a hostage deal with the genocidal Islamist extremists who slaughtered 1,200 people in southern Israel last October is a hideous challenge, but also a national necessity. Hamas uses every ounce of the leverage it obtained by seizing the hostages, and is demanding the release of countless mass murderers from Israel’s jails and the right to survive, revive and restart the slaughter. Israel, by Netanyahu’s own telling, has sought to utilize a combination of military pressure on Hamas and diplomacy to achieve terms that it can bear and save the lives of its abducted citizens.
For weeks now, however, Israel’s own negotiators — led by Mossad chief David Barnea and Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar — have been telling Netanyahu that the time was ripe for a deal, based on a proposal that Netanyahu himself approved at the end of May. That Hamas was sufficiently battered militarily to at least potentially release some 30 living hostages in an initial, 42-day phase of an agreement, and just possibly all the rest of the hostages, alive and dead, in subsequent phases. That Yahya Sinwar’s terrorist organization had given up on its demand for an upfront Israeli commitment to end the war and withdraw all its forces from Gaza. That the hostages’ lives were in constant danger because Hamas had given their captors standing orders to kill them if they feared the IDF was closing in. That time was of the essence.
But instead of seizing the moment, Netanyahu issued fresh conditions, including the demand that Israel maintain its troops on the Philadelphi Corridor — the narrow 14-kilometer (9-mile) strip that separates Gaza from Egypt — during that first, 42-day stage of the deal. A new Israeli “clarification” document was drawn up and reluctantly conveyed by the Israeli negotiators to the US, Qatari and Egypt mediators, and on to Hamas, which rejected it.
Israel’s negotiators warned Netanyahu he was likely dooming the deal, and thus potentially dooming the hostages. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant dismissed the ostensible imperative of retaining the Philadelphi Corridor for six more weeks. The IDF made plain that it could recapture the border fairly quickly if and when needed, and that other deployments and mechanisms could prevent Hamas from exploiting the IDF’s temporary absence to smuggle in more weaponry. The mediators indicated that Hamas’s efforts to revive such weapons smuggling would constitute a violation of the deal, and thus legitimize a resumption of Israeli fighting.
But Netanyahu doubled down. Last week, without advance warning, he told his security cabinet — which includes the far-right Jewish supremacists Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, Justice Minister Yariv Levin (whose efforts to radically constrain Israel’s judiciary were tearing the country apart before Hamas invaded last year), and a handful of other Likud ministers terrified of defying Netanyahu — to endorse his “clarification” document as official government policy. This they duly did, by a vote of 8-1, with Gallant the only no, and Ben Gvir abstaining since he opposes any dilution of Israeli troops along the Philadelphi route.
Again, any deal with Hamas by definition involves almost untenable concessions, necessitated by the obligation to bring home hostages who were failed by the political and military leadership on October 7. All in Israel and all who care for Israel would sensibly agonize about the release of killers who have pledged to go straight back to killing, and about the consequent and incredibly dangerous boost to Hamas in the West Bank. All would be anxious to ensure any deal prevented the strategic revival of Hamas in Gaza. All would recall that Israel — under Netanyahu — freed 1,027 security prisoners to secure the release of a single Israeli soldier in 2011, and that one of those 1,027 was Yahya Sinwar.
But Netanyahu, when he chose to appear before the nation on Monday night, focused primarily on none of these concerns. Days after six Israeli hostages, who had survived for almost 11 months, were executed in cold blood by their Hamas captors, and amid overwhelming national anguish at the failure to save them and overwhelming national fear for the lives of those still oppressed in the Hamas tunnels, the prime minister devoted almost all of his attention to what he indicated was an existential need for Israel to maintain control of the Philadelphi Corridor.
The night after relatives of the remaining living hostages in Gaza had accused him of playing “Russian roulette” with their loved ones, and described themselves as “bereaved families in waiting,” Netanyahu declared: “We will not go out. The importance of the Philadelphi Corridor is cardinal… This corridor is different from all other corridors and places. It is central and determines our entire future.”
Internal illogic
Netanyahu, after delivering his prepared statement, took questions from reporters. And the longer the press conference went on, the more he discredited his own arguments — both through what he said and what he didn’t.
He claimed to have firmly opposed prime minister Ariel Sharon’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza in general, and leaving the Philadelphi Corridor in particular, but omitted to mention that he voted several times in favor of disengagement both in the Knesset and in the government.
He claimed, as he often does, an extraordinary capacity to resist pressure, but when discussing why, in all the years of his premiership before October 7, he had never sent the IDF to capture the ostensibly vital border between Hamas’s Gaza and Egypt, much less strategically tackle Hamas, he said meekly that he could not “go in to conquer Gaza, to recapture the Philadelphi Corridor and the Rafah Crossing” because “there was neither national nor international agreement.”
Similarly, he vowed to defy all pressure to leave the Philadephi Corridor now — even though his negotiators have told him that would likely mean there is no deal, and some 30 hostages whose names were on the lists for release in that first “humanitarian” phase, including four of those who were murdered last week, may never again see the light of day. But he said he had to do this because he would not be able to defy the international pressure against returning to the Philadelphi Corridor. “If you leave, you don’t return.”
He failed to explain why he had fed the barbaric Hamas an estimated $360 million a year, brought into the Strip by Qatar.
He made no mention of the fact that he had delayed the IDF’s entry into Rafah, at the foot of the Strip, for months while the army waited for political instruction, and only sent the IDF to capture the Philadelphi Corridor in May — seven months into the war. (Former war cabinet minister Benny Gantz, in a press conference of his own on Tuesday night, claimed Netanyahu had rejected a proposal early in the war “to quickly tackle the southern [Gaza] front.”)
If Israel’s entire future depends on controlling that border corridor, to the point where the IDF cannot be allowed to withdraw for even six weeks in the cause of saving dozens of Israeli hostages, how could it be that retaking Philadelphi was not among the most urgent, immediate priorities of the post-October 7 ground offensive? If its retention is essential, how is it that his own May 27 proposal did not specify this?
Blasting Gallant, indulging Ben Gvir
The prime minister’s presentation was not only riven with internal contradiction, it was also transparently cynical.
He spoke at some length about Gallant’s “stunning” refusal to accept collective cabinet responsibility, after the defense minister denounced and urged the reversal of the ministerial endorsement of Netanyahu’s “clarification” document. He didn’t actually name the defense minister at this stage of his address, though the target was unmistakable; Gallant was the only ministerial voice defying Netanyahu’s. He then read aloud from a Hamas document found by the IDF in the Gaza tunnels, a kind of message sheet in which, he quoted, Hamas commanders are ordered to “do everything to increase the psychological pressure on Gallant.”
Gallant, it will be recalled, was fired by Netanyahu for two weeks in March 2023 for daring to warn that the judicial overhaul was weakening the country and emboldening its enemies. Several Netanyahu-loyalist Likud MKs have been clamoring for the prime minister to fire Gallant again now, permanently this time.
While he denounced Gallant’s ostensible disloyalty to the government, Netanyahu has for months tolerated Ben Gvir’s overt endorsement of public Jewish prayer on the Temple Mount — the open, ultra-inflammatory defiance of the so-called status quo forbidding Jewish prayer there, one of the most significant of all Israeli policies, which was instituted after Israel captured the Old City in 1967 in order to avoid confrontation with the entire Muslim world.
Defense Minister Gallant, the only experienced ex-general in the security cabinet, is politically expendable, however. National Security Minister Ben Gvir, a dangerous thug who is brutalizing the Israel Police that Netanyahu so irresponsibly placed under his control, has the political power alongside Smotrich to bring down his coalition.
No strategy
Netanyahu’s repeatedly stated determination to continue the war, with his insistence on “total victory” — ever more hollow as more and more hostages die — and no strategic endgame, is incredibly problematic for Israel in innumerable fundamental respects.
The IDF is stretched to a near-breaking point. It is so short of man- and woman-power that it has resorted to sending out notices unilaterally calling back ex-reservists who, for one reason or another, have been excused from duty. That crisis is exacerbated by Netanyahu’s years-long refusal to require military or national service by the ultra-Orthodox, the fastest-growing community in Israel, whose political representatives are also crucial to Netanyahu’s governing majority.
By the end of this year, many combat reservists will have done over 200 days of frontline duty since October 7, 2023. Essentially, these patriotic warriors in their 20s, 30s and 40s have found themselves back in the standing army, largely absent from their families and from their jobs. The knock-on effect of their removal from the workforce is devastating — further harming an economy already battered by the war and mounting international financial wariness about investing in or even associating with Israel.
Yet after all this time, tens of thousands of Israelis are still displaced from their homes near the northern border. Hezbollah is intact and relentlessly attacking. Its rocket and missile capacities are barely dented. Its losses are merely in the hundreds. It contemplated firing precision missiles at sensitive targets in central Israel last month, to “avenge” Israel’s killing of Fuad Shukr, the Hezbollah commander under whose guidance a missile killed 12 Israeli children on a soccer field in July.
Meanwhile, West Bank terrorism is escalating steadily. Degraded in Gaza, Hamas is determinedly encouraging a strategic return to the suicide bombings in and from the West Bank of the Second Intifada.
Several major attacks were attempted in recent weeks — including a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv and major bombings targeting settlements — any of which, if “successful,” would have changed Israel’s reality in a second, deepening the security crisis, stretching the IDF further still, and exacerbating the vicious and debilitating internal debate about how this country should deal with its enemies. Ben Gvir’s incendiary behavior, and the rampages of settler extremists, only stir up more tension on the ground, presenting more challenges for the army.
The highest stakes
Gallant attempted to tell the security cabinet last week that Israel is at a “strategic crossroads.”
Follow one route, and a hostage-ceasefire deal just might enable the release of some or even many of the hostages and the beginning of post-October 7 national healing. It might yield calm in the north — though Hezbollah will have to be tackled sooner or later. And it could reopen the path to a regional and international alliance to defeat an Iranian regime that is at once immensely dangerous but also highly vulnerable.
Follow the other route, and the deal is missed, the hostages die, and the IDF remains entrenched in Gaza for the foreseeable future, bleeding troop losses, as Israel gradually becomes the military and civil administration in the Strip. The north remains uninhabitable. Terrorism escalates. The economic crisis deepens. Internal bitterness and anger grow. More of those Israelis who can leave, do so.
And Iran’s regime, overseeing the multifront war, proceeds along its serene course to the nuclear arsenal with which it intends to deliver the final blow.
According to leaks from last Thursday’s security cabinet meeting, Gallant directly confronted Netanyahu at one point and asked him what he would prioritize if everything came down to a choice between saving the hostages and keeping the IDF deployed on the Philadelphi Corridor. “I stay on the Philadelphi,” the prime minister reportedly replied.
Monday’s press conference would appear to confirm Netanyahu’s thinking.
What’s at stake here, in fact, goes beyond even the fate of the hostages, and the terrible rending of Israeli society, all the way to the very future of this country.
It ought to be unthinkable that Netanyahu could possibly be placing Israel at existential risk simply to stay at the helm as he steers the ship onto the rocks.
But then you listen to what he said out loud to the nation this week — focused on a refusal to temporarily withdraw IDF forces from an important border strip, a new obsession manifestly out of whack with his years of previous policy and his stewardship of the first seven months of the war. And you hear the warnings and pleas of his defense minister, his security chiefs, and those who until recently sat in government alongside him — all of them discredited by October 7, but none more so than Netanyahu himself.
You watch, and you listen. And your fears for Israel, already heightened by the catastrophe of October 7 — the failure to prevent it, the monstrous day itself, and everything that has been happening since — grow still more acute.
