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As if the Israeli people’s losses from October 7th are not grievous enough, their fears for the hostages not haunting enough, and the miseries of the Gazans not shaming enough, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is bringing his country back to war. He’s also exacerbating its divisions, pitting orthodoxy and coercion against the rule of secular law. “Netanyahu’s true objective appears increasingly clear,” Haaretz’s senior defense analyst Amos Harel wrote, “a gradual slide toward an authoritarian-style regime, whose survival he will try to secure through perpetual war on multiple fronts.”
On March 18th, with the Trump Administration’s approval, Israeli aircraft renewed the bombing of Gaza. Raids killed at least five senior Hamas officials. They also killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, some four hundred people, more than two-thirds of whom were women and children. Since then, both Hamas and the Houthis in Yemen have resumed firing rockets and missiles at Israel, setting off air-raid sirens in the center of the country; and Israeli ground forces have pushed into the Netzarim Corridor, once again cutting Gaza in half. Rockets were also fired from Lebanon at the northern Israeli town of Metula. It’s hard now to see what will stop the escalation.
Netanyahu’s office said that the strikes were necessary because Hamas had rejected proposals—advanced by the Trump Administration’s envoy, Steve Witkoff—to extend the ceasefire agreement, which had been in place since January 19th, by negotiating the release of more hostages. “Israel will, from now on, act against Hamas with increasing military strength,” the Prime Minister’s office said in a statement. From now on. The Hostages and Missing Families Forum, a group representing almost all the families of the remaining hostages, was having none of it. It called for mass demonstrations and issued a statement accusing Netanyahu of “abandoning” their loved ones while engaging in “complete deception.”
On Saturday night, more than a hundred thousand people joined those demonstrations in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Two major opposition leaders, the Democrats’ Yair Golan and Yair Lapid, of the centrist party Yesh Atid, each called for civil disobedience: a mass refusal to pay taxes and a general strike. On Channel 12, a third, center-right party leader, National Unity’s usually circumspect Gadi Eisenkot, endorsed their stand. The three pledged to form a single democratic bloc to bring down the government. “We are stopping the economy, the ports, transportation, the schools, academia, businesses and the streets,” Golan, who was shoved to the ground by police at a recent demonstration, said. “We are stopping the country—to save it.”
The ceasefire agreement consisted of two phases, the first of which ended at the beginning of March. Hamas (and Islamic Jihad) released thirty-three hostages (and the bodies of eight more) in return for nearly two thousand Palestinian prisoners. The second phase, which should have been under negotiation by now, was meant to arrange for the return of the remaining living hostages, believed to be twenty-four people, in exchange for an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza—and a change of government there. Notionally, Hamas would be replaced by a new regionally supported Palestinian administration. Once it was in place, the Saudis were expected to join in the underwriting of Gazan reconstruction and in normalizing relations with Israel.
But, from the start of the war, Netanyahu has obstructed any effort to set up a new Palestinian governing structure, because that would inevitably engage the Palestinian Authority, and would thus be a step toward eventual Palestinian independence. Harel told me that Netanyahu’s government is now not only authoritarian in style but also “brazenly theocratic,” aiming for, among other things, incorporating into Israel “Judea and Samaria”—the occupied West Bank. An alternative administration for Gaza is not, though, entirely hypothetical. Earlier this month, Western-aligned Arab states assembled in Cairo, where they detailed plans for a government of Palestinian “technocrats”—adjacent to and legitimatized, but not chosen, by the P.A., which controls parts of the West Bank, under the auspices of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Egypt and Jordan pledged to offer security support. Some fifty-three billion dollars, presumably in large part from the Gulf states, would be funnelled into reconstruction. Hamas would consent to an interim administration, though it was left unclear what would be done about its armed units.
“All Palestinian parties see the P.L.O. as the unifying umbrella for the struggle against occupation,” Samir Hulileh, the former C.E.O. of the huge Palestinian conglomerate PADICO (and a potential candidate “technocrat” for a new government), told me. “Hamas could be integrated into the P.L.O., once it agrees on its charter and past agreements with Israel.” It would then be “a political party, not a militia, and even compete in future elections.” Its guns would be handed over to a Palestinian police force to be established in Gaza and commanded by the P.A., which, in turn, could recruit police officers from Hamas and, crucially, pay their salaries. The business community in the West Bank as a whole is mobilized, in despair over mounting violence by settlers and the Israeli military in that territory, in addition to the violence in Gaza. (PADICO has invested more than three hundred and fifty million dollars in real estate in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The company’s chairman, Bashar Masri, independently built Rawabi, a one-and-a-half-billion-dollar planned city, near Ramallah, designed to accommodate forty thousand residents.) And for Egypt there is urgency in advancing the regional alliance that rebuilding Gaza requires. Houthi attacks have caused the diversion of most shipping from the Red Sea to a route around South Africa. This has, among other losses, reduced Egyptian revenue from the Suez Canal by about eight hundred million dollars a month.
Witkoff, however, was offering not a Phase Two but a sort of Phase One-lite: half the remaining hostages in exchange for a fifty-day truce. At that point—the hostages’ families might reasonably fear—Netanyahu could proceed to reoccupy Gaza, potentially “abandoning” the remaining hostages. (His populist and messianic coalition partners are already enthusing over Trump’s fantastical plan for U.S. custodianship of—and the Gazans’ removal from—the Strip.) In other words, Phase Two has evaporated. Netanyahu claims that Hamas has rejected all compromise—a point that Witkoff, curiously, seemed to cast doubt on in an interview with Tucker Carlson on March 21st. Meanwhile, with so many enraged youth in Gaza, Hamas and Islamic Jihad have reportedly recruited new fighters—not enough to threaten Israel but more than enough to intimidate Gazans. By Netanyahu’s logic, the bombing must continue until Hamas simply capitulates but, illogically, releases the hostages first.
Netanyahu’s justification for renewed war is a deception, also, because it is his culminating move in a political struggle that will determine whether Israel remains an open society; and the rival camps in this contest map closely onto those who fought over his government’s so-called judicial reform, in 2023. That gambit aimed to curtail the Supreme Court’s ability to set constitutional limits on the Netanyahu government’s actions. And, in both cases, the Netanyahu coalition’s transparent concern is an old one: to advance annexation and sustain theocracy—and to preëmpt, respectively, Palestinian independence and Israeli liberalism.“Establishing a religious autocracy on the ruins of Israel’s already battered democracy has always been and remains the government’s primary mission,” the Haaretz editor Aluf Benn wrote, earlier this month. The government is now “approaching this task anew,” but, this time, it is “facing less protest and a weaker opposition.”
On the surface, Benn’s assessment may be too gloomy. According to a recent survey from the Israel Democracy Institute, some seventy per cent of Israelis believe that Netanyahu should take responsibility for October 7th and resign. Some seventy per cent also want a comprehensive deal to end the war and bring the hostages home. And polls consistently show Netanyahu falling short of another majority in the Knesset. But seventy per cent also oppose a Palestinian state. And one poll found that eighty per cent like the sound of Trump’s proposal to have Jordan, say, take in the residents of Gaza to help “clean out” the Strip, although any such move would severely undermine Jordan’s Hashemite regime.
Netanyahu, in short, is not as popular as his antipathies. So he is playing for time and letting them fester. The Guardian reports that the Prime Minister has threatened to “finish the job” of preventing an Iranian bomb—and is hoping to gain the Trump Administration’s support for an attack. He need not face the voters until the end of 2026, now that his far-right coalition partners passed a budget earlier this week—despite his government’s fiscal predations. The economy, the Hebrew University economist Joseph Zeira says, is in severe recession—a twenty-per-cent decline in over-all investment, whose impact on unemployment is temporarily offset by a high number of reservists who have been called up for service. More than eighty thousand Israelis left the country in 2024. Yet the government is proposing to cut the salaries of teachers and civil servants, while steering more than one and a quarter billion dollars to ultra-Orthodox parties and schools and West Bank settlements.
Netanyahu may remain electorally vulnerable, then, but the electorate will be vulnerable to the appeal of hard-liners. (The former leader of the Jewish Home party, Naftali Bennett, is waiting in the wings.) Besides, Netanyahu is making collateral moves that, Yair Golan fears, portend “unfair elections.” Netanyahu has renewed efforts to hand the Knesset the power to supersede Supreme Court rulings; on Thursday, he pushed through a law giving the government control over appointments to the Court. He has moved to shift power over the elections commission from the courts to the Knesset, in order to facilitate the suppression of Arab-Israeli political parties. And he has threatened the closure of the independent public broadcaster, Kan. Much like Donald Trump, Netanyahu is flooding the zone, maneuvering the public into a diplomatic trap that engenders a sense of unravelling and, over time, makes effective political dissent difficult.
“Shortly after the war started, when Netanyahu looked finished, over forty per cent of Israelis showed clinical level symptoms of depression and anxiety,” the psychologist Yoav Groweiss told me. (He is part of a team at the Ruppin Academic Center which has been conducting a nationwide study of public health since October 7th.) “Those numbers slowly declined, but, simultaneously, people began reporting much higher levels of concern about existential threats regarding national security and economic stability. Try finding a couples therapist or child psychologist with an open slot today.” Netanyahu “makes these many-sided threats seem endemic to the region,” Groweiss said, “endemic to Jewish history and liturgy—not the consequence of his use of power but, if anything, the justification of his power.”
Indeed, Hamas has been largely defeated by the I.D.F., is increasingly discredited among ordinary Gazans (in recent days, anti-Hamas demonstrations have broken out in multiple locations), and is all but isolated owing to the military collapse of Hezbollah and the Assad regime in Syria. Yet Israelis so object to the prospect of Hamas exercising residual control in Gaza that Netanyahu’s messaging plays. Golan, for his part, was the I.D.F.’s deputy chief of staff from 2014 to 2017. On the morning of October 7th, he drove toward the site of the Nova Music Festival, to rescue people who had fled the Hamas attack there. He does not want Hamas in any position of control, either, but the question he asks is whether apprehension justifies resuming the war.
“I say, the hostages first,” he told me earlier this week, and if Hamas ever again represents a threat, “we can fight again.” But why fight before trying diplomacy? Netanyahu has “made no attempt to turn military successes into a replacement for Hamas, or any larger diplomatic move,” Golan said. “This is shameful.” Israel, he said, starting in enclaves near Rafah and Gaza City, could “introduce security forces from the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Jordanians. Expand the U.S.-backed multinational force monitoring the Sinai north into Gaza. New P.A. battalions can be trained.” Meanwhile, investment would begin. “The new forces would secure civilian contractors. Young people could then vote with their feet. What do you want to do? Go to war? Or go to work, for ten times the salary?”
Netanyahu, instead of making “diplomatic moves,” is bent on installing loyalists in the military and the security services. Both the I.D.F. and the security service, Shin Bet, released internal performance reviews, revealing operational inertia and the botched use of available intelligence. Both had apparently assumed, prior to October 7th, that Hamas could be deterred by periodic eruptions of overwhelming violence, or else be bought off by cash from Qatar. The heads of the groups—the I.D.F chief of staff, Herzl Halevi, and the Shin Bet commander, Ronen Bar—announced that they accepted responsibility for institutional failures and that they intended to resign.
Yet the real problem, they say, was strategic complacency that flowed from the top. Since 2009, Netanyahu had pushed the idea that Hamas’s rule in Gaza was a kind of strategic asset—it debased the P.A. and kept the Palestinians divided. Halevi and Bar have called for a state commission of inquiry, which would almost certainly implicate Netanyahu and demand that he accept his responsibility.
Instead, Netanyahu complained of a “deep state,” and replaced Halevi with Eyal Zamir, a gruff former armored-division commander—and former military secretary to Netanyahu—who has acted to undermine any potential state commission and is managing the renewed attack on Hamas and the settler-friendly occupation force in the West Bank. (On Monday, the co-director of the Oscar-winning documentary “No Other Land,” Hamdan Ballal, was beaten by a settler—while soldiers stood back—during an attack on the village of Susiya, where Ballal lives; he was detained and then turned over to the police, who arrested him.)
As for Bar, who had become a key hostage negotiator, he was fired on March 20th, before his intended resignation date. The Shin Bet had begun investigating highly placed members of Netanyahu’s staff regarding a recent leak of purloined Hamas negotiating documents, a supposed effort to enhance Netanyahu’s image, and for taking payments for public-relations work from Qatar—including in 2022, while it was funding Hamas. Netanyahu, ignoring the clear conflict of interest, simply claimed that Bar had been too “soft” in negotiations with Hamas. Gali Baharav-Miara, the attorney general, stepped in, and insisted on examining “the factual and legal basis” underlying the dismissal. The Supreme Court concurred with the attorney general; now Netanyahu’s government is proceeding to fire Baharav-Miara, too. Overnight, demonstrations against the war and for the hostages morphed into a renewed civil action to enshrine due process and democratic norms. Israel’s President, Isaac Herzog, fears a breakdown. “What level of madness can we reach as a nation?” he said.
In this context, Netanyahu’s tightening control over the parts of the military seems ominous. “When the state was created, Ben-Gurion had to force ideologically strident militias into a single professional, secular army,” the military historian Yoram Peri told me. Bibi, he said, seems to be re-creating a split. About forty per cent of the graduates of the Army’s infantry officer schools, Peri notes, come from the dati leumi, or nationalist Orthodox minority, many of them extremist yeshiva students and supporters of settlements. “Zamir,” the new I.D.F. chief, “is their kind of commander,” Peri said. “A professionalized, secular army is not their goal. Neither is a secular democratic society.” ♦
