Israel almost certainly can reduce, possibly end, Hamas’ ability to wage war. But Israel must also reclaim its legitimacy, and doing so depends more on expressing soft power than on flexing its undoubted kinetic muscles. That is, all wars are ultimately for hearts and minds. Ukraine has been successful in opposing Putin’s juggernaut as much by showing immense courage and establishing the legitimacy of its existential struggle as by slogging away on the fields of combat.
Israel is engaged in an existential contest; the barbarians of Hamas seek to remove Israel and Israelis from the whole of the Levant. But Israel could win on the ground and in the tunnels and totally lose the overriding legitimacy race. That is why Israel’s government must upstage its critics and approach the war’s aftermath with major declarations now.
Israel could shortly claim military victory over Hamas but simultaneously lose any chances to consolidate its fundamental legitimacy. Israel is defending the fundamental integrity of Israel as a holy land for Jews and as their post-holocaust refuge. Yet, the wholesale killing of Gaza Strip civilians – at least two-thirds of all of fatalities to date – and the resulting wretched humanitarian conditions within the Strip cannot be justified as mere collateral damage (“they were in the way”). Israel’s existence as a just, humane, embodiment of the ideals of Zionism (and the founding ideals of the young state’s first exponents) need not be discarded, no matter today’s pressing and critical military challenges.
No one – certainly no one in the West and few even in Arab lands – denies the heinous nature of Hamas’ dastardly attacks on Oct. 7. Most everyone can appreciate the need for a forceful, even extirpating, response. But that response would carry more weight if it were accompanied by the Israeli government’s promise to improve the lives of Palestinians in the West Bank, and even in Gaza, after the war ends. How are 2 million Gazans, caught as they have been for two decades between Hamas and Israel, going to exist after the shooting stops? Ideally, they might find and even want homes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, or Jordan; but those countries do not want new refugee hordes. Israel needs to profess how it will make the lives of Gazans better after Hamas is removed; and how the displaced and homeless will find jobs and food. Winning hearts and minds outside as well as inside Gaza starts now, not only after combat ceases.
Of equal, if not greater importance, Israel must proclaim a new deal for the entire West Bank. Unless Israel promises the end of illegal Jewish settlements throughout what could be and was once thought to be Palestinian two-state territory between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, the military victory in Gaza will accomplish far less in restoring Israel’s legitimacy than it should.
Students and other protesters at American universities point to decades of Israel hindering Palestine from functioning as a second state, alongside Israel. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s current minister of finance and a right-wing extremist, is even now withholding from the Palestine Authority essential import tax payments.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, according to the press, has for years played a shameless game of keeping the Palestinian Authority weak and letting Hamas strengthen itself on the back of Qatari gifts of startlingly generous cash payments in order – cynically – to bolster his own political prospects and so that he could declare that all the Palestinian administrations were weak. “I have no partner,” Netanyahu frequently declares.
“The Palestinian Authority is a burden,” Smotrich said in 2015. “Hamas is an asset.” Shlomo Brom, a retired general and former deputy to Israel’s national security adviser, indicated that an empowered Hamas helped Netanyahu avoid negotiating over a Palestinian state.
Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7 upended Netanyahu’s self-referential game. As Avigdor Lieberman, a former Israeli defense minister, reflected recently: “For Netanyahu, there is only one thing that is really important: to be in power at any cost,” he said. “To stay in power, he preferred to pay for tranquility.”
Netanyahu wants to hold off making changes within his government until Hamas is defeated. But the struggle to establish Israel’s legitimacy can only be won at home, with the dismissal of his far right accomplices and a public transition to associates with greater credibility than those who joined his coalition of nihilists in 2022 -- a coalition that ignored intelligence warnings of a Hamas attack and complaints from Washington and other capitals about injustice to Palestinians.
Any military triumph over Hamas will prove hollow unless Israel can win the global information war, a contest that perhaps is already lost. Netanyahu wants above all else to save himself and to continue leading Israel. Likely, he cannot, but he might be able to win some time and some favor for himself if he cut ties with his far-right supporters and joined forces with the trio of generals who now constitute the majority in his war cabinet.
What else? If Netanyahu could begin to think transformationally rather than transactionally he would appreciate that Washington and other concerned foreign administrations could lean on Qatar and therefore on Hamas to exchange all of the hostages immediately for a pause in hostilities. A second step toward a complete cease-fire could follow the transfer of Hamas’ top leadership (perhaps 25 persons) to Qatar, where Hamas’ top political leaders already reside. Such a consequential trade is perhaps fanciful, but such a leadership transfer could save many thousand civilian lives, possibly the lives of some Israeli soldiers, and validate Israel’s aims in the Gaza war. It would also begin to transport Israel to a higher ground of public opinion.
Israel needs to neuter Hamas’ military prowess. Relocating its leaders far away from the Strip will help. It could then more easily keep a close eye on any remaining middle- or lower-level Hamas operatives.
The bottom line is that Netanyahu and his generals need to take charge. They need to cut their official ties with political extremists and begin to emphasize Israel’s overriding legitimacy claims as much as the shorter-term conquests of its bombers and tanks.