The principle of hopelessness by Johannes Simon, 8/7/2025

The principle of hopelessness

Israel’s warfare is aimed at preventing a Palestinian state

What Benjamin Netanyahu shares with his far-right coalition partners is the view that any political stability among the Palestinians poses a threat and must be combated. This is the common thread running through Israel’s warfare.

By Johannes Simon

[This article posted on 8/7/2025 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://jungle.world/artikel/2025/32/gaza-israel-konflikt-das-prinzip-hoffnungslosigkeit.]

A vast field of rubble. A view from Israel of the northern Gaza Strip in January of this year.

– There is much speculation about the motives behind Israel’s warfare. While those who hate Israel make little effort to differentiate and crudely see Jewish “supremacy” at work, others assume that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is fueling the chaos in order to avoid the legal consequences he could face if he loses office.

Tens of thousands have died as a result of Israeli bombing, entire cities are now piles of rubble, and hunger is raging in the Gaza Strip. International pressure is currently mounting on Israel to end the war immediately, while 20 Israeli hostages are believed to still be held alive in the Gaza Strip. Polls show that support for Israel in both the US and Western Europe is at its lowest level in four years. And Hamas is showing starving Israeli hostages in gruesome videos, as if to provoke the Israeli public and make negotiations to end the war impossible.

Israel’s shared responsibility for the hunger in Gaza undoubtedly represents a moral low point in the country’s history. But the war could also end in a strategic impasse for Israel.

When looking for reasons for this catastrophe, most people point to the fact that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is politically vulnerable to blackmail and has therefore always calibrated the war in such a way as to prevent his coalition government with the far-right parties from collapsing. These parties are demanding that the Gaza Strip be annexed and that large parts of the Arab population be “emigrated,” as it is euphemistically called.

Before the war, Netanyahu had by no means presented himself as a messianic settler extremist, but rather as a responsible security politician who shied away from military adventures.

That this is actually one of Israel’s war aims still seems hard to imagine, but in order not to lose the support of his ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu is leaving this scenario open. In this way, he apparently wants to manage not to lose either international support or that of his governing coalition. Therefore, every step Netanyahu has authorized so far has had to “serve a dual purpose,” Yair Rosenberg recently wrote in the US magazine The Atlantic: “It had to pursue a supposed strategic goal, but also potentially advance the plan of the extreme right.”

Since the resumption of fighting in March, Netanyahu has said several times that Israel will follow the “Trump plan,” i.e., expel the Arab population of the Gaza Strip. These statements were accompanied by a drastic reduction in food supplies – another long-standing demand of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich.

By this stage at the latest, even loyal supporters of Israel had begun to criticize the war in no uncertain terms. One example is the French rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, who wrote in early May that it pained her to see Israel, “a country I love,” being led into “political disaster and moral bankruptcy.”

### The Gaza war is destroying “lives, money, and the future.”

Even then, according to polls, a clear majority of Israelis were in favor of ending the war through negotiations with Hamas if all hostages were released. A number of Israeli security experts also expressed the view that it made no military sense to continue the war.

At the beginning of April, the former head of the Israeli domestic intelligence service Shin Bet, Ami Ayalon, demanded that “this war must end, not only because it has no political goal, but also because it is causing us to lose our security and our identity.” Former Mossad director Tamir Pardo put it even more bluntly in early June: The war in Gaza is “useless” and “accomplishes nothing.” From an Israeli perspective, it is “a waste,” destroying “lives, money, and the future.”

A common interpretation of Israel’s conduct of the war is that Netanyahu was never seriously interested in negotiations to free the hostages and end the war because doing so would cause him to lose the support of his far-right coalition partners. His coalition would then collapse, and if he lost his immunity as prime minister, he would face prison time for several corruption cases.

However, this interpretation is too narrowly focused on the personal interests of one individual. The crucial question is rather what constitutes the political basis for the alliance between Netanyahu, Ben-Gvir, and Smotrich.

### The stance of Netanyahu’s camp: political nihilism

Throughout his long political career, Netanyahu has by no means presented himself as a messianic settler extremist, but rather as “Mr. Security” – a responsible security politician who tended to shy away from the risks of military adventures. What connects him to his far-right coalition partners, however, is the conviction that it is imperative to prevent the Palestinians in the occupied territories from expanding their political autonomy and initiating a process that could eventually lead to a Palestinian state.

From this perspective, a politically strengthened Palestinian Authority (PA) would be a disaster, especially if it could assert its claim to be the legitimate government of all Palestinians, both in the West Bank and in Gaza. That is why, as Ami Ayalon put it in the interview quoted above, Netanyahu considered Hamas in Gaza to be an “asset,” a strategic asset, before October 7. “As long as Hamas controlled Gaza and the Palestinian Authority controlled the West Bank,” he said, “no one in the international community could demand negotiations” between Israel and the Palestinians.

After October 7, Netanyahu’s camp’s stance on this issue has become more extreme. It could be described as political nihilism: according to this view, a settlement of the conflict with the Palestinians is impossible, as they would always pose an existential threat. The only responsible policy, therefore, is to weaken the Palestinians politically and keep them in check with military force. All attempts to achieve greater stability or even peace through political compromise are not only futile and illusory, but even dangerous.

### The euphemism “Trump plan”

This idea was most clearly expressed in Netanyahu’s refusal to even discuss scenarios for a post-war order. This would inevitably have meant planning for Palestinian administration of the Gaza Strip, with the Palestinian Authority imposing itself as the point of contact.

The slogans about “fighting until final victory” and “completely destroying Hamas” could hardly conceal the fact that there was simply no political plan to end the war. It was only in this vacuum that all the evil fantasies represented by the euphemism “Trump plan” could become socially acceptable. The idea that the conflict with the Palestinians must be resolved through expulsion had been marginalized on the extreme right in Israel for decades. This has now apparently changed, partly because of US President Donald Trump.

Ending the war to free the hostages means accepting the continued existence of Hamas in Gaza – this should not be overlooked. But as Israeli army spokesman Daniel Hagari said in mid-2024, anyone who claims “it is possible to destroy Hamas, to make it disappear, is throwing sand in the eyes of the public.” Hamas can be destroyed as a military organization and eliminated as a threat, but it lives on in the minds of its supporters.

### PA as a “semi-failed state” in the West Bank

There are also practical objections to the PA taking power in Gaza, foremost among them that it would not be able to keep Hamas in check. The PA is corrupt, enjoys little support among the population, and has therefore not held elections for almost 20 years.

But as Israeli security expert Seth Frantzman said a few months ago in an interview on the podcast “Call Me Back”: “No hostages are being held in Ramallah.” Since the PA has existed as a “semi-failed state” in the West Bank, there have been no threats or attacks there that even come close to those of Hamas and October 7. “If you want to get rid of Hamas, you have to replace it with something else,” says Frantzman, because if there is a power vacuum in Gaza, Hamas will fill it. “If you say we don’t want either the PA or Hamas there, you will get Hamas with mathematical certainty.”

However, the Israeli government is not even talking about establishing a state order in the Gaza Strip at some point. But if that doesn’t happen, the result can hardly be anything other than a perpetual state of war in which guerrilla groups like Hamas can constantly reform.

“If you want to get rid of Hamas, you have to put something else in its place.” Seth Frantzman, Israeli security expert

In the West Bank, too, the Israeli government does not seem interested in stability. The PA is humiliated and weakened by the now daily violence of settler extremists, which the state at least accepts. A driving force in this matter is Ben-Gvir, who last Sunday allowed himself to be filmed praying on the Temple Mount in front of the al-Aqsa Mosque – a taboo breach and a deliberate provocation. On that occasion, he once again declared that Israel must completely annex the Gaza Strip.

The purpose of such actions is obviously not to ensure Israel’s security. The same could be said of the non-binding resolution passed by the Israeli parliament at the end of July by 71 votes to 13. According to the resolution, the West Bank is an “indivisible part of the Land of Israel” and “the historical, cultural, and spiritual homeland of the Jewish people” – and “Israel has the natural, historical, and legal right to all parts of the Land of Israel.”