Living by the sword

'T
his will go down in history,' said Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, in his wartime press conference on 16 June. 'What we're saying today, I must say – as a son of a historian,' he continued, 'will go down not only in the annals of our nation, but also in the history of humanity.'
Netanyahu's mention of his historian father was not a meaningless aside, but the reflection of the deep influence that his father's ideology, conceptions of Jewishness and world history, and ideas about power and powerlessness, continue to exert over his decision-making. Indeed, Israel's current war against Iran owes it shape, at least in part, to Netanyahu the elder's world-view, to which the son has always seen himself as faithful.
Netanyahu is not a religious man. He does not observe the Sabbath or follow a strict kosher diet. Perhaps he does not believe in God. But he does believe in history – that the history of Jews has its own course and logic (perpetual, existential danger), and that Jews are meant to serve as an example to the Judaeo-Christian West (as a healthy nation willing to fight and die for its sovereignty). He did not merely come to these ideas on his own. He inherited them.
Benzion Netanyahu, who died in 2012 aged 102, was a scholar of the Spanish Inquisition and, no less significant, an uncompromising right-wing ideologue. As a young man he served as secretary to Vladimir (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky, the charismatic leader of the militant but secular Revisionist Zionists, whose adherents hoped to claim both sides of the Jordan River for a Jewish state. Some within the Revisionist ranks drew inspiration from the authoritarian Sanacja movement of Piłsudski's interwar Poland and the Blackshirts of Mussolini's fascist Italy.
In his best-known historical work, The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain, Benzion Netanyahu controversially claimed that the Inquisition was not only, or even primarily, aimed at rooting out vestigial Jewish observance among the Marranos (Jews whose ancestors had been forced to convert to Christianity), but constituted the invention of the racial anti-Semitism that would reach its exterminationist terminus under Nazism. Born under tsarist rule in today's Poland, Benzion possessed a dark and pessimistic view of the world and the place of the Jews within it. 'Jewish history,' he once told the New Yorker editor David Remnick, 'is in large measure a history of holocausts.'
Benjamin Netanyahu, the family's middle child, has made this catastrophic world-view his own. He has also largely adhered to his father's ideological legacy. In the early 1990s, he rose to national political prominence as the fresh face of the right-wing Likud Party and opponent of the Oslo Accords and the dovish Yitzhak Rabin's Labor-led government. For nearly his entire political career, Netanyahu has aimed to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. Indeed, it has been one of the central animating goals of his life.
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But while Netanyahu is a territorial-maximalist, he is not a messianist. The radical, religious West Bank settlers, with whom Netanyahu has found common cause, believe that the Palestinian dilemma can be solved (or eliminated) through an apocalyptic conflagration that would lead to the expulsion of the Palestinians from all the territory under Israel's control and end, they hope, with the dawning of the Messianic Age. Lately, Netanyahu has embraced some of the religious right's rhetoric: the idea of 'transferring' Palestinians out of Gaza; referring to Hamas as 'Amalek', after the biblical Israelites' enemy, whom they are told by God to wipe out. But this reflects domestic realpolitik more than genuine conviction.
Instead, Netanyahu has tended towards a kind of brutal realism. Rather than the settlers' preference for a 'decisive' eschatological rupture, his preferred approach is an indefinite and, if necessary, eternal war of attrition. 'I am asked if we will live forever by the sword,' Netanyahu once said in 2015. His answer is 'yes'. He does not consider the Palestinians a real people deserving of national self-determination. He remains convinced that, after enough oppression, devastation, punishment and humiliation, they will surrender their dreams of freedom, and if not, that they can be subjugated in perpetuity. It is this logic that, in part, accounts for the way Israel's criminal destruction of Gaza has been executed – and why Netanyahu has refused any postwar arrangement that would allow for independent Palestinian self-governance.
In his 1993 book, A Place Among the Nations, Benjamin Netanyahu sketched out his theory of machtpolitik, which has guided his successive administrations for more than 15 years. And while in the realm of domestic politics Netanyahu is known for his flagrant mendacity, when it comes to geopolitics, he has been rather more consistent. According to his strategic vision, military might is the only guarantee of security. 'The only peace that will endure in the region,' he writes, 'is the peace of deterrence.' There is, in other words, no such thing as real peace; there is only preparation for the next round of fighting. Or as he put it, 'ending the state of war is a must, but that will not end the possibility of a future war'.
For Netanyahu, Israel's only way to guarantee its survival is to maintain overwhelming military supremacy such that it can threaten any potential rival with outright defeat. Weakness, it follows, is an existential threat. 'If you lack the power to protect yourself,' Netanyahu writes, 'it is unlikely that in the absence of a compelling interest anyone else will be willing to do it for you.'
It is here that echoes of his father's world-view can also be heard: the experience of the Jewish people in the 20th century – specifically, the destruction of European Jewry during the Holocaust – is taken as proof that defencelessness is a death sentence while sympathy is much less an insurance policy than the force of arms. The world stood by idly when the Nazis sent Europe's Jews to the gas chambers; there is no reason to expect that, were the Jewish state to find its survival jeopardised, the world would act differently this time.
Such a view is widely shared in Israel and has been almost since its establishment. It was a pillar of Israeli defence strategy many years before Netanyahu came to power. It is the reason why Israel sought nuclear weapons of its own, and why it has acted unilaterally on many occasions to destroy the military capabilities of other states it sees as threats to its survival. In 1981, for instance, Israeli fighter jets destroyed the Osirak nuclear reactor located deep in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. The success of the operation gave rise to 'the Begin Doctrine' – after the prime minister Menachem Begin, Jabotinsky's successor as leader of the Revisionist movement, who authorised the strike (and who came to power in 1977 in Israel's first transition of power from left to right). Begin vowed that in the future Israel would carry out pre-emptive attacks to stop any enemy state from gaining nuclear capabilities. In 2007, under Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Israeli warplanes bombed a suspected nuclear reactor in Bashar al-Assad's Syria.
Israeli leaders have warned for years that Iran was next on the list. In 2012, Netanyahu appeared before the United Nations General Assembly and brandished a cartoon to illustrate his claim that Iran's enrichment levels were approaching those necessary for a nuclear weapon. Over the subsequent decade, Netanyahu warned many times that a nuclear-armed Iran would constitute an unacceptable threat to Israel, and that he would take action to eliminate it. Iran, for its part, has long claimed that it does not seek to possess nuclear weapons, notwithstanding its leadership's repeated, lurid promises to destroy the Jewish state. That an Israeli strike did not occur in years past owed much to dissent within Israel's military establishment, about whether Israel itself possessed the capabilities to take down Iran's nuclear programme on its own and whether it could withstand a potential Iranian counter-attack.
Netanyahu has gambled his legacy on Israel's current war against Iran. He has said more than once that he hopes to be remembered as the 'protector of Israel'. And while the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023 cast doubt on his claim to be Mr Security, it is clearly his hope that by destroying Iran's nuclear programme and, as he has not so subtly hinted, toppling the Islamic Republic's regime, he will restore his flagging domestic reputation and rewrite his place in history, masking with a stunning military operation the deadly, colossal intelligence and operational failure that preceded it almost two years earlier.
Still, for Netanyahu, and indeed for many Israelis, what is at stake is much more than that – nothing less than the shape of the post-Cold War order. It has long been both Netanyahu's conviction and policy goal that Israel's integration and normalisation into the Middle East can be achieved without granting the Palestinians a state. Successive Netanyahu administrations have pursued the de-Arabisation and isolation of the Palestinian national cause, perhaps most spectacularly in the form of the Abraham Accords, brokered by the US in 2020, which Netanyahu believes even Saudi Arabia could one day join.
Iran, through support for its proxies – in particular, Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah – has constituted the most significant obstacle to this vision of removing the Palestinian issue from the global agenda, as well as the last standing substantial military rival to Israel's armed forces in the region. By taking down the Islamic Republic, or at least its nuclear programme, Netanyahu hopes not only to eliminate a threat he perceives as existential, but also to realise his long-held geopolitical fantasy.
Yet the ongoing attempt to do so could just as well result in catastrophe – for the region and perhaps the world. At the time of writing, it is too early to know where the balance of power will lie after the last bomb is dropped and the final missile fired. The paradox of Netanyahu's perpetual struggle for Israel's security is that, in practice, it has meant that Israelis live under near-constant threat. For Palestinians it has meant decades of military occupation and, since 7 October, utter devastation, war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Gaza. Indeed, Benjamin Netanyahu's dream of a new Middle East – devoid of any military rival, absent any prospect of Palestinian self-determination – has only brought more death.
[See also: Ideas for Keir]
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