‘Clearly an excuse’: Does Netanyahu really want Hamas gone?
Israel’s war on Gaza rumbles on, even as international condemnation grows.
Hamas has expressed that it is ready for a deal to end the war, even offering to turn over the administration of Gaza to a technocratic government. United Nations Security Council members have overwhelmingly voted in favour of a ceasefire, a resolution blocked from passing only by a United States veto.
But Israel, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is adamant in its refusal of any agreement that does not include what it calls the “defeat of Hamas”, even if that means endangering the Israeli captives still held in Gaza.
“Hamas is already the weakest it’s ever been, and there’s nothing they can do that is remotely comparable to what Israel possesses,” writer and researcher on Israel-Palestine and founder of The Fire These Times podcast Elia Ayoub told Al Jazeera.
“There’s ample evidence by now that the only reason this genocide is ongoing is because Netanyahu wants it to continue. It’s clearly just an excuse to keep the war going.”
Next to that, Israel scrapped the passage in Witkoff's 'ceasefire' proposal of Hamas stepping down. Netanyahu wants Hamas to stay there so he can keep killing Palestinians.
Israel’s strategic failure is now apparent
Since the mid-1960s, Israel has received significant military and diplomatic support from successive administrations in the United States.
But never has it enjoyed such unconditional support as it has in the past eight years – under the first and second administrations of President Donald Trump and the administration of President Joe Biden.
As a result, Israel has started openly pursuing its greatest Zionist dream: expanding state borders to achieve Greater Israel and accelerating the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people from their homeland.
Although the Israeli state may appear more powerful than ever and overly confident that it will achieve regional dominance, its current position paradoxically reflects a strategic failure.
An Israeli settlers attack leaves behind burned farms in al-Mughayyir near Ramallah in the Israeli-occupied West Bank
The reality is that after nearly eight decades of existence, Israel has failed to achieve legitimacy in the eyes of the region’s peoples and lasting security for itself. Its present resurgence will secure neither. And that is because its foreign, domestic and military policies are based on a settler-colonial logic which makes them untenable in the long run.
Settler-colonial mentality
Since its founding in 1948, Israel has sought to convince the world and its Jewish citizens that it was created “on a land without a people”. While this narrative has successfully caught on – particularly among the younger generations of Israelis – the forefathers of the Israeli state openly spoke about “colonisation” and settling a land with a hostile native population.
Theodor Herzl, considered the father of modern Zionism, planned to reach out to well-known British colonialist Cecil Rhodes, who led the British colonisation of Southern Africa, for advice on and approval of his plan to colonise Palestine.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, a revisionist Zionist who founded the far-right Zionist group Betar in Latvia, strategised in his writings on ways to address native resistance. In his 1923 essay The Iron Wall, he wrote:
“Every native population in the world resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonised. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing.”
This settler-colonial mentality played a central role in shaping the domestic, foreign and military policies of the newly founded Israel. Today, almost 80 years after the creation of the Israeli state, expansionism and aggressive military posturing continue to define the Israeli regional strategy.
Despite official rhetoric about seeking peace and normalisation of relations in the region, the Israeli aspiration to achieve a Greater Israel – one that includes not only occupied Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, but also parts of modern-day Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan – persists.
Continued here: https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/6/7/israels-strategic-failure-is-now-apparent
