There is no other way to characterize it. Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar is deeply in love with Israel’s prime minister, a love story written in blood.
For nearly a year prior to the war’s outbreak, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu embroiled the country in a totally unnecessary judicial reform, focusing our national attention inward, instead of on the growing external threats to our security.
Rather than preparing for potential conflicts with Hamas, Hezbollah, and an Iran now on the nuclear threshold, the IDF and the intelligence community were overwhelmingly preoccupied with the struggle to simply keep themselves from being torn apart by the reform process. Israel’s defense leaders repeatedly warned Bibi that the political-judicial crisis was tearing apart the country’s social contract and undermining its national security. It provided the setting for the catastrophic intelligence and operational failures of October 7 that took even Sinwar by surprise. All love stories have their moment of infatuation.
Bibi then played directly into Sinwar’s supple hands, making every mistake a lover can. Rather than planning and implementing a carefully thought-out strategy with achievable objectives, he launched a headlong frontal attack against Hamas, promising more than could be delivered. The war’s objectives were defined as Hamas’s destruction, its ousting as the governing body in Gaza, and the freeing the hostages.
Had electoral considerations not been uppermost in Bibi’s mind, he would have defined the objectives more cautiously – the destruction of Hamas as a coherent military force and its weakening as a governing body paving the way for the emergence of a successor government. Had he done so, Israel could have declared victory as early as December, by which time these objectives had been achieved. We could have used the time ever since to focus on the hostages’ release.
Not that Israel’s full-on attack was not fully justified. It was. But it was also clear to anyone familiar with asymmetric warfare in densely populated areas that a large-scale campaign, lacking clearly defined objectives, would eventually stall and that Israel would be caught in an ongoing quagmire. In fact, this is precisely what happened, what Sinwar predicted and dreamed Bibi would do.
Israel, the victim, is seen as the villain
One thousand two hundred Israelis were slaughtered in an unpremeditated attack on the single worst day in Jewish history since the Holocaust, and it is Israel that has become the global villain, excoriated and blamed for overkill in Gaza, accused of genocide and the focus of international legal action. Incredibly, warrants may soon be issued for the arrest of Israel’s premier and defense minister, the first ever to be issued against leaders of a democratic state. Sinwar’s infatuation had started to become an obsession.
His ardor was further aroused by Bibi’s refusal to heed President Joe Biden’s recurring exhortation, from the war’s outset, to do everything possible to minimize humanitarian suffering and civilian casualties, thereby enabling the United States to continue providing Israel with maximum support. Instead of taking ownership of the humanitarian issue and announcing from the outset that Israel would take responsibility for the provision of all humanitarian needs, Bibi failed to heed the American advice. Israel is blamed today, falsely, as in so many other areas, for using privation and even starvation as tools of war.
SINWAR’S CONCUPISCENCE has been further inflamed by Bibi’s ongoing refusal, even now, nine months later, to define an endgame. Even Biden, the most pro-Israel president in history, has torn his hair out in frustration. The failure to define an endgame has left Israel without a realistic strategy for who will take over as the governing body in Gaza when the IDF ultimately withdraws.
Its ongoing refusal to countenance the eventual reinstatement of a “revitalized” Palestinian Authority (PA), or to provide any other realistic alternative, has ensured one of two outcomes: Either a temporarily weakened Hamas will remain in power, or Israel will end up with responsibility for over two million desperately impoverished Gazans, in addition to the self-eviscerating occupation of three million of their brethren in the West Bank. Sinwar himself could think of no better way to ensure that Israel erodes its international standing, military prowess, and societal resilience.
Remarkably, one of the outcomes of the war has been a growing rift between Israel and its all-important superpower patron, the US. In point of fact, serious difficulties in the relationship were brewing long before the war broke out, and it merely served to briefly postpone, but intensify, the moment of reckoning.
The war’s early months saw Biden put aside all other considerations and provide Israel with extraordinary strategic, military, and diplomatic support; Israel could not have asked for more.
As the fighting continued, however, with no end in sight, and the casualties mounted, American public opinion predictably began turning, primarily on the Democratic Left, whose active support is critical to Biden’s reelection. Decades of pent-up frustration and fury, primarily over Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians, but also its ongoing commitment to basic American values, and other issues, finally erupted. At the very best, the US-Israeli relationship has taken a significant hit, possibly considerably worse. To further deepen Sinwar’s now boundless love, Netanyahu decided to try to save his cratering electoral prospects at home, by once again addressing Congress and stoking partisan tensions.
Moreover, the war achieved what was probably one of Sinwar and his Iranian allies’ overarching objectives: postponement and possibly complete derailment of Saudi-Israel normalization and with it the establishment of a US-led regional military alignment against Iran and its allies.
AROUND 120 Israelis remain in Hamas captivity. Dozens of them are no longer alive. Following the initial hostage release, Bibi appears to have undercut every realistic opportunity for a further deal since then.
Time and again, his own electoral priorities – keeping his coalition together and himself in power and out of jail – have taken precedence over all other considerations. Who would ever have imagined that an Israeli premier would knowingly risk the lives of hundreds of Israeli citizens? It is not that Bibi’s intentions are malevolent; he has lost the ability to differentiate between his own interests and those of the state.
Thus, Bibi has managed to paint Sinwar as the side more avid to reach a deal. Sinwar’s love has reached new heights.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) and a former deputy national security advisor in Israel.