Did Netanyahu Prolong the Gaza War To Save Himself?

Patrick Kingsley, Ronen Bergman, and Natan Odenheimer make a damning charge in the NYT Magazine: “How Netanyahu Prolonged the War in Gaza to Stay in Power.” The evidence is, shall we say, circumstantial.

The setup:

Six months into the war in the Gaza Strip, Benjamin Netanyahu was preparing to bring it to a halt. Negotiations were underway for an extended cease-fire with Hamas, and he was ready to agree to a compromise. He had dispatched an envoy to convey Israel’s new position to the Egyptian mediators. Now, at a meeting at the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv, he needed to get his cabinet onboard. He had kept the plan off the meeting’s written agenda. The idea was to reveal it suddenly, preventing resistant ministers from coordinating their response.

It was April 2024, long before Netanyahu mounted his political comeback. The proposal on the table would have paused the Gaza war for at least six weeks. It would have created a window for negotiations with Hamas over a permanent truce. More than 30 hostages captured by Hamas at the start of the war would have been released within weeks. Still more would have been freed if the truce was extended. And the devastation of Gaza, where roughly two million people were trying to survive daily attacks, would have come to a halt.

The kicker:

But for Netanyahu, a truce also came with personal risk. As prime minister, he led a fragile coalition that depended on the support of far-right ministers who wanted to occupy Gaza, not withdraw from it. They sought a long war that would ultimately enable Israel to re-establish Jewish settlements in Gaza. If a cease-fire came too soon, these ministers might decide to collapse the ruling coalition. That would prompt early elections that polls showed Netanyahu would lose. Out of office, Netanyahu was vulnerable. Since 2020, he had been standing trial for corruption; the charges, which he denied, mostly related to granting favors to businessmen in exchange for gifts and favorable media coverage. Shorn of power, Netanyahu would lose the ability to force out the attorney general who oversaw his prosecution — as indeed his government would later attempt to do.

That’s . . . pretty thin. We’ve all known that the war was good for Netanyahu, both politically and personally. There are plenty of good reasons to want to preserve one’s governing coalition in the midst of war. And it would be impossible to prosecute a peace deal with the government collapsing. Which it would almost certainly have done:

Then Bezalel Smotrich, his finance minister, interrupted the proceedings. As a young activist in 2005, Smotrich was detained for weeks — though never charged — on suspicion of plotting to blow up vehicles on a major highway in order to slow the dismantling of Israeli settlements in Gaza. Along with Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right national-security minister, Smotrich was now one of the strongest advocates in the cabinet for re-establishing those settlements. He had recently called for most of Gaza’s Palestinian population to leave. Now, at the cabinet meeting, Smotrich declared that he had heard rumors of a plan for a deal. The details disturbed him. “I want you to know that if a surrender agreement like this is brought forward, you no longer have a government,” Smotrich said. “The government is finished.”

It was 5:44 p.m., according to minutes of the meeting. At that moment, the prime minister was forced to choose between the chance of a truce and his political survival — and Netanyahu opted for survival. There was no cease-fire plan, he promised Smotrich. “No, no, there’s no such thing,” he said. And as the cabinet discussion moved on, Netanyahu quietly leaned over to his security advisers and whispered what must have by then become obvious to them: “Don’t present the plan.”

Again, this is not just Netanyahu’s political survival. It was the survival of a Likud-led response to the October 7 massacre. While I have no doubt that Netanyahu is a cynical creature, and is enjoying the resurgence that the war has given him, I also think that he’s a True Believer who wants the Israeli right—yes, preferably in the person of himself—to set the end stages of the conflict.

To understand the role that Netanyahu’s own calculations played in prolonging the war, we spoke with more than 110 officials in Israel, the United States and the Arab world. These officials — both supporters and critics — have all met, observed or worked with the prime minister since the start of the war and sometimes long before it began. We also reviewed scores of documents, including records of government meetings, communications among officials, negotiation records, war plans, intelligence assessments, secret Hamas protocols and court documents.

For obvious reasons, one of the most sensitive accusations about Netanyahu’s conduct of the war is that he prolonged it for his own personal political benefit. Whether or not they thought he had, everyone we spoke to agreed on one thing: The war’s extension and expansion has been good for Netanyahu. 

Which, again, is not the slightest bit in doubt. But also an entirely different thing than his having prolonged the war for that primary purpose. Indeed, the writers acknowledge as much:

It is of course impossible to say that Netanyahu made key wartime decisions entirely in the service of his own political survival. His personal quest for power is often inextricably enmeshed with genuine patriotism and the belief, which infuses his public pronouncements, that he alone knows how best to defend Israel. Beyond his own motives, war is a complex, chaotic process with many daily variables that take a course of their own. Like all Israeli prime ministers, Netanyahu lacks full executive control over a sprawling administration full of competing factions and interests. His enemies in Lebanon and Iran posed genuine threats to Israel, and their defeat has strengthened Israeli security. And his adversary in Gaza, Hamas, has blocked or slow-walked cease-fire negotiations during key stretches of the war, including at a point early last summer when Netanyahu appeared more willing to reach a truce.

They follow that with this:

Yet for all these caveats, our reporting has led us to three unavoidable conclusions. In the years preceding the war, Netanyahu’s approach to Hamas helped to strengthen the group, giving it space to secretly prepare for war. In the months before that war, Netanyahu’s push to undermine Israel’s judiciary widened already-deep rifts within Israeli society and weakened its military, making Israel appear vulnerable and encouraging Hamas to ready its attack. And once the war began, Netanyahu’s decisions were at times colored predominantly by political and personal need instead of only military or national necessity.

That paragraph does nothing to advance the argument. It’s mostly about things that happened before the war, then a repeat of the thesis. The positioning of the latter makes it appear a logical conclusion of the paragraph, but it is not.

We found that at key stages in the war, Netanyahu’s decisions extended the fighting in Gaza longer than even Israel’s senior military leadership deemed necessary. This was partly a result of Netanyahu’s refusal — years before Oct. 7 — to resign when charged with corruption, a decision that lost him the support of Israel’s moderates and even parts of the Israeli right. In the years since his trial, still ongoing, began in 2020, he instead built a fragile majority in Israel’s Parliament by forging alliances with far-right parties. It kept him in power, but it tied his fate to their extremist positions, both before the war and after it began.

Again, that does nothing to advance the thesis. War aims are a political matter, not a matter of military expertise. (To be sure, the probability of success and risk factors are within the expertise of senior officers, who should be advising the PM.) And the fact that his coalition is fragile is a fact, regardless of his own culpability in making it so before the war.

Indeed, most of the evidence presented thus far goes against the authors’ thesis. It was Netanyahu who was leaning toward a peace deal at the six-month point, but he has consistently been pushed in the direction of a more ruthless approach by hardliners.

Under political pressure from those coalition allies, Netanyahu slowed down cease-fire negotiations at crucial moments, missing windows in which Hamas was less opposed to a deal. He avoided planning for a postwar power transition, making it harder to direct the war toward an endgame. He pressed ahead with the war in April and July 2024, even as top generals told him that there was no further military advantage to continuing. When momentum toward a cease-fire seemed to grow, Netanyahu ascribed sudden significance to military objectives that he previously seemed less interested in pursuing, such as the capture of the southern city Rafah and later the occupation of the Gaza-Egypt border. And when an extended cease-fire was finally forged in January, he broke the truce in March in part to keep his coalition intact.

This is the most damning piece of evidence yet. To me, though, it points to an issue that we’ve discussed here many times: the war aims are unachievable so long as Gaza (and arguably the West Bank) exist as Palestinian territories. There’s essentially no end state that precludes Hamas, or something like it, from reconstituting and committing another atrocity.

But for Netanyahu, the immediate rewards have been rich. He has amassed more control over the Israeli state than at any other point in his 18-year tenure as prime minister. He has successfully prevented a state inquiry that would investigate his own culpability, saying that the fallout must wait until the Gaza war ends, even as the defense minister, army chief, domestic spymaster and several top generals all either have been fired or have resigned. As he attends court up to three times a week for his corruption trial, his government is now moving to fire the attorney general who oversees that prosecution. The war’s continuation has also shored up his coalition. It gave him time to plan and enact his attack on Iran. Above all, as even his strongest supporters note, it kept him in office. “Netanyahu pulled off a political resurrection that no one — not even his closest allies — thought possible,” said Srulik Einhorn, a political strategist who is part of Netanyahu’s inner circle. “His leadership through a prolonged war with Hamas and a bold strike on Iran has reshaped the political map. He’s now in a strong position to win elections again.”

This is the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy in action. Nobody disputes that the war has been good for Netanyahu. That doesn’t prove he continued the war for that reason.

And, again, the coalition pressure thesis is bolstered by this:

Netanyahu’s biggest domestic political boost came in September 2024, when Gideon Saar, an opposition leader, agreed to shore up Netanyahu’s majority by bringing his small party into the governing coalition. Suddenly it was far harder for Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to make ultimatums: The government would more easily survive if one or the other departed.

With far greater room to maneuver, Netanyahu finally agreed to a truce in January 2025 — encouraged by the incoming President Trump and his Mideast envoy, Steve Witkoff. The text of the deal was almost identical to the version that Netanyahu rejected the previous April. Ben-Gvir resigned in protest, taking his small group of lawmakers with him. But with Saar on board, Ben-Gvir was no longer essential to Netanyahu’s survival — at least for the moment.

While the distinction between “Netanyahu’s survival” and the survival of the Likud-led coalition may seem trivial, it is not. Israel is at war. Of course he didn’t want a more left-leaning coalition in charge of the peace. And, again: Netanyahu’s personal instinct seems to have been more moderate than that of the deciding votes in the coalition, until the coalition expanded to include more moderates.

By March, however, Netanyahu’s political calculus changed once more. Ultra-Orthodox coalition members were threatening to bring down the government, angry at the lack of concessions for their community in a new national budget. Ben-Gvir offered to return to keep Netanyahu’s alliance afloat, as long as the war resumed. On March 18, the Israeli Air Force began a major bombardment of Gaza, breaking the cease-fire. A day later, Ben-Gvir returned to the coalition. Netanyahu’s budget passed. The government survived. The war continued.

Again, this tracks with the coalition argument.

Finally, we get to this:

Next began the power grab. Comparing himself to Trump, Netanyahu revived the divisive judicial overhaul, advancing plans — derailed by the outbreak of war — to give politicians greater control over the appointment of judges to the Supreme Court. Above all, he sought to fire or restrain officials who either threatened his personal future or blocked his government’s policies. “In America and in Israel when a strong right wing leader wins an election, the leftist Deep State weaponizes the justice system to thwart the people’s will,” he wrote in March on X. “They won’t win in either place!”

I don’t know the nuances of Israeli politics well enough to have a strong view on this, but it certainly reeks of populism, if not authoritarianism. But this is March 2025, a year after Netanyahu ostensibly took the peace deal he was about to offer off the table after reading the room. He’s a shrewd politician, to be sure, but I can’t imagine he was plotting that far ahead. Certainly, the resurrection of Trump was far from a safe bet at that point.

And, again, this seems to reinforce the coalition narrative:

In early June, Netanyahu decided to proceed with an attack. Having presided over the worst failure in Israel’s military history, Netanyahu was edging toward political redemption.

Yet before the warplanes took off for Iran, Netanyahu needed to solve a problem at home. Several lawmakers in his fragile coalition, ignorant of the secret plans, were set to bring down his government. As in the crisis in March, the lawmakers were ultra-Orthodox Jews, known in Hebrew as Haredim. This time, they were furious at proposals to end the exemption from military service for the ultra-Orthodox minority. They planned to join the opposition in a vote to dissolve Parliament, triggering new elections, and the vote looked set to pass. As a caretaker prime minister, Netanyahu could still order the Iran attack, but its legitimacy would be undermined.

As the ultra-Orthodox leadership considered bringing down the government, Mike Huckabee, Trump’s ambassador to Israel, came to Netanyahu’s aid. He invited ultra-Orthodox politicians to the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem, warning them in general terms that their maneuvers risked endangering Israel’s fight against Iran. He also told them that U.S. support for Israel’s campaign would wane if the government collapsed, because the United States would be less willing to back major moves by an interim leader.

A few days later, on Monday, June 9, Netanyahu made the kind of political maneuver that has allowed him to survive for so long as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. Sitting in his small office at the army headquarters in Tel Aviv, where he spends part of the week, Netanyahu asked an aide to call Moshe Gafni, the leader of one of the restive ultra-Orthodox parties in his coalition. Once Gafni picked up, the aide handed the phone to Netanyahu, who summoned Gafni to meet him immediately.

After Gafni arrived at the office around 6 p.m., he was presented with a sheet of paper and told to sign it. This was a confidentiality agreement, often used in the Israeli military, that obliges the signatory to keep a military secret. Anyone briefed on highly sensitive information in Israel is required to sign such a document, which allows for legal action against those who leak classified information. Gafni signed — and Netanyahu revealed the plan to attack Iran in four days’ time.

Gafni left the room worried. He wondered if Netanyahu, the consummate politician, was playing him. He also feared that Netanyahu was in fact sincere and that a vote to dissolve Parliament might prevent this historic attack from going ahead. Two days later, Gafni’s party voted to preserve the government, and Netanyahu survived as prime minister. Less than 24 hours later, Israeli warplanes set off for Iran, beginning the greatest episode of Netanyahu’s political career.

The multipronged maneuver showed Netanyahu at the height of his political powers. It highlighted his constant quest to ensure his political survival by placating and manipulating allies within his coalition and benefactors in the United States government, often all at once. It showed the frequent overlap among his personal goals, his political needs and the national interest. Above all, it highlighted how Netanyahu has instrumentalized war — whether in Gaza, Lebanon or in this case Iran — in part to stay in office. “The plan to strike Iran was the only thing that kept the Haredim from dissolving the government,” said Israel Cohen, a Haredi radio host and confidant of Gafni’s. “And Bibi knew that.”

Again, this is all sleight-of-hand. That Netanyahu was able to use the impending Iran strike to bolster his hold on power is the nature of wartime leadership. The rally ’round the flag thesis has been around a long time. But does anyone doubt that Netanyahu, who had been itching to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities for a very long time, did so now to save his own hide? Isn’t it more likely that he did so because a series of bold maneuvers had rendered Iran weaker than it has been in years, lessening the risk of seizing the moment?