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The nature of Israel’s febrile coalition politics has long favoured theatrics. The standing and psychology of its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, adds a further element of panic and cynical calculation.
All those characteristics were in evidence as Israel and Hamas edged towards a ceasefire deal, particularly in Netanyahu’s struggle to triangulate his portrayal of an agreement that has the potential to damage him politically.
The deal, as many in the Israeli media have not been slow to point out, is essentially identical to the agreement that Netanyahu torpedoed over the summer, leaving more Israeli hostages and soldiers to die in the intervening months.
Moreover, for Israel’s right and far right specifically, it is not clear how a negotiated settlement accords with Netanyahu’s promise of “total victory” and Hamas’s complete defeat. Instead, the deal, if it holds, offers the possibility that Hamas will survive, with its wounded going to Egypt to be treated.
The reality is that an open-ended war in Gaza has always suited Netanyahu and his supporters more than the interest of Israelis as a whole.
It has allowed Netanyahu and his supporters to kick the issue of accountability for the failings associated with Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 into the long grass. It has also allowed the Israeli prime minister, on trial for corruption charges, to present an image in the dock of a figure preoccupied with his country’s security for whom the proceedings are a distraction.
As a wartime leader, he has invoked the longstanding convention in Israel that unity should trump politics to glue together his fractious coalition of the right and far right.
The deal exposes Netanyahu on all of those fronts, which explains why he has been uncomfortable with being tied to it.
The problem is all politics. Netanyahu can probably win a binding vote in his cabinet, but that could risk his coalition collapsing if the far-right parties walk away, potentially hastening elections that he has no guarantee of winning.
On top of all that is the dawning realisation that Donald Trump’s interest in Israel, its war, and above all Netanyahu are at best transactional and built on far shakier foundations than the troubled relationship with the Biden administration, which has sucked up the humiliations piled on it by Netanyahu.
If there is a conundrum it is that, in the short term, Israeli political analysts see a deal that ensures the release of hostages held in Gaza and a phased end to Israel’s offensive against Hamas as a widely popular move that would be likely to benefit Netanyahu.
“Netanyahu is flailing,” said the pollster and academic Dahlia Scheindlin, who believes that the Israeli cabinet will ultimately sign off on the deal. “He’s famous as being someone who can be paralysed by that pressure. He is going through one of those spells where he can’t choose between conflicting loyalties.
“But he manufactured this situation, starting when he brought in [the far-right ministers] Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, and then prioritising them at every stage over other options.
“[Nevertheless] he is in a good position for elections because of the perception that he has damaged the Iranian-led axis of resistance in Lebanon and elsewhere. He’s back to where his base was before the war. With 70% of Israelis supporting a deal, he would expect a boost.”
The big unknown is around Trump and how the incoming president’s relationship with Netanyahu might play out.
“My feeling is that that’s a missing piece,” said Scheindlin. “What is the substance behind Trump’s leverage on Netanyahu [to do a deal]? No one knows.”
In particular, Netanyahu will be dependent on a Trump White House to shield him from arrest and prosecution at the international criminal court as well as maintaining US military assistance to Israel.
The extent of Trump’s interest in Israel and Netanyahu – beyond his loud insistence that he did not want to inherit the Gaza war – remains unclear, as does the way in which Israeli voters will internalise the events of the past 15 months of war when faced with the prospect of elections, early or otherwise.
“You know what’s written [in the agreement] and you know what was written in the previous proposals, the ones that we nearly settled on with Hamas,” an Israeli official told the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, summing up the feelings of many. “It’s appalling to think that we could have signed this so long ago,” said the official. “And it can’t be avoided – coupled with the happiness is the terrible thought that gnaws away at you relentlessly.”
The result of these converging pressures and uncertainties has been to push Netanyahu into declaring what many suspect is a manufactured crisis over the deal, accusing Hamas of reneging while also trying to suggest that Israel will return to fighting in the deal’s second phase.
This “version of the deal”, Haaretz’s Amir Tibon wrote, “appears in statements and briefings published by Netanyahu’s office and his media loyalists where phase two of the deal is a dead letter, and Israel is hell-bent on renewing the war after the completion of phase one, even at the cost of sacrificing its male hostages [still remaining in Gaza after phase one]”.
What will have occurred to many observers is that it has been precisely this concern that has been worrying Hamas’s negotiators, who signed up to the deal all the same.
If one thing is clear it is that – intentionally or otherwise – Netanyahu’s behaviour bodes ill for a deal that relies on new negotiations to begin during the first phase, ahead of any second phase.
There is concern that the phased approach builds in the risk of failure at every subsequent turn. Even if the Israeli cabinet signs off on the deal, it appears it may not be the last word.
