Middle East and North Africa

In 1978, a 28-year-old Ben Nitay—the Americanized name that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu adopted at the time—explained to a Boston audience that “the stumbling block to the road for peace is this demand for a PLO state.” Since then, his life’s mission has been to prevent it.

In the 1990s, first as leader of the opposition to then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s peace efforts and then, after Rabin’s death, as his successor, Netanyahu did everything in his power to delegitimize and derail the Oslo process. When he returned to office in 2009, his first task was to repel the Obama administration’s negotiation efforts and then, after the predictable failure of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempt to negotiate peace in 2013, to remove the Palestinian issue from the agenda.

In 1978, a 28-year-old Ben Nitay—the Americanized name that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu adopted at the time—explained to a Boston audience that “the stumbling block to the road for peace is this demand for a PLO state.” Since then, his life’s mission has been to prevent it.

In the 1990s, first as leader of the opposition to then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s peace efforts and then, after Rabin’s death, as his successor, Netanyahu did everything in his power to delegitimize and derail the Oslo process. When he returned to office in 2009, his first task was to repel the Obama administration’s negotiation efforts and then, after the predictable failure of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempt to negotiate peace in 2013, to remove the Palestinian issue from the agenda.

In the decade that followed, Netanyahu abandoned even the pretense of negotiations, declaring in 2015, “No Palestinian state on my watch.” His engagement with the Palestinian Authority, his potential partner, was limited to crippling it financially and undermining its legitimacy while his governments scattered settlements deep in Palestinian territory, making partition exceedingly more difficult and violence all but inevitable. Netanyahu’s current government, formed in 2022, includes Israel’s most abhorrent elements, which, until recently, were pariahs in Israeli politics, openly calling for resettling Gaza and Syria and for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

To Israel’s strategic detriment, Netanyahu is conducting the war in Gaza with the apparent supreme goal of not allowing moderate Palestinians, particularly the Palestinian Authority, any foothold there, even if that means leaving Hamas in charge. Numerous proposals for an international stabilization force, which would rebuild Gaza and disarm Hamas, were rebuffed by Israel because they included steps toward Palestinian sovereignty. When Hamas itself suggested ceding control of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority, Netanyahu swiftly dismissed the idea.

Netanyahu’s obstructionism was never in the service of a competing solution. Its success was always dependent on the concealment of that fundamental lack. But the bankruptcy of Netanyahu’s Palestinian strategy—to his and Israel’s detriment—has now been exposed. Israel has failed in Gaza, is stuck in Lebanon, and, after dragging the United States into a debacle in the Gulf, has ignited the entire region and upended the global economy. Now, Iran seems to have the upper hand while Israel is more isolated than ever.

All this adds up to a strategic failure of unprecedented proportions. Still, a better outcome is attainable. But to achieve it, Netanyahu’s failed approach, which led to the current quagmire, must be recognized and replaced.

Israeli settlers raise an Israeli flag during a ceremony for a new settlement on Mount Tarousa, in the occupied West Bank, on June 16.Hazem Bader/AFP via Getty Images

Netanyahu’s basic approach to the conflict can be summarized as: status quo today, status quo tomorrow, status quo forever.

Though he indulges the far right’s annexationist fantasies, Netanyahu has never bought into them. He is too sober and too secular to take seriously the Messianic visions motivating the fanatics of Greater Israel—the Jewish supremacists who believe that Israel should dominate all of historic Palestine and that, with abundant violence and some divine intervention, the Palestinians can be forced to surrender to their status as noncitizen subjects in their own land. Netanyahu knows how to secure their support but doesn’t share their fantasies. While talk of Israel’s de facto annexation of the West Bank has become popular, the fact remains that Netanyahu’s governments have never seriously proposed annexingthe West Bank, let alone Gaza, despite persistent pressure from his base.

Netanyahu’s approach is premised on two assumptions: that the status quo is better than the alternative and that the status quo is, in fact, static. The alternative, namely partition, is in Netanyahu’s view, which crystallized back when Jordan and Iraq were still formidable threats tantamount to the destruction of Israel. It is precisely because he knows there is no feasible alternative to the two-state solution that he clings to the status quo.

Netanyahu’s policy of “managing the conflict” is the strategic expression of this conception. It is not premised on the idea, which is shared by many, that resolving the conflict is presently unattainable but on the conviction that it is........

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