If these Coalition talks fail,Israel will have to have another election (the fifth in 30 months) next autumn. Netanyahu will remain prime minister in the meantime,and will then have another,fifth chance to get a durable right-wing majority coalition that will pass legislation safeguarding him from further prosecution.
I can’t read Netanyahu’s mind,but if he were a ruthlessly self-serving politician he would certainly find this little war politically useful. How about his alleged “objective ally”,Hamas?
Hamas needs a war right now less than Netanyahu does,but it’s always up for one. Its business model is perpetual rejection of peace with Israel,in the expectation that divine intervention will one day deliver total victory and eliminate the Jewish state.
Hamas is therefore in permanent competition with Fatah,the rival Palestinian political movement that accepted the (now moribund) “two-state solution” which envisaged Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side. A little war with Israel now and then is good for Hamas’s image.
The Hamas-Netanyahu “objective alliance” is based on the fact that Netanyahu hates the idea of a two-state solution just as much as Hamas does. Indeed,they began by strangling that deal together in 1995-96,and most of the shooting since has been about keeping it dead.
The deal came out of the Oslo Accord of 1992,in which Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat agreed to move towards two parallel states living in peace.
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Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish right-wing extremist,but everybody expected his successor,Shimon Peres,to win the 1996 election on a sympathy vote and go through with the Oslo deal. Instead,Hamas went on a terrorist spree,bombing buses in Israel to cause maximum casualties,in order to drive Israeli voters into the arms of the anti-Oslo Accords nationalist right instead.
It succeeded,and the right-wing candidate,ex-commando Binyamin Netanyahu,became prime minister instead and sabotaged the “peace process”. It was never very likely to succeed,but Hamas and Netanyahu both act as objective allies whenever the corpse of the two-state solution threatens to rise from its shallow grave.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.