Netanyahu allies call for Israel to annex Gaza: ‘The Holy Land’

A pair of Israeli government ministers called for Israel‘s annexation of Gaza and the dispersion of Palestinians who live there amid international doubts that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has a viable strategy.

“We must return to Gaza now! We are coming home to the Holy Land!” Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir said during an Israeli Independence Day rally. “We must encourage emigration. Encourage the voluntary emigration of the residents of Gaza. It is moral!”

Those policies would run contrary to international law, according to United Nations officials and leading Western powers. Ben Gvir’s airing of those goals has drawn criticism from President Joe Biden’s administration, but some families of Israeli hostages held by Hamas believe that Ben Gvir has obstructed the liberation of the captives by pushing Netanyahu to conduct the war along lines conducive to those hard-right ambitions.

“There’s this complete fallacy of what ‘total victory’ has to be in this case for Israel — and that is Hamas completely ceasing to exist, and for full Israeli control, forever, over the Gaza Strip,” Hebrew University historian Jonathan Dekel-Chen, an Israeli American whose son, Sagui, was taken hostage on Oct. 7, told the Washington Examiner last week. “Neither of those are going to happen in the real world, and striving for that will only get the hostages killed — and a lot of Palestinians as well, of course — because you cannot avoid in such a densely populated area more civilian casualties.”

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 amid the Second Intifada, almost 40 years after seizing the territory from Egypt in the Six-Day War. Hard-right distaste for that withdrawal has created internal pressure on Netanyahu to make the safety of the hostages a secondary objective in the war, according to Dekel-Chen.

“They’re looking for population transfers; they’re looking for very radical things. They never came to peace with Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in 2005,” he said. “And they now see an opportunity to return to what they consider to be the good old days, which is Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip and intensive Israeli settlement in the Gaza Strip, which will just cause endless conflict in our region and untold bloodshed.”

The United States, Egypt, and Qatar have been coordinating indirect negotiations over a ceasefire and hostage deal, fueled in part by an offer from Netanyahu that Secretary of State Antony Blinken has described as “extraordinarily generous.” Hamas rejected that offer and countered with a demand that Israel “basically lose the war and let Hamas win the war,” as Netanyahu put it Sunday in an interview with Dan Senor on the Call Me Back podcast. Yet his theory of victory has drawn frank skepticism from Biden’s team in recent days.

“We are struggling over what the theory of victory is, and, I think sometimes when we listen closely to Israeli leaders, they talk about mostly the idea of some sort of sweeping victory on the battlefield, ‘total victory,’” Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell said Monday at the 2024 NATO Youth Summit in Miami. “I don’t think we believe that that is likely or possible. … And so, ultimately, I think, we view that there has to be more of a political solution.”

Netanyahu outlined his theory of the case in broad strokes on Sunday, saying he envisions the destruction of Hamas as an organized military force, followed by “mop-up” operations to kill surviving terrorists and then a transition to an administration of Gaza by Palestinian civilians who are not associated with Hamas.

“That’s the realistic plan right now,” Netanyahu said Sunday. “People say, ‘What are you going to do on the day after? Where’s your plan?’ Well, the first thing is make sure it’s the day after.”

Those general statements fail to acknowledge the difficulty of defeating a terrorist organization, according to top U.S. officials who warned that Hamas’s recruiters would thrive amid the protracted instability and carnage.

“One of the risks of engaging in any kind of counterinsurgency campaign is the ability of the terrorist group to attract more recruits and more followers as time goes on,” White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said Monday. “So, one of the key points that we have been reinforcing is to step back just from a tactical military analysis of the situation and ask strategically: How do we get to the common goal, the enduring defeat of Hamas? And that is going to require military pressure, yes. But more than just military pressure — a political plan to get there.”

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If Netanyahu has faced criticism for lack of a plan, Israel’s hard-right politicians made their political plan clear on Tuesday.

“In order to preserve the security achievements for which so many of our troops gave up their lives for, we must settle Gaza, with security forces and with settlers,” Israeli Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, who is a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, told the same rally where Ben Gvir spoke. “This is not because there is no other option but out of a deep understanding that this is the only real way, both to exact a heavy price from the Nazis, from Hamas, and to protect our people and our homeland. We will wipe out the disgrace of the year 2005 with settlement in the year 2024-2025, God willing.”