This week two major developments gave us proof, if anyone needed it, that Benjamin Netanyahu is acting out of sheer political calculus and naked self-interest.
On Tuesday 18th March, Israel ended its ceasefire with Hamas. Waking up to the news that morning that the Israeli military had killed at least 300 Palestinians in Gaza (the death toll later rose to over 400)—in what the military claimed were strikes targeting Hamas and other terrorist groups—it felt as if there had been no ceasefire at all. Since then, the army has also gone in on the ground. Tuesday’s death toll included nearly 200 children, according to Palestinian officials.
Then only a few days later, on Thursday night, Netanyahu’s cabinet voted—after much speculation in the press—to dismiss the head of the Shin Bet security services, Ronen Bar, on the pretext that the prime minister had lost confidence in him since 7th October. A Netanyahu spokesman even claimed that Bar was directly to blame for the Hamas attack, in which more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals were killed and more than 250 taken hostage, including women and children.
Bar is the first Shin Bet head to be summarily dismissed. Hardly coincidentally, the Shin Bet is currently in the middle of a corruption investigation involving allegations that Netanyahu aides took money from lobbyists in Qatar. Earlier this month, the agency also got on the wrong side of the prime minister when it released its internal report into 7th October, acknowledging the Shin Bet’s part in the security failures while pointing to issues across broader government. In a letter to the Israeli cabinet ahead of its vote, Bar claimed the moves to get rid of him were intended to “prevent the uncovering of the truth – both regarding the events that led to the [7th October] massacre and the serious affairs currently being investigated by the Shin Bet”. Since then, the government has also made moves to fire the country’s attorney general.
During the first phase of the tortuously negotiated ceasefire, which ended on 1st March, some 33 Israeli hostages were exchanged for around 1,800 Palestinian prisoners housed in Israeli jails. That a ceasefire had happened at all was mostly down to the work of Donald Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, Steve Witkoff, who is said to have forced Netanyahu to agree to it during a face-to-face meeting on a Saturday afternoon in January.
However, talks to confirm a second phase after 1st March—which hypothetically would have seen Israel accept a permanent Gaza ceasefire—had stalled. (Not helping the matter were Trump’s bellicose remarks that the US should take over Gaza, including an AI slop vision of what the president believed that might look like, replete with bearded belly dancers and Netanyahu on a sun lounger.) And the day after the truce ended, Netanyahu announced he would stop aid supplies from entering Gaza—one of the war crimes, it’s worth remembering, that the ICC listed in its arrest warrant—on the pretext that Hamas had not agreed to an American proposal to extend the first phase and release more hostages, rather than negotiating the second phase as originally agreed.
With Israel dragging its feet, US officials were reported to have met with Hamas in Doha, to discuss both the release of American hostages and on the broader agreement. But these talks with Hamas failed to deliver what the US wanted. Turning to social media, Trump threatened the group on Instagram: “‘Shalom Hamas’ means Hello and Goodbye – You can choose. Release all of the Hostages now, not later, and immediately return all of the dead bodies of the people you murdered, or it is OVER for you.” With no progress in sight, it appears the White House had given Netanyahu’s government the all clear to strike Gaza again—in what is the clearest indication that the US is not really committed to solving this crisis or ending the war. At the very least, it seems Trump’s attention was elsewhere.
Netanyahu had long been working to scupper the ceasefire agreement from going through its three agreed phases. The veteran negotiator Gershon Baskin told me that the “Netanyahu machine” had also convinced the US to end its direct contact with Hamas. Meanwhile, the government insists that the resumption of strikes is the only way to free the remaining hostages—a position utterly rejected by the families of the hostages themselves. Yarden Bibas, a former hostage whose wife and two young children were murdered in Hamas captivity, wrote on Facebook after the strikes resumed that “the military pressure endangers the hostages, while an agreement brings them home”. Mass protests against the resumption of fighting, in the hopes that the hostages can be released, have been taken place all over Israel.
The renewal of war in Gaza and the attempt to dismiss the Shin Bet chief are further steps in Netanyahu’s autocratic arc. Refusing a national commission of inquiry into the failings of 7th October, and with a criminal trial still hanging over him, the prime minister has repeatedly made decisions, with monstrous consequences, to hold on to power. As Haaretz’s military analyst Amos Harel put it: “Netanyahu’s true objective appears increasingly clear: a gradual slide toward an authoritarian-style regime, whose survival he will try to secure through perpetual war on multiple fronts.”
With the Gaza war restarted, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the extremist former national security minister, has rejoined the government, having originally left it over the ceasefire deal. On Friday, when Israel’s supreme court blocked Ronen Bar’s dismissal before a court session to address the various petitions filed against his firing, Ben-Gvir posted on X: “Judicial reform now!” (This was a reference to the attempts by Netanyahu’s government to overhaul the judiciary, so that the government can do whatever it likes.)
Netanyahu’s political self-interest is transparent, and increasingly unpopular. Though around 30 per cent of Israelis support Israel’s war on Gaza, as the Israeli pollster Dahlia Scheindlin tells me, the majority do not. This is chiefly down to a wish to see the hostages freed, but also because they are tired of the war and doubt its political aims. Every time there is a crisis, she notes, Netanyahu conveniently postpones further hearings of his criminal trial.
The targeting of Bar, she says, should likewise be seen within that bigger context: A “majority are disgusted by what this government stands for,” she tells me. They think that “this government is just trying to protect itself and [Ben-Gvir] is emblematic of the fact that this is a government full of extremists and fundamental ideologues dedicated to expansionism, annexation, destruction of Palestinian life and keeping Netanyahu in power.”
As the strikes on Gaza have continued, today Hamas announced it is considering a US proposal to extend the first phase of the ceasefire, the scenario Netanyahu was originally reportedly pushing for. On Friday, the defence minister, Israel Katz, pledged to permanently take over parts of Gaza if the hostages aren’t released, though the government knows well that military pressure has not succeeded in releasing hostages since this war began. Netanyahu can’t pretend his decisions are keeping Israelis safe when soldiers are dying in Gaza and the Houthis are firing rockets from Yemen.
The truth is, if Netanyahu can just start bombing Palestinians in Gaza, killing hundreds of men, women and children, with US backing, then the countries that believe they are on the side of human rights and a rules-based order might need to consider their position. After all, the US has shown that it will only wave through more destruction—just like that.
