War First, Then Annexation: Is Israel Preparing To Permanently Occupy Gaza?
It's been a heady week in Jerusalem. Trains and public spaces have been flooded with protesters noisily calling for the government to go. This weekend, the protesters calling for the government to immediately prioritize a deal to release the hostages held by Hamas joined with anti-government protests calling for new elections, for a mass demonstration.
Both groups of protesters are hoping for the perfect storm to help boot the government out. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing the fury of the hostage families, having failed to secure a hostage release deal since the initial agreement in November. He's had plenty of help from Hamas in this failure, but Netanyahu is Israel's elected leader, and he's been lying to its citizens that his policies will get the hostages back. Instead, families have noticed that their loved ones are still not home.
Then the U.S.-Israel crisis appeared to hit breaking point last week. Worldwide opinion is sliding into Israel's global isolation. The ghastly IDF killing of seven workers from the international relief group World Central Kitchen has brought fresh and searing global condemnation.
Protesters calling for an immediate hostage deal and new elections try to break through a police barricade near Prime Minister Netanyahu's Jerusalem residence last weekendCredit: Olivier Fitoussi
On the home front, the government has teetered due to a showdown between its own ruling coalition parties over proposed legislation to conscript ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students; there were no winners. The High Court of Justice ordered the state to begin drafting the Haredim posthaste, and to freeze funds to yeshivas that don't cooperate with the draft. After 75 years of a free ride (well, it cost the rest of us), the Haredi parties were thoroughly shocked, sending tremors through the government.
The various streams of protesters are hopeful that their pile-on of pressure could finally bring the edifice down. In conversations, more and more people say, "I smell elections."
Elections slip-sliding away
But it's a long road to Canaan, so to speak. In the immediate phase, there are plenty of factors working against the protesters' aim of toppling the Netanyahu government. And in the long term, there are numerous reasons to think the government can slog on while laying the groundwork for its most grandiose plans.
After their initial shock, the ultra-Orthodox parties remembered just how beneficial it is to be inside governing coalitions – especially one that is devoted to propping up their isolationist society and schools with public funds, and advancing theocratic aims. They may not get a better deal and they're not leaving just yet.
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The global crisis, too, is more bark than bite. What looked like a high-stakes clash last week – the U.S. allowed the UN Security Council to pass a resolution calling for a cease-fire, and Netanyahu canceled a planned delegation to the White House to discuss a proposed Rafah ground offensive – has been swallowed up by love this week. Netanyahu reversed his decision to cancel the delegation. The Americans will reportedly continue stuffing Israel's military depots with munitions and its hangars with fighter jets, which speak much louder than words.
The last major crisis in U.S.-Israel relations in 2015 had a similar trajectory: Netanyahu addressed Congress, invited by Republicans behind President Barack Obama's back – an unprecedented insult. But it ended with a $38 billion 10-year military aid package as Obama's goodbye gift.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attending a cabinet meeting in Jerusalem. His core supporters apparently still view him as a savvy statesman.Credit: Abir Sultan,AP
Israelis have never faced true global isolation, and Netanyahu's core supporters apparently still view him as a savvy statesman. His numbers have actually stabilized somewhat in surveys of Israeli public opinion: he hit a floor in the first few months; now his ratings, his party and his government have stayed low but stable, or even recovered a smidge.
It's natural for the government to want elections later rather than sooner: the prewar coalition parties are still winning only 46-48 seats in serious polls, far from the 61-seat number they need and miles from their winning 64-seat tally in the last election. More time means potential poll recovery.
But the real reason this government wants to keep power is to advance its broad agenda: Inequality by law (Jewish supremacy); theocracy; annexation; gut the welfare state; legitimize corruption. To do these, the government is rapidly consolidating executive power, stacking the public sector with political loyalists and dismantling democratic institutions.
The anti-government protests and their perfect storm can't force elections. They may even act as an accelerator for the most coveted part of this plan: annexation. And this time we're talking not only about the West Bank; the big vision stretches into Gaza, too.
Right-wing conference in Jerusalem in January promoting the establishment of settlements in a permanently occupied Gaza, with a map featuring their proposed communitiesCredit: Olivier Fitoussi
The biggest prize, the historic precedent
Most of the parties in the original Netanyahu coalition believe in the cosmic right to a Jewish religious grip over all of historic Palestine. If they could, they'd even cross the Jordan (eastward), to the lands of the biblical tribes of Reuben, Gad and Manasseh. Historic distinctions between the traditionally anti-state theology of ultra-Orthodoxy versus the messianic, land- and Jewish-sovereignty-fetishizing followers of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook have faded over the decades.
Haredi urban sprawl over the Green Line (the armistice demarcation line before the 1967 Six-Day War) blurred the geographic distinctions, while the Haredi-Nationalist groups bridged the sociological lines. In today's Knesset there are religious Likud ministers who defend a draft exemption for Haredim, and Haredim who hold that Gaza settlements would "correct a historical injustice." And when it came to settlements in land occupied in 1967, the state was never far behind.
Likud, once a mostly secular party that drove a nationalist ethos alongside a liberal constitutional order, has remade itself in the image of the ultranationalist religious parties, just with less bombastic religion. That matters for fighting over the conscription law – but it's a perfect storm in favor of annexation.
Far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich addressing a faction meeting in Jerusalem earlier this year.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
One of the government's first, but least headline-grabbing, actions of 2023 was to transfer powers once held by the Israel Defense Forces in the West Bank to far-right minister Bezalel Smotrich. He's been frantically employing bureaucratic mechanisms to advance permanent Israeli control: Last month he declared swaths of territory to be "state land," preventing Palestinians from ever using it. He can't get enough, and did it again this week.
It's impossible to keep up: As I was writing this, the Knesset passed another seemingly banal, technical law regarding local authority budgets that again erases the distinction between settlements and sovereign territory (along with other laws gouging democracy, such as the law giving the prime minister the power to shutter media outlets).
Enter Hamas, the worst leaders Palestinians have ever had. Hamas gave Israel the biggest possible prize: a chance to double its annexationist fantasies by expanding to Gaza. Before October 7, the government probably wouldn't even let itself dream of such a scenario. Now its members – Likud ministers included – have openly declared their intention to reoccupy Gaza permanently and rebuild settlements.
Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli airstrike on a building in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip this weekCredit: Mohammed Salem/ REUTERS
The plans may sound wild, but the pieces are all there.
First, Netanyahu rejected the idea that anyone can run Gaza except the IDF. He still refuses all talk of a day-after plan or cease-fire, but then released a plan that includes indefinite Israeli security control.
Give that idea time to settle in (so to speak); Israel might propose an occupation of 10 years in Gaza, or 18 years, like the occupation of southern Lebanon. And Lebanese territory wasn't even part of Israel's ideology or theology; for some strange and unbiblical reason, Gaza is.
Back in 1967, the idea of 700,000 settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem would have sounded like a pipe dream. So would brazenly formalizing the annexation of both East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the early 1980s. But there have been no material consequences for either, other than giving Israel a bad image in the world. Most Israelis just slough that response off as a sign of the world's incurable antisemitism, or a prescription for better hasbara.
The limitations of demonstrations
Generations of Israeli leaders, consciously or instinctively, learned a winning technique: Let radical-looking elements in society – politicians, settlers or thugs – indulge in policies, and not just on a theoretical level, that could never fly at the time, even at home, like the first religious ideological Hebron settlers in 1968. Go through the motions of reining them in, release trial balloons, let them pop, then float them again.
This was not only the decades-old dance between settlers and the Mapai/Labor government (see Gershom Gorenberg's meticulous documentation of the process in "The Accidental Empire"). It was precisely the pattern for the creeping assault on Israel's independent judiciary (which I documented myself).
For over a decade, radical forces in Likud, Habayit Hayehudi and others were putting out rabid anti-judiciary testers, bills, policies and op-eds. They were softening up their target of public opinion, while all the while Netanyahu played at being good cop.
Communications Minister Shlomo Karhi, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, Heritage Minister Amihai Eliyahu and other Netanyahu coalition lawmakers at the 'Resettle Gaza' conferenceCredit: Olivier Fitoussi
Each trial, pop and new balloon bounces around in Israel's "lively democratic debate," which feeds familiarity and, ultimately, acceptance – happily by some, while others succumb, exhausted.
Israel's government is hardly troubled by demonstrations, even big ones. Israelis held mass demonstrations against their leadership for its collusion with the perpetrators of the Sabra and Shatila massacre during the first Lebanon war. They demonstrated for the Oslo Accords, and against Netanyahu's regime coup of 2023.
Demonstrations sometimes have an impact, but they can unwittingly play into the government's hands: They are evidence of Israel's "vibrant debate" while prompting the government to just slow down or change tactics to achieve its aims.
So, if the judicial reform didn't fly, break it down and snatch power anyway, in different ways. If West Bank annexation can't happen openly, overnight, do it bureaucratically, over time, inch-by-physical-inch; show off some setbacks, display willingness for concessions on constricted or impossible terms, and downplay the quiet, creeping victories.
Why not repeat the formula for Gaza? When the government floats ideas for the future, I advise testing them against this historic pattern; if they fit, occupation and annexation are on the horizon.
Protesters against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government and calls for the release of hostages held by Hamas outside of the Knesset in Jerusalem last monthCredit: Leo Correa,AP
Can anything stop the mad dance, or cause a change of course? Only the unprecedented or the unknown.
Mainstream Israelis never legitimized the refusal to serve in reserve duty before 2023. Most everyone rallied for the war after October 7, but when Israelis are stuck in the mud of Gaza, facing a new occupation, settlements and permanent Palestinian insurgency, reservists or even conscripts might make different choices.
Further, countries around the world have loudly proclaimed that this time, Israel truly must be reined in; a permanent political agreement must end this conflict for good. Too bad they won't say how they're planning to make it happen.
But there's one condition for any anti-annexationist alternative to come true: Netanyahu must go. He didn't invent most of these policies, but if he remains in power, we barely have to imagine the future. Just look at the last six months, the last year, the last 15 years, and ask if you want this, or worse, to be Israel's fate.