Before October 7, a discussion took place in the cabinet about the situation in the West Bank. "You need to think differently," Finance Minister Smotrich threw at Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi. "Maybe it's good for us that Hamas rules the West Bank?" Yes, the statement that "Hamas is an asset" was not accidental — it's a worldview. Smotrich really prefers that a murderous terrorist organization controls the area adjacent to Kfar Saba, Afula, and most of the country, rather than the Palestinian Authority.
"Do you hear what you're saying?" Halevi responded. The Palestinian Authority returns Israeli citizens who mistakenly enter Palestinian cities every week, Halevi told the ministers. Each such incident could have ended in a lynching. Halevi didn’t convince anyone. Smotrich, and on this matter Benjamin Netanyahu as well, are not persuadable. For them, the Palestinian Authority is the worst thing in the world. Not because of corruption or lack of democracy — that doesn’t bother them; after all, they have excellent relations with the worst leaders in the world. They refuse to hear about the Authority because in important capitals around the world it is still considered a partner for negotiations, a legitimate and moderate leadership of the Palestinian people.
No one failed to say at the start of the war in Gaza: prepare for the "day after." The army shouted this, senior Biden administration officials tried to create dialogue. Ilan Goldenberg, who was involved in a team set up on the issue, recounted how it was impossible to schedule meetings with the political echelon in Israel. The army was interested, the Shin Bet wanted to advance it, but when Ron Dermer once came to a meeting, he explained that the solution for the "day after" lies in a decades-long process of de-radicalizing the Palestinian people.
In other words: leave us alone. And they indeed left them alone, left us alone, and now, almost two years later, we are stuck in a situation where Netanyahu says: "You want us to leave Gaza and allow Hamas to return and rule? We are not interested in that," but Netanyahu has scuttled every other option, destroyed the Egyptian plan, the Emirati plan, any plan that involved even a small finger of the Palestinian Authority. Netanyahu and his government prefer clans, including clans led by criminals, over involvement of the Authority. They prefer chaos, they prefer Hamas — just not the Authority.
This terrible failure of Netanyahu stands out especially now. The moment he would officially agree to end the war, we could have received many more hostages alive on a much faster timetable. Why do two hostages have to wait until day 50 to be released? Why must ten others remain off the list?
To Netanyahu’s credit, at least this time he isn’t publicly saying every other day that he will renew fighting after the deal. In previous deals, he did so with the stubborn cruelty of someone determined to reduce the chance that Hamas would mistakenly think the ceasefire was permanent and release more hostages. This is the only time in the world, Yair Lapid rightly said, that the entire world is begging Netanyahu to lie a little — and he refuses.
Because of fear of Donald Trump, Netanyahu is playing the game this time. Suddenly there are leaks that maybe he’ll be willing to end the war, and suddenly there are no contradictory statements. We’ll see what happens at the White House, but it’s likely that Trump will talk about ending the war and Netanyahu will walk the tightrope. Who will really stop him from returning to fighting if he signs a deal to end the war and it turns out Hamas is rearming? At one of the war cabinet meetings, Chief of Staff Halevi said something along the lines of: Hamas didn’t ask the UN for permission to invade our territory on October 7.
Now we just have to wait and see what Netanyahu will tell the families whose loved ones died in “Gideon’s Chariots,” based on the claim that the operation will decide Hamas’s fate.