Why Israel decided to go back to war seems evident on the surface—cease-fire negotiations broke down and Hamas wouldn’t release any more hostages.
Israelis see other factors at work beneath that, though: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s desire to shore up his coalition, postpone elections, pass a budget, and delay investigations of a growing scandal.
According to Martin Indyk, former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who brokered the end to the 1973 Yom Kippur War, leading to the 1979 Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt, liked to say Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics.
A former U.S. ambassador to Israel, Indyk wrote a book about Kissinger, “Master of the Game.”
And it’s those domestic needs, many Israelis think, that drove Netanyahu to begin the fighting again.
“That’s what the experts think,” Eyal Zisser, vice-rector of Tel Aviv University, told The Epoch Times. “I’m not speaking on behalf of [all] Israelis. But experts, the political class, and [media] panelists. That’s what they say.”
Michael Milshtein heads the Palestinian Studies Forum at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center. During 25 years in the Israel Defense Forces, his last role was heading IDF Intelligence’s Palestinian Department.
When the war started, Milshtein said, “It was amazing. There was an intense consensus and solidarity. People were ready to sacrifice their lives for the war in Gaza.
“But this time,” Milshtein told The Epoch Times,“ when people don’t understand how the war is going to help release the hostages, I’m not sure people are ready to go immediately to any mission this government sends them to.”
And this time, he said, if reserve officers are called up again after having served several hundred days already since the Oct. 7, 2023, attack, “many soldiers will say no.”
Budget, Elections, Qatargate
Netanyahu must pass a 2025 budget next week or trigger elections he'd rather put off.His ruling coalition has been shaky: the ultra-Orthodox belonging to it are upset about efforts to draft ultra-Orthodox men who have, since Israel’s creation, enjoyed draft exemptions.
That the ultra-Orthodox, or haredi, still largely avoid military service while enjoying government welfare subsidies, said Milshtein, embitters reservists looking at yet another call-up.
Netanyahu’s resumption of war pleased one key party: Itamar Ben Gvir, who resigned his position as National Security Minister in January to protest against the cease-fire, taking two fellow ministers from his Otzma Yehudit party with him.
The right-wing firebrand advocates finishing the job of destroying Hamas.
Gvir rejoined the ruling coalition and cabinet this week. He brought the two other ministers back with him. That shores up Netanyahu’s position on the budget, and he likely has enough votes to pass it, according to the Jerusalem Post.
“Many see it [the renewed fighting] as a mistake, a political step, as spin, to divert public anger against the Netanyahu government,” Harel Chorev, a senior researcher at Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Dayan Center, told The Epoch Times.
Demonstrations to free the hostages have gone on throughout the war. Beyond the hostage issue itself, they have often been seen as continuations of anti-government protests that nearly paralyzed the country in 2023 before the Oct. 7 attack.
In the past week, anti-government protesters added another issue: Netanyahu’s impending dismissal of Ronen Bar, the head of the Israel Security Agency, or Shin Bet.
The cabinet unanimously approved Bar’s firing on March 21, effective on April 10.
Netanyahu’s detractors call his move an effort to derail Shin Bet’s investigation called Qatargate: the accusation that Qatar paid two high-ranking Netanyahu aides to improve its image in Israel.
Most Israelis, Milshtein said, see Qatar as an enemy allied with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and others sworn to destroy the Jewish state.
Shin Bet investigates foreign powers trying to influence Israel’s domestic affairs, Milshtein said.
“This was shocking for Israelis,” he said. “The basic reputation of Qatar here in Israel is very bad. It was bad before Oct. 7, and after it, horrible. People understand Qatar is not a neutral player.”
Some eye the war dubiously for strategic reasons, saying Netanyahu still has no plan for what to do with Gaza after destroying Hamas.
“The government has no strategic aim other than the political survival of the government,‘ Zisser said. ”If there’s no end goal, no vision for the future of Gaza, we’ll always be stuck in ongoing war, in rounds of violence.”
Caught by Surprise
Israel resumed air attacks on Gaza on March 18. The government said it had likely killed much of Hamas’s top leadership—leaders who had replaced those killed during the 15 months of war that preceded the Jan. 19 cease-fire.As many as 400 Gazans were killed on the first day alone.
Israel’s leadership has promised a steady intensification of the attack.
On March 19, it announced the beginning of a “limited ground operation” aimed at retaking the nearly four-mile-wide Netzarim Corridor, which Israel had established earlier in the war to cut off Gaza’s south from its north and impede Hamas’ movement and transfer of arms.
Tactically, Israel got the jump on the terrorist group.
“It seems it caught Hamas and the population by surprise,” Chorev said. That Israel might be contemplating military action as negotiations stalled was no secret, he said.
“But we know the senior officials were killed in their homes, in their beds. Usually, when this begins, they go down into the tunnels.”
The losses of leadership by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad are significant, said Chorev, who specializes in Palestinians, Shiites, and terrorism.
The Day After
There are some reasons why Israel might succeed this time when it didn’t in the first 15 months of fighting, Chorev said.The first time around, the IDF left 30 percent of Gaza relatively untouched, including half of Gaza City and central Gaza near refugee camps.
The hostages were concentrated in those areas, and the IDF didn’t want to risk hitting them, he said.
There was no way the IDF could finish the job leaving that much territory alone, he said. It gave Hamas too much opportunity to survive, regroup, rebuild, and recruit.
And, he said, Israeli units raided areas without occupying them.
“We didn’t build a military government there, that would supply Gazans with everything they need, and create a ‘Day After’ so that Hamas would not come back.”
Chorev said conventional Israel wisdom has been to avoid resuming a military administration over Gaza.
A previous one was so problematic former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally pulled Israel, including thousands of Jewish settlers, out in 2005, leading to Hamas’ takeover.
But there may now be no other option, Chorev said.
There were numerous reasons for not occupying earlier in the war, he said, including the manpower needs on the Lebanon and Syrian fronts and in the West Bank.
Plus, Chorev said, the Biden administration held Israel back by limiting not only shipments of heavy bombs but also the resupply of tank and artillery shells and military bulldozers.
This put the IDF’s infantry at risk, as they were forced to assault Hamas positions with only light weapons.
“Many were killed by explosive charges only because they didn’t have a tank or artillery cannon to do the job instead of them.”
The Biden administration did not “project a strong enough stand in the way you expect from the most powerful country in the world,” Chorev said.
Washington thus forced Israel to back off for three months in spring 2024, delaying its assault on Rafah in what proved to be a futile attempt to get Hamas to agree to a six-week cease-fire and hostage exchange over Ramadan.
Hamas saw they didn’t need to agree to it and meanwhile used the time to regroup.
“Diplomacy failed. It wasted the time of the hostages,” he said.
When Israel finally attacked Rafah, it did not bring about the humanitarian disaster Washington had decried.
“At the end of the day, the IDF showed it was doable,” Chorev said. “We wished we'd done it far earlier.”
In the first six months of 2024, Israel received half the military shipments from the United States it had gotten in the war’s first three months, he said.
“We still owe a great debt to America,” Chorev said. He said the Biden administration made errors, but in good faith.
Now, he said, President Donald Trump projects strength and power. “We believe this is the way an empire should act.”
Washington no longer holds Israel back.
Hamas has recruited 25,000 new fighters to replace about 20,000 previously killed, Chorev said. But the new ones don’t have the experience or training their predecessors had, he said.
And Israel has more tactical latitude, he said: there are fewer remaining hostages and less risk of accidentally hitting them.
Milshtein said Netanyahu needs to be more honest with the nation.
He’s pledged both strategic change in Gaza and freeing the hostages, but most Israelis think those goals are mutually exclusive.
“We’re not stupid. We understand you can’t do both things.”
Israel may have to tolerate Hamas long enough to get the hostages back, Milshtein said.
Miki Michaeli isn’t an expert. He’s Israel’s version of a Gold Star dad.
His son Omri Michaeli, a reservist in the elite Duvdevan unit and a war hero whose story and photos had hit the newspapers in the past, dashed to the frontier the morning of Oct. 7, 2023, without waiting for orders.
He had a car full of comrades and a trunk full of guns. He died that morning kicking in a door at the hard-hit Kfar Aza kibbutz, fighting to retake it from Hamas.
Michaeli and his wife Rina just got back from a trip to Australia and New Zealand to raise money for the Duvdevan, with whom his son fought for 17 years.
The funds will go to bereaved families and to take care of the wounded, he told The Epoch Times.
He also thinks Netanyahu resumed the attack for his own political benefit. He doesn’t think Netanyahu is making a sincere effort to free the remaining hostages and missed a couple of opportunities to free some in 2024.
Michaeli said he used to support Likud, the right-of-center party that Netanyahu leads, but changed his mind some years ago as more stories of alleged corruption emerged.
He sees the difficulties that Netanyahu faces, though.
The way out of Gaza involves a new government to replace Hamas, but installing a military government for the transition would be risky for Israel’s soldiers, he said.
His late son was once wounded in Gaza.
“You’re not fighting a country that cares about the civilians,” he said. “The worst groups—Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah—you can’t talk logic to those people.”
