Let’s unpack the essence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu utterance at Monday’s disastrous press conference.
Let’s unpack the essence of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s utterances at Monday’s disastrous press conference. In a nutshell, he told the Israeli public, he told the anguished families of the still surviving hostages held captive by Hamas in Gaza and the grieving families of the murdered ones, he told President Joe Biden, he told Diaspora Jewry, he told Hamas, he told the world that he never intended to make any deal to rescue any of the hostages, that he will never make such a deal, and that his narcissistic, egocentric intention is to continue waging war in Gaza, perhaps forever.
That’s the gist of his belligerent and bellicose comments. He made clear that everything he ever said to the contrary to Biden, to Vice President Kamala Harris, to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, to French President Emmanuel Macron, to anyone, was a sham, a subterfuge, a delaying tactic, an outright lie.
Israel’s war goals, Netanyahu declared defiantly, were “to destroy Hamas, to bring back all of our hostages, to ensure that Gaza will no longer present a threat to Israel, and to safely return the residents of the northern border”, adding that “three of those war goals go through one place: the Philadelphi Corridor”, a narrow 14 kilometer-long (8.7 miles) stretch along the Egyptian-Gaza border, which, he contended, “is Hamas’s pipeline for oxygen and rearmament.”
His insistence on the Philadelphi Corridor, which the IDF only took control of in May, as the centerpiece of his strategy to scuttle any deal for any type of ceasefire that would rescue any of the hostages is of relatively recent vintage.
As Yair Lapid, a leader of the opposition in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, succinctly put it: “Israel evacuated the Philadelphi Corridor 19 years ago, and Netanyahu voted in favor. Both in the government and in the Knesset. Netanyahu was prime minister for 15 years. It did not occur to him to recapture the Philadelphi Corridor. The war began on Oct. 7. Until May 20 . . . he did not bother to send the IDF to the Philadelphi Corridor.”
It was only in July, after months and months of stringing Biden, Blinken, the families of the hostages, and his own negotiating team along, that he had an epiphany of biblical proportions and suddenly took note of the Philadelphi Corridor.
This epiphany came in the form of an ultimatum from the mouth of Orit Strock, his hardline settlements and national projects minister, who hails from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s far-right, ultranationalist Religious Zionism party. This is the same Smotrich, incidentally, who said more recently that “it might be justified and moral” to “cause two million civilians [in Gaza] to die of hunger.”
In any event, on July 16, Strock threw Netanyahu an unexpected lifeline by threatening in no uncertain terms that if the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) were to leave the Philadelphi Corridor and the Netzarim Corridor that neatly splits Gaza into two, “we will not be in the government, we are dismantling the government.
