Whether or not Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has achieved his aims in the war on Gaza, which reached the 10-month mark on 7 August, it is clear that despite speculation about it his political career he has so far survived.

“This is not surprising because Netanyahu is a master manipulator, though it is just unbelievable that he should have made it this far despite everything,” said one Cairo-based European diplomat. According to this and other Cairo and Tel Aviv-based diplomatic sources, both Western and Arab, it is hard to underestimate the success of the political survival scheme that Netanyahu has taken against the odds, including opposition from within his cabinet, from within the top brass in the Israeli military, and from the public opinion which has been lobbying so hard against him. Further still, it is hard to underestimate the political thick skin he has shown despite the US pressure, international criticism and unprecedented criticism from top world legal bodies.

This week, while the world anticipated a retaliatory attack from Iran for the killing in Tehran of Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh, right after the inauguration of Iran’s new President Masoud Pezeshkian, Netanyahu appointed to introduce a new spokesman, Omer Dostri, a political scientist who openly defended Netanyahu’s policies in the face of internal criticism and blamed US President Joe Biden for not doing enough to support Israel.

Despite the enormous support Biden has shown for Israel in the early months of the war, which came in the wake of a Hamas operation against Israeli targets on 7 October, the US president put serious pressure on the prime minister as the war on Gaza became a humanitarian liability with thousands of Palestinians, mostly women and children, dying on a daily basis in Israeli attacks on designated safe zones, UNRWA schools and hospitals.

“Netanyahu could see early on that Biden was becoming weaker; he heard that in some key Arab capitals, which were never keen on Biden from the start, the US president was not on top of things,” commented the regional diplomat. “Netanyahu’s calculations were based on basically ignoring all the pressure Biden was putting on him and counting on the reluctance of regional powers to put pressure on Biden to end the war.”

It is all too common a statement among regional diplomats that Netanyahu was telling his American interlocutors, including US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and CIA Chief Bill Burns, that he is not in the war against Hamas on his own and that several regional capitals, especially in the Gulf, are on board, given the expanding wish of Arab leaders to see a final and total end to all forms of political Islam. Without the power and lobbying of political Islamic groups, especially militant resistance groups like Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon, “the case of Palestine” is likely to be pushed out of the focus of Arab and Muslim public opinion.

According to the same diplomats, it was not necessarily that Biden was not on board but it was clear that Biden was coming under increasing pressure from his own Democratic Party, from active segments of public opinion and from international humanitarian organisations to “do something” as the horrific images of killed and maimed, starved and homeless Palestinians keep coming to the forefront of international attention.

However, according to a Tel Aviv-based Arab diplomat, Netanyahu took it one step at a time and slowly but surely turned down almost every single pressure Biden exerted on him, including the attempt by the US administration to lobby leading Israeli figures, including Benny Gantz, the opposition leader who left the Israeli ruling coalition, and Yaov Gallant, Israeli minister of defence “whose growing disagreements with Netanyahu have been coming into the open more and more”.

Finally, the same diplomat said, against the wishes of Biden, Netanyahu received repeated bipartisan applause during his speech to the Congress last month on the invitation of US legislators. In Israel, the same diplomat said, Netanyahu’s foes and friends watched as the Israeli prime minister as he met with Donald Trump, former US president and runner for this year’s presidential elections, and the “clear chemistry that the two men seemed to have.”

It is very clear to concerned diplomatic sources that, as he was leaving the US following his speech to Congress, his tense meeting with Biden and more than tense meeting with the now Democratic front runner Kamala Harris, that Netanyahu was just counting down for 9 January 2025 when Trump would find his way back to the Oval Office where he had presided over two of the biggest moments in the contemporary history of Israel: moving the embassy of the US to Jerusalem and signing the Abraham Accords to start a very active normalisation process between Israel and both Bahrain and the UAE.

It was less than 48 hours after Netanyahu’s return to Israel from Washington that Israel conducted the two assassinations of a Hizbullah leader, Fouad Shukr, in the southern zone of Beirut and of the chief of Hamas political bureau, Ismail Haniyeh, in Tehran.

The Israeli programme of targeted killings is old and broad. Since its very inception, Israel has acted to physically eliminate possible targets of concern — not just militants who subscribe to resistance movements but also scientists who were acting to strengthen the military capacities of their Arab and Muslim countries, with Iran being at the forefront.

However, Palestinian resistance militants were always the key target of the Israeli programme of assassinations, especially those of Hamas militant leaders. The list of top Hamas leaders that Israel has been killing includes Yehya Ayyash, Salah Shehadeh, Ismail Abu Shanab, Ahmed Yassin, Abdel-Aziz Al-Rantissi, Ahmed Al-Jaabari and Raed Al-Attar. All were killed following the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993.

Except Yassin and Khaled Meshaal — who survived the 1997 attempt on his life thanks to the intervention of the Jordanian Monarch King Hussein, who gave him the antidote to the poison Israel had given him, the assassinations had targeted militant leaders. In this sense, the killing of Haniyeh, to which Netanyahu alluded without actually acknowledging it during a statement on Israeli TV over the weekend, constitutes a shift in Israeli policy.

According to the source in Tel Aviv, Netanyahu might receive statements of unease from Washington for these killings but “it was only out of concern that they would eliminate the chances for a ceasefire in Gaza that Biden is desperate to achieve before the presidential elections” on 9 November, when the war on Gaza would have reached into its 11th month.

Equally, internal concern over these assassinations is essentially related to the fear that they might reduce the increasingly dismal chances for the hostages, who had survived the aggressive and often indiscriminate Israeli bombings of Gaza, to be handed over as part of the ceasefire deal. “Today, as Israel anticipates some sort of Iranian retaliation, big or small, the biggest worry is that of the families of the hostages who increasingly believe that Netanyahu is not going to hesitate to compromise the lives of their family members to save his political career.”

There is a near consensus among the diplomatic and security sources who have been speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly since the start of the war that, today, nobody could put any serious pressure on Netanyahu to reconsider his scheme which seems to be based on prompting more bloodshed and expanding the volume and scale of the war to prolong his political survival and extend his term as prime minister of Israel.

“A few months back there were moments when the political survival of Netanyahu seemed really at serious risk; however, today it would not at all be surprising if Netanyahu were to wait until the end of his war on Gaza to claim victory and call for early elections that might actually end up keeping him in office,” the source in Tel Aviv said.

However, he added, everything depends on how Iran and its allies will act in the next days and weeks, how Netanyahu will decide his next move, whether or not the region will go ablaze, and who will win the US election.

* A version of this article appears in print in the 8 August, 2024 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly