On the eve of renewed negotiations, Israel stunned observers by striking a Hamas delegation in Qatar. It was widely read as a deliberate attempt to sabotage the talks, an act of political calculation rather than military necessity, designed to ensure the war on Gaza dragged on.
For Benjamin Netanyahu, such manoeuvres are nothing new. War, for him, has never been simply defence—or even deterrence—but a political instrument: a way of blocking any process that might end in peace.
Since its founding, Israel has relied on military power to alter demographics, restrict Palestinian claims to land and sovereignty, and enforce its will through overwhelming force. Netanyahu has refined this into a personal doctrine: endless conflict as a shield against corruption trials, a tool to keep rivals at bay, a means of cultivating his image as the indispensable “security man.”
By prolonging the war, he has also cemented his pact with the far right, expanded settlements and derailed every diplomatic initiative. The strike in Qatar was only the bluntest expression of this longer history.
Netanyahu and his generals
Contrary to appearances, this appetite for war has not always commanded consensus inside Israel.
Guy Ziv’s Netanyahu Vs The Generals: The Battle for Israel's Future (Cambridge University Press, 2024) maps a widening gulf between the prime minister and the country’s security establishment, usually the natural ally of any leader. Based on interviews with 46 senior officials, Ziv shows Netanyahu repeatedly defied the advice of military and intelligence chiefs.
On Gaza, he was accused of bolstering Hamas by weakening the Palestinian Authority (PA) and enforcing a siege that bred only misery and militancy, culminating in the 7 October 2023 attack.
On Iran, the generals opposed his calls for a pre-emptive strike, preferring the flawed 2015 nuclear deal as at least a brake on escalation.
In the occupied West Bank, they warned that settlement expansion was driving Israel towards a one-state apartheid reality. Netanyahu, Ziv argues, has used “security” chiefly as political currency, manipulating elections and shielding himself from trial.
The struggle went beyond policy into a fight for influence. Netanyahu passed laws to limit the entry of retired generals into politics, fearing they would challenge his dominance. But the army’s criticism carried little public weight.
Since the trauma of 1973, its prestige has waned; the collapse of the left after Oslo allowed Netanyahu to cast himself as a bulwark against “false peace”; the rise of nationalist populism gave him a constituency immune to military dissent.
Ziv concludes that this rift has fractured Israel’s decision-making.
Once assumed to be a partnership, the relationship between politicians and generals has split into two visions: the military’s pragmatic preference for containment and compromise, and the radical right’s drive for permanent expansion.
The result, he warns, is a drift towards either binationalism or entrenched apartheid.
A historian's warning
If Ziv offers an anatomy of decision-making, Avi Shlaim—writing in Jamie Stern-Weiner’s edited volume Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm (OR Books, 2024)—sets the current war in the longer arc of Zionist history. Just months after 7 October, Shlaim predicted the path Netanyahu would take. Two years on, his analysis looks less prophetic than descriptive.
Hamas’s attack, he argued, “did not come out of nowhere.” It was the product of an “exceptionally brutal and illegal occupation” since 1967 and a suffocating blockade since 2006.
Israel, in his words, is a state that “lives by the sword,” where force is the first resort rather than the last. The doctrine of “mowing the lawn”, occasional wars to weaken Hamas while leaving it in place, collapsed on 7 October. Military superiority could no longer conceal political bankruptcy.
Shlaim dissected Netanyahu’s motives on two levels. Personally, war offered a lifeline: a way to reorder national priorities around an “existential threat” and push corruption trials into the background.
Ideologically, Netanyahu inherited the “iron wall” doctrine of his father’s generation—force first, negotiation later—but without the second half. His central mission was to prevent a Palestinian state.
Most chilling was Shlaim’s use of leaked Israeli intelligence papers from October 2023, which set out three options for Gaza.
The “optimal” one envisaged mass displacement into Sinai, enforced by a buffer zone and followed by the indefinite suspension of Gaza’s political status—in effect, a second Nakba. This, he argued, was no improvisation but the continuation of a Zionist logic: “as much land as possible with as few Arabs as possible.”
The rhetoric of the war reinforced the point. Defence minister Yoav Gallant’s description of Palestinians as “human animals” and president Isaac Herzog’s claim that “the entire people of Gaza is responsible” were not slips but signals, preparing the ground for mass displacement.
Starvation, the bombing of hospitals, the making of Gaza “unliveable”: strategy, not collateral damage.
The parallels with 1948 were unmistakable. Then, displacement was carried out under the cover of the “war of independence.” Now, it proceeds under the cover of the “war on Hamas.” The goal is the same: empty the land.
Levy's indictment
If Shlaim provides the longue durée, Gideon Levy supplies the daily record.
The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe (Verso Books, 2024) collects a decade of his journalism, charting wars whose timing owed more to political convenience than security strategy. “Seventeen operations in nineteen years,” Levy writes: “a war almost every year.”
He portrays Gaza as Israel’s laboratory: a testing ground for weapons, a proving ground for repression, while West Bank settlements expand under the cover of war.
Netanyahu, he argues, used the shock of 7 October as pretext for a total war whose aims extended far beyond hostages or Hamas.
“Behind all this lies Israeli arrogance,” Levy writes: the belief that Israel can act with impunity—detaining, killing, expelling—while settlers unleash their own violence unchecked. That arrogance, he concludes, is what made 7 October possible in the first place.
For Levy, the absence of strategy is itself a strategy: keeping the conflict open, ready to be instrumentalised at politically useful moments.
Ceasefires were rejected not because they were unworkable but because they risked granting Hamas legitimacy. The priority, he argues, was never to end the war, nor even to rescue hostages, but to prolong it.
Netanyahu lit the war to escape accountability, suspend his trial, and unify a divided electorate. Meanwhile, settlement activity accelerated in the West Bank.
Levy documents ministers calling to “wipe out Gaza” and promote the “voluntary transfer” of Palestinians, while dissenting voices inside Israel were branded treasonous. The war, he argues, long ago shed any pretence of deterrence or defence. What remains is the perpetuation of violence for its own sake, at the cost of Israel’s moral legitimacy and international standing.
America's complicity
Bob Woodward’s War (Simon & Schuster, 2024) shifts the focus to Washington. If Netanyahu emerges as manipulator-in-chief, Woodward shows how American complicity enabled him. Biden, in private, called Netanyahu “a really bad man,” dishonest and self-serving. Yet in public, he offered “absolute support.”
From the first days after 7 October, the US shielded Israel diplomatically and armed it militarily, even as the White House received daily reports of starvation, bombed hospitals and collapsing infrastructure.
Biden tried to stop the war from widening, furious when Israel assassinated an Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander in Damascus and later struck Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, both without consultation.
When Netanyahu pressed for a pre-emptive strike on Hezbollah, citing “confirmed” intelligence of an imminent attack, Biden refused. The “drones,” it turned out, were birds.
On humanitarian aid, the record is damning.
Israel slashed truck deliveries from 500 a day to a handful. Biden pleaded for 350; Netanyahu allowed 20. Hospitals went dark, infants died in incubators, famine loomed. Antony Blinken attempted to press Netanyahu but achieved little. Ashdod port, proposed as a relief channel, remained closed.
Israel refused; Washington acquiesced.
Woodward concludes the war exposed a fracture in America’s self-image. The administration knew the scale of the catastrophe yet chose to prioritise its alliance with Israel. The US could no longer claim neutrality, still less the mantle of democracy.
Instead, it became an explicit partner in war. The result, he argues, is not just diplomatic damage but moral failure: America placed itself on the wrong side of history and helped Gaza to die.
Catastrophe without end
Nearly two years on, images from Gaza eclipse the speeches: emaciated children, hospitals without power, families erased under rubble. These will remain in the collective memory, not the rhetoric of deterrence or balance of power.
Taken together, the books cited here expose the underlying logic: war as a survival strategy for a corrupt leader, displacement as demographic engineering, arrogance as an ideology, and complicity as a policy.
Ziv shows the rift inside Israel between generals and politicians.
Shlaim traces the continuity from 1948 to the present. Levy records the cruelty of perpetual war. Woodward documents American knowledge and acquiescence.
The catastrophe of Gaza is not only Israel’s doing, nor only America’s enabling. It is a test for the world. So far, the world has failed.
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