The Corrupt Bargain Behind Gaza's Catastrophe

The Atlantic

4 days ago

When Benjamin Netanyahu returned to power in 2022 after a brief period of political exile, he did so on the backs of the most extreme allies in Israeli history. Fourteen of his coalition's 64 seats were held by parties led by two explicitly anti-Arab lawmakers: Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich. Ben-Gvir had been charged and convicted of support for terrorism and racist incitement. He was a disciple of Meir Kahane, a rabbi who called for the expulsion of Israel's Arabs and whose political party was banned from Parliament for its radicalism. Smotrich had advocated segregating Jews and Arabs in Israeli maternity wards and told his Arab colleagues in the Knesset that they were 'enemies' who were 'here by mistake.'
Both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich expressed sympathy for violent settler attacks in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Both sought to annex the West Bank and disenfranchise or expel the Palestinians living there. And both became ministers in Netanyahu's new government, because the Israeli leader desperately needed their support.
The math was simple: The parties in Netanyahu's coalition received just 48.4 percent of the vote and attained a parliamentary majority only through a quirk of the Israeli electoral system. This meant that Netanyahu entered office in a profoundly precarious position—on trial for corruption and beholden to extremists who could bring him down if he bucked their demands.
Recognizing how bad this arrangement looked from the outside, Netanyahu embarked on an international PR campaign to assure outsiders that he, not the extremists, was running the show. 'They are joining me,' he told NPR. 'I'm not joining them.' The trajectory of the war in Gaza has conclusively disproved this spin. At crucial junctures, the prime minister's choices have been corrupted by the need to cater to those with the ability to end his grip on power. As a result, he has undermined Israel's war effort and shredded the country's international standing abroad. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the events that precipitated the Gaza hunger crisis.
Israel was faced with a dilemma after Hamas butchered some 1,200 Israelis and took hundreds more hostage. The United Nations Relief Works Agency was the only actor capable of delivering humanitarian aid to the civilians of Gaza during the ensuing war, but UNRWA was compromised by Hamas, which siphoned supplies for itself and sold them at a markup to fund its operations. Although the extent of this co-option is disputed, the fact of it cannot be denied. Employees of the organization were among the perpetrators of the October 7 atrocities, as even the UN itself has acknowledged; hostages have testified that they were held by UNRWA staff or in UNRWA facilities. 'All aid goes down'—that is, underground to Hamas—and 'does not reach the nation,' an elderly Palestinian woman told Al Jazeera in December 2023. 'Everything goes to their houses. They take it, they will even shoot me and do whatever they want to me, Hamas.'
Hamas has obscured its subversion of aid by intimidating aid workers, civilians, and media outlets. In the early days of the war, the terrorist group reportedly looted fuel and medical supplies from UNRWA's headquarters in Gaza City. The aid organization initially disclosed this on social media but then deleted the post. It had good reason to worry. More than a decade ago, a senior UNRWA officer in Gaza attempted to investigate whether any of the organization's local employees were moonlighting with Hamas. He received a funeral bouquet in the mail, and later a live grenade, at which point he was evacuated from the territory. According to The New York Times, Matthias Schmale, the head of UNRWA in Gaza from 2017 to 2021, gave a TV interview that upset Hamas; he was pushed out of his position after the group 'informed UNRWA that it could no longer guarantee his security.'
'Would I be totally surprised if at the end of the day there is proof that 2,000 UNRWA staff are members of Hamas?' Schmale told the paper. 'No, I wouldn't be,' though 'it would be a bit shocking if it is such a high number.'
Faced with this predicament, as well as pressure from the Biden administration to allow more aid, Israel had several credible options for providing humanitarian assistance. Starting on day one of its ground invasion, the army could have begun building a new aid mechanism for Gaza's civilians by setting up non-UNRWA distribution centers, in conjunction with local and international partners, in each area where it assumed control. Or Israel could simply have flooded the enclave with so much aid that Hamas would not be able to resell it for significant value. This latter option had the downside of inevitably funneling food and fuel to Hamas in its tunnels, perversely bolstering the group's fight against the country supplying it. But realistically speaking, there was no way to starve Hamas out of its well-stocked underground fortress without first starving the desperate Gazan civilian population, which, as ever, served as the group's human shield.
Israel chose neither of these options. Instead, it allowed UNRWA to continue limited operations, while repeatedly tightening and relaxing restrictions in response to complaints about the diversion of aid. Israel then agreed to surge supplies into the territory during the 42-day cease-fire in January—only to completely blockade all aid for two months afterward. Finally, with Gaza on the brink, Israel and the United States launched the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation in May, attempting at last to displace UNRWA. This effort to implement an entirely new system on the fly, under the worst possible conditions, unsurprisingly failed. Both Israeli troops and Hamas killed Palestinians trying to reach the distribution sites, and food prices in Gaza skyrocketed, culminating in the crisis we see today.
Israel's choices here are contradictory and do not make moral or strategic sense. But they do make political sense from Netanyahu's perspective. Since the start of the war, the prime minister has contended with pressures from opposing directions: from international partners insisting that he sustain Gaza's civilians and from the right flank of his coalition, which seeks to ethnically cleanse those civilians and repopulate the area with Jewish settlements. Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have explicitly called for the 'voluntary migration' of the area's Palestinian population and advocated ending humanitarian aid as a lever to achieve it. 'The only way to win the war and bring back the hostages is to completely stop the 'humanitarian' aid, conquer the entire Gaza Strip, and encourage voluntary migration,' Ben-Gvir declared on Saturday on social media.
To keep this faction in check—and keep himself in power—Netanyahu needed to ensure that the choices he made could satisfy not just military imperatives or international diktats but also the hard right's demands. Every step he authorized had to be dual use: ostensibly for a strategic purpose but also capable of potentially advancing the far right's plan. In practice, pursuing these two goals at the same time is incompatible with a just and successfully prosecuted war: It is impossible to provide aid and also withhold it, to pursue a limited war against Hamas to free hostages and also a war of conquest.
The longer the conflict has gone on, the more obvious the compromised nature of Netanyahu's decision making has become. Initially, the Israeli leader was restrained by pressure from the Biden administration (which pushed for more aid and compelled Netanyahu to reject Gazan displacement), Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (who insisted that Gaza be returned to Palestinian governance), and the centrist wartime-coalition partner Benny Gantz (who advocated for a cease-fire). But Gantz left the coalition in June 2024, Joe Biden was replaced by Donald Trump in November, Netanyahu fired Gallant the day Trump won, and then Trump himself proposed relocating the Gazan population in order to construct a 'Riviera in the Middle East.'
The result: Today, the only pressure on Netanyahu is from the far right, which is effectively running his war policy against the desires of a large majority of Israelis who oppose settlements in Gaza and support a hostage deal to end the war.
This bleak reality and its consequences explain the growing alienation of many of even Israel's strongest international allies. After October 7, Israel's partners may have thought they were interfacing with a typical—if deeply conservative—Israeli government. Now they actually seem to be dealing with a Smotrich/Ben-Gvir government in a Netanyahu-shaped trench coat. Belatedly, a group of European countries, as well as Britain, Australia, and Canada, are attempting—without American assistance—to reimpose the pressures that might compel Netanyahu to change course.
Hamas has agency in all this. It chose to launch the October 7 attack knowing that it would provoke a devastating response; it chooses to hold hostages in underground dungeons under inhumane conditions; it chooses to hide within and beneath Gaza's civilians; it chooses to appropriate aid intended for those civilians to fuel its messianic war machine. Israel also faces prejudice and unfair expectations that would not be faced by many other countries in such circumstances. But Netanyahu has agency in how he chooses to respond to these realities. He has made his choice—and Palestinians and Israelis will continue to pay the price for it until he makes a different one.