By Jamal Kanj
Netanyahu’s deliberate undermining of US-led negotiations for prisoners’ swap exemplifies his quintessential diabolical persona.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared that Israel’s war on Gaza will continue until achieving what he terms “total victory.”
Instead of critically examining Netanyahu’s vague and open-ended objectives, much of the Western media and many governments frame the onslaught as self-defense, and some even normalize the genocide as a “humane” attempt to “free” Israeli captives.
At the same time, the same pundits decontextualized the Palestinian right to self-defense by ignoring that the October 7 revolt was a direct response to over two decades of Israel’s imposed “starvation diet” blockade on Gaza. Exactly, as the West turns a blind eye, and continues to enable Israel’s theft of Palestinian-occupied land in the West Bank to benefit Jewish-only colonies.
Meanwhile, these media outlets downplay or dismiss Israel’s treacherous undeclared war objectives, even to the detriment of Israeli captives and the immense civilian suffering in Gaza.
For over a year, Netanyahu has prioritized an agenda to reoccupy and ethnically cleanse northern Gaza rather than engage in negotiations for prisoners’ swap. Especially since the release of Israeli captives would undermine one of Netanyahu’s primary pretexts for pursuing his sinister objectives.
This is only possible in the wake of Western leaders embracing Netanyahu’s racist perspective, focusing only on the well-being of Israeli captives, while ignoring the over 10,000 Palestinian hostages held in Israeli jails, and the welfare of the 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza. For instance, Joe Biden has expressed recently his concern over Netanyahu potentially delaying action to secure the release of Israeli captives until January 20, 2025, while expressing no sympathy for the suffering of Palestinians in 2024 and beyond.
With the conspicuous silence or impotence of world bodies, the Israeli captives became a convenient fig leaf under which Netanyahu saw as an opportunity to reoccupy Gaza. It is worth recalling that in 2005, Netanyahu resigned from the Israeli government in protest against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s decision to “disengage” and remove the Jewish-only colonies from the Gaza Strip.
Immediately following October 7, Netanyahu launched a genocidal war, disregarding the Palestinian Resistance’s proposal for prisoners’ exchange. His decision to pursue war instead of negotiations was motivated by several factors:
a) Deflect responsibility for the intelligence failure under his watch.
b) Evade scrutiny of his role in facilitating external funding to Hamas.
c) Execute a campaign of genocide and ethnic cleansing to reoccupy Gaza.
The strategy to ethnically cleanse Gaza was openly advocated by Israel’s racist Finance Minister, Bezalel Smotrich, who three months following October 7 called for Palestinians to leave Gaza. The scion of a Ukrainian immigrant repeated the century-old European Zionist myth of blooming the desert¾a narrative that not only ignores historical and geographical realities but also contradicts his own Old Testament that once described Canaan, the land of the Filastin (Palestine), as the “land of milk and honey,” before the ancient Hebrews migrated from their original homes to Palestine.
Further, and on January 1, 2024, Smotrich’s fellow racist National Security Minister, Itamar Ben Gvir, declared in a Knesset speech that Israel should never withdraw from any territory it occupies and explained that the establishment of new Jewish-only colonies in Gaza as “an important thing.” The following day, on January 2, Ben Gvir doubled down, stating that displacing “hundreds of thousands” of Palestinians from Gaza would help pave the way for the creation of the new Jewish-only colonies.
More recently, on Monday, November 25, Smotrich declared to the Yesha Council, an umbrella group representing the Jewish-only colonies in the occupied West Bank, “We can and must conquer the Gaza Strip.” He claimed there is “a unique opportunity” with Donald Trump’s election to halve Gaza’s population—a veiled euphemism for ethnic cleansing. On Thursday, November 28, Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir echoed similar calls to “reoccupy the Gaza Strip.”
On the ground inside Gaza, the tools of occupation were more explicit in defining the meaning of Netanyahu’s ostensible mantra: “total victory.” Israeli soldiers posed before an orange banner that read, “Only (Jewish-only) settlement (in Gaza) would be considered victory!” Notably, the orange color harkens back to the banners used by the settler movement in 2005 to protest Sharon’s decision to evacuate the Jewish-only colonies from Gaza.
To this end, and starting October 1st, Israel initiated a new phase of targeted genocide by starvation, blocking food aid trucks from entering northern Gaza, particularly the towns of Beit Lahia, Beit Hanoun, Jabalia and camp Jabalia. And where trucks were allowed in, food aid was swapped with sandbags. Starvation has become so widespread in these areas, women and children are forced to scavenge through mounds of trash for food.
On November 29, Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN Human Rights Office for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, stated after visiting Gaza that the “UN had been unable to deliver any aid to northern Gaza” due to “repeated impediments or outright rejections of humanitarian convoys by the Israeli authorities.”
Regarding the genocide by terror, UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk reported that residents of northern Gaza are subjected to “non-stop” bombing. Simultaneously, hundreds of thousands have been ordered to evacuate, likely to make way for new Jewish-only settlements.
As part of the forced depopulation of Gaza’s northern region—the most fertile land in the strip—Israel is constructing a topographic barrier to isolate this area from the rest of Gaza. Beginning in early October, Israel carried out extensive controlled explosions, demolishing multi-story buildings to clear a path for a 5.6-mile road cutting across the strip. This road divides Gaza City from the northern towns of Jabalia, Beit Hanoun, and Beit Lahia. Human Rights Watch (HRW) has characterized this widespread forced displacement as part of an official government policy amounting to “crimes against humanity.”
On November 30, former Defense Minister and IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon confirmed HRW findings, stating that Netanyahu and “far-right” (racist) elements are waging a war of “occupation, annexation, and ethnic cleansing.” He added, “There is no Beit Lahia, there is no Beit Hanoun.”
The live documented ethnic cleansing in Gaza, much like in 1948, alongside the expansion of Jewish-only colonies in the West Bank, underscores the true undeclared objectives in Israel’s ostensible “total victory.”
In this context, Netanyahu’s deliberate undermining of US-led negotiations for prisoners’ swap exemplifies his quintessential diabolical persona: exploiting the predicament of his own Israeli captives to further his cynical undeclared agenda of slaughtering the “Amalek,” and ethnically cleansing Gaza to pave the way for new Jewish-only colonies.
– Jamal Kanj is the author of “Children of Catastrophe,” Journey from a Palestinian Refugee Camp to America, and other books. He writes frequently on Arab world issues for various national and international commentaries. He contributed this article to The Palestine Chronicle
