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Rosenberg asks in Foreign Policy whether Netanyahu needs another war
Image credit: Benjamin Netanyahu — Wikimedia Commons · License
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Benjamin Netanyahu's path to re-election on 27 October may run through a manufactured security crisis, and the likeliest theatre is the occupied West Bank, David E. Rosenberg argued in Foreign Policy on Thursday. Rosenberg is the economics editor and a columnist at the English edition of Haaretz.
His starting point is the polls: Likud stagnating or slipping while Gadi Eisenkot's party rises, seven weeks out.
A July survey by Israel's Institute for National Security Studies, which he cites, found 37 per cent of Israelis rating the country's security situation bad or very bad against 26 per cent calling it good, and 49 per cent of Netanyahu's own supporters in the pessimistic camp.
For a politician who built a brand as "Mr Security," Rosenberg wrote, that is the number to repair.
Turkey as the stage#
Rosenberg reads Netanyahu's 18 August bombing of Syria's Abu al-Duhur air base, and his escalating language about Turkey, as preparation of Israeli opinion for a confrontation. He quotes Tom Barrack, Donald Trump's envoy to Turkey and Syria: "One theory is they were just baiting Turkey, and it's a very aggressive, but maybe well-received, pre-election concept."
Trump's investment in Syrian stability may limit that option, in Rosenberg's telling. The West Bank, he wrote, offers no such brake.
The West Bank as the risk#
Settler violence has grown "more brazen" in recent weeks and now reaches Palestinians, foreign journalists and occasionally Israeli soldiers, Rosenberg wrote, while the army's chief of staff has warned that the situation is out of control and the government refuses to intervene.
His reading is that the government's tolerance of land seizures and attacks could be designed to provoke a Palestinian response large enough to justify a major military operation before the vote.
He does not claim to know that this is the plan. His argument is that a leader facing the loss of office, his legacy and his criminal trial has reasons to escalate that a war-weary public does not, and that the incentives point in one direction.
Foreign Policy is a Washington magazine of international affairs; Rosenberg's piece is an analysis, and the argument is his. It appeared on the day Israeli police made a first arrest over the settler attack on Qusra and Ben Gvir published his Gaza emigration plan.
