The world is preparing for the first anniversary of October 7, 2023 — many will honour the victims, some will celebrate the perpetrators. It will be a painful and revealing moment, as so much of the past year has been.
But Sept. 22 also bears remembering. Exactly one year ago Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the UN general assembly in New York. The Netanyahu speech needs remembering, too — mostly by the man himself, who seems to have entirely forgotten it, conceding to Hamas a victory that certainly is not due.
Netanyahu has granted three major victories to Hamas. The first of the three great Netanyahu failures was the catastrophically inadequate security response on October 7 itself. The second is the Israeli failure to decisively conclude the war with a plan for Gaza’s future, achieve a ceasefire or secure the hostages. The third failure is to lose sight of Israel’s strategic priorities — the subject of the UN address a year ago.
It is spectacular record of failure in less than a year. The only success, which is personal, is Netanyahu’s continuation in office, which is apparently his highest priority. That Netanyahu is still prime minister must be regarded as a massive failure of Israel’s entire political class.
Everything looked different a year ago. An ebullient Netanyahu arrived in New York to announce the vindication of his nearly 30-year policy of separating Arab-Israeli peace from the Palestinian question, above all from a Palestinian state.
“I made the case that Israel and the Arab states shared many common interests, and that I believed that these many common interests could facilitate a breakthrough for a broader peace in our region,” Netanyahu said. “The common threat of Iran has brought Israel and many Arab states closer than ever before in a friendship that I have not seen in my lifetime.”
“You applaud now, but at the time, many dismissed my optimism as wishful thinking,” he continued. “Their pessimism was based on a quarter-century of good intentions and failed peacemaking. Why did they always meet failure? Because they were based on one false idea, that unless we first concluded a peace agreement with the Palestinians, no other Arab state would normalize its relations with Israel.”
The Trump-brokered Abraham Accords in 2020 changed that. A bit prematurely, but reasonably, Netanyahu announced at the UN that Saudi Arabia would soon be included in the Abraham Accords. He held up a map of “The New Middle East” with Jordan, Egypt, Sudan, United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia all coloured a serene (Islamic) green around Israel. Then he took out a red magic marker and drew a sweeping arrow from Asia, across the Arabian peninsula, toward Europe — the new Middle East becoming a corridor of exchange, encounter and enrichment.
That was the promise of Sept. 22. The attack of October 7, carried out by Iran’s ally Hamas, was intended to frustrate that promise — even at the cost of a devastating Israeli response.
Israel’s overarching strategic goal should have been to preserve the promise and not grant Hamas the victory of tearing up Netanyahu’s map of the “New Middle East.”
Israel’s Arab allies have done their part. There have been only muted murmurs of supposed Islamic/Arab solidarity with Gaza. There has been no significant opposition to Netanyahu’s strategy of pulverizing Gaza to eliminate the Hamas threat.
Most astonishing, when Iran launched missiles and drones against Israel in April, the attacks were repelled with assistance from the United States, United Kingdom, France, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. That two Arab countries would side in a military operation with Israel against Iran indicated that a new Middle East had arrived.
I wrote then that the overarching strategic and diplomatic goal of Israel was to advance that new framework for the Middle East, not to become ever more fearsome in the old framework.
Since the April attacks, Netanyahu has not shown any degree of imagination in that regard. His only response is to demonstrate that Israel is more fearsome than ever, able to fight wars against Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon at the same time.
The co-ordinated pager explosions in Lebanon this past week were a perfect example of that. Israel managed to demonstrate its superiority in the deployment of improvised explosive devices on a handheld scale. But a battle over who is better at IEDs is not one that is in Israel’s interests.
Israelis know this, which is why tens of thousands have taken to the streets against Netanyahu. They demand creativity in diplomacy, not improvised detonations.
A year ago Netanyahu went to the UN to announce a new Middle East was being born. Hamas and Iran conspired to throttle that baby. Netanyahu risks drowning the baby in the bloodwater.
It’s time for Netanyahu to remember what he said a year ago. And if he no longer thinks it possible, then to allow Israelis a new prime minister capable of creating a new Middle East.
National Post