August 13, 2025, 6:00 AM View Comments ()

Israel’s popularity in the United States is at an all-time low. World leaders are threatening to recognize a theoretical Palestinian state as a symbol of deepening distaste for Israel’s intractable war in the Gaza Strip. Ireland, Spain, and Lithuania are among the countries that have indicated they might arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu if he goes to those countries and haul him before the International Criminal Court on charges of war crimes in Gaza. Violent antisemitism is hitting American cities and rattling the country’s Jewish communities. A rising chorus of Holocaust scholars, former Israeli leaders, human rights groups, Hollywood celebrities, and Israeli intelligentsia are calling Israel’s war in Gaza a genocide. Images of starving Palestinian children have created a new surge of global condemnation for Israeli policies that continue to fuel a famine stalking thousands of Palestinians.

Things may seem bleak for Netanyahu. But the Israeli prime minister is getting just what he wants, and his ongoing war is advancing this Israeli government’s long-term objectives: thwarting any prospects for the creation of a Palestinian state and expanding Israel’s territorial borders.

The contours of Netanyahu’s ambitions were clear in the days after the horrific Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack in southern Israel that left roughly 1,200 people dead and another 250 abducted and taken into Gaza to be used as bargaining chips.

From the start, Netanyahu’s refusal to discuss a “day after” plan meant that, inevitably, the prime minister could fill the self-created void and reoccupy the Gaza Strip, as he is now setting out to do. Netanyahu laid out his three “no’s”: No talks about creating a Palestinian state. No to returning the U.S.-backed Palestinian Authority to govern Gaza. No to an agreement to end the war without a total dismantling of Hamas.

By saying no to the U.S. and all other interlocutors that have sought to bring an end to the war, Netanyahu has put Israel on an inevitable path toward full military occupation of the Gaza Strip.

Israel has methodically destroyed the Gaza Strip’s hospitals, universities, schools, and government buildings. It carried out a smear campaign against the United Nations and successfully sidelined that institution’s decadeslong aid efforts in Gaza, paving the way for armed private contractors favored by U.S. President Donald Trump to step in and create a dystopian aid distribution effort that has led to hundreds of civilian deaths. And Netanyahu has unsuccessfully tried to empower Palestinian families with dodgy track records to challenge Hamas and supplant the Palestinian Authority as Gaza’s next leaders. These Israeli policies have fueled more chaos in Gaza, creating a power vacuum Netanyahu now steps in to fill.

Thanks to Netanyahu, too, the debate has shifted from a question of when Israel will withdraw from all of the Gaza Strip to how much of the Gaza Strip Israel will continue to occupy when the war ends. The Israeli military says it already controls 75 percent of the Gaza Strip—without being able to achieve the government’s stated goals of crushing Hamas or rescuing the 20 remaining Israeli hostages believed to still be alive.

In the meantime, Israeli bulldozers have razed thousands of Palestinian homes along the established Gaza-Israel border, creating a self-declared “buffer zone” to be controlled by Israel. Israel has also razed thousands more homes along the Gaza Strip’s established border with Egypt, ensuring that 2 million Palestinians are fully encircled by Israeli occupation. Israel has razed hundreds more homes to create a military corridor that cuts the Gaza Strip in half, creating two tiny dystopian Palestinian enclaves. Netanyahu is effectively seeking veto power over any Palestinian selected to run the newly created Middle East Bantustans. Amid all the disagreements over who, what, when, and where, Israelis are talking about annexing parts of the Gaza Strip to further expand their country’s borders.

World leaders can recognize a theoretical Palestinian state, but in reality, there is less and less to recognize every day.

When Hamas deposed the Palestinian Authority in the Gaza Strip in 2007, people dryly joked that Palestinians had finally gotten the two-state solution they were demanding; it just wasn’t the two-state solution they were expecting. The Hamas coup further fractured flickering Palestinian aspirations for a state of their own. Netanyahu worked with Qatar, Hamas’s main financial backer, to pump billions of dollars into the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian militants openly trained for Oct. 7 under Israeli surveillance.

Israel occupies not just the Gaza Strip, it also retains military control in key parts of southern Lebanon, in violation of a U.N. cease-fire treaty. And it has refused to withdraw soldiers from southern Syria, where some of Israel’s most ardent defenders argue that the Jewish nation is stepping in to prevent the new Syrian government from carrying out a “genocide” against the country’s minority religious Druze community.

Israel’s most steadfast loyalists have long painted Bibi as a well-intentioned prime minister who has been forced to make unpalatable decisions because he is beholden to the extreme members of his cabinet, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who have both openly declared aspirations to use their immense government power to conquer the Gaza Strip and rebuild Israeli settlements.

Yet while global condemnation of Israel continues to grow, most Israelis express little empathy toward Palestinians. One recent poll found more than 80 percent of Jewish Israelis support forcibly expelling Palestinians from Gaza. A majority of Israelis said they were untroubled by the famine Israel was fueling in Gaza. Netanyahu’s personal popularity remains low, but just like Trump, the Israeli prime minister has neutralized all potential rivals that have tried to topple him.

There’s a story I learned while writing a book about Jerusalem that seems especially germane to Netanyahu’s current worldview.

When the 1948 war that created Israel’s initial borders was coming to an end, Israeli and Jordanian officials used thick grease pens to carve up Jerusalem, with both sides steering around the city’s United Nations compound, creating a small area “between the lines” that was controlled by neither side.

In 1957, nine years into the country’s existence, Israeli civilians, soldiers, and bulldozers crossed into the area between the lines to enable the planting of 100,000 trees on 5,000 acres near the U.N. compound. Jordan objected to Israel’s bold breach of international law and brought its case all the way to the U.N. Security Council.

Golda Meir, one of Israel’s central political leaders who was then serving as foreign minister, refused to back down.

“We know that if we stop this one time, it is harder to start again later,” Meir told members of the cabinet in August 1957. “I think that the best thing we can do is to finish quickly, at the very least, the work with heavy equipment. Indeed, bulldozers are not machine guns.”

In language familiar to diplomatic reporters stationed in Washington and other world capitals, U.S. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. told the U.N. Security Council that the United States hoped that “both sides would refrain from taking any action between the armistice lines that would tend to increase tensions.”

In short, the U.N., the U.S., and the world did nothing. And Israel kept bulldozing.

Israel has successfully employed the same strategy for decades, leading to the establishment of a Jewish settlement program in the West Bank that continues to use military control, ethnic violence, and deadly attacks (including against Americans) to expand its control over land once expected to be part of an independent state of Palestine. Israeli leaders are now talking about annexing large parts—if not all—of the West Bank, something the first Trump administration worked behind the scenes to prevent.

Netanyahu, like Trump the second time around, has learned that the bounds of his power are tested only when some other opposing force steps in to pose a serious challenge. Trump is giving Netanyahu the green light. The Israeli military has begun planning to carry out Trump’s off-the-cuff plan to “voluntarily” depopulate the entire Gaza Strip of its 2 million living Palestinians for redevelopment—an idea critics arguably characterize as ethnic cleansing.

Like Trump, Netanyahu has repeatedly defied doomsayers who wrote his political obituaries. It became a cliche for writers to refer to Netanyahu by his nickname—“the magician”—every time someone declared his political demise and he emerged like a phoenix from the ashes. Israel’s cataclysmic failures on Oct. 7, and in the years leading up to it, were supposed to be the nails in Netanyahu’s coffin, sealing his demise as one of the nation’s most reviled leaders for failing to prevent the worst attack in his nation’s history.

Instead, Netanyahu has persuaded the U.S. to attack Iran’s nuclear program, neutralized the long-feared Hezbollah missile threat from Lebanon, seized control of parts of Syria and Lebanon, floated plans to annex parts of the West Bank, and launched plans to reoccupy the Gaza Strip.

Inch by inch, mile by mile, Netanyahu is expanding Israel’s boundaries in violation of international laws because he faces no serious consequences for doing so.

And that part of Jerusalem between the lines where Israelis planted those contested trees in 1957 in violation of international laws? It’s now known as Jerusalem’s Peace Forest.