While an endless military operation allows the prime minister to cling to power, it also fulfills a larger ideological goal: preventing Palestinian statehood.
by Meron Rapoport, +972 Magazine
It took Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu more than a month to present to the Israeli public any kind of exit strategy from the war that Israel has been waging on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip since October 7. The war will end, he said in a press conference on Nov. 11, “after Hamas has been eliminated. Gaza will be demilitarized and won’t be a threat to the State of Israel. The IDF will continue to have security control over Gaza to prevent terror.”
He went on: “Any place where there’s no Israeli security control, terror returns, entrenches itself, and harms us. This has been proven also in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank]. Therefore, I will not agree to give up on security control under any circumstances.”
When asked about the possibility of the Palestinian Authority (PA) returning to rule Gaza, Netanyahu replied: “There will be no civil authority that educates its children to hate Israel or kill Israelis. There cannot be an authority that pays money to the families of murderers. There cannot be an authority whose leader has still not condemned the massacre. There will need to be something else — but in any case, with our security control.”
A few things can be inferred from these comments. The first is that Netanyahu is aiming for a very long — maybe even endless — war. The Israeli army may indeed be advancing through Gaza, forcibly displacing all the residents from the areas it captures, and destroying those areas to their very foundations.
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