It has become a familiar refrain: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says that he is “changing the face of the Middle East.”
It is, he says, “a war of rebirth.”
It is, in a sense, undoubtedly true.
Israel has troops in Lebanon, Syria and Gaza. It’s vowed to demilitarize huge swaths of all three – backed by an unquestioning ally in the White House. The war in Gaza, which Israel restarted earlier this month, looks increasingly like it will lead to occupation for months or even years to come.
But Netanyahu is a master tactician, not a master strategist, former Israeli national security officials tell CNN. He has seized opportunities to claw himself back from being in charge during the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust to unimaginable heights of power, at least in Israel.
To cement his legacy, however, and for a grand strategy to materialize, the country and its national security leaders will need to overcome some fundamental and maybe intractable contradictions.
“We didn’t start the war on October 7,” Ophir Falk, a top foreign policy adviser to Netanyahu, told CNN. “But we’re going to win it.”
Gaza looms large
The most difficult problem is also the most obvious: Gaza.
Netanyahu wants “total victory” over Hamas, a goal a top military official derided as sloganeering, or “throwing sand in the eyes of the public.”
The prime minister has never been willing to say what, when the war is over, Gaza should look like, only what it should not be – that is, governed by either Hamas or the Palestinian Authority.
“The big problem is with the government itself,” Israel Ziv, a retired Israeli general who once headed the military’s operations department, told CNN. “They are not fully committed to those goals (in Gaza). And now it’s not even clear – not to the army, and not to the public – what the government really wants.”
Netanyahu’s indecision was rewarded when US President Donald Trump proposed that all Palestinians leave Gaza. It is, Netanyahu said, “the only plan that I think can work to enable a different future for the people of Gaza, for the people of Israel, for the surrounding areas.”