Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeated his intention to launch a new assault on Rafah, the Gazan city on the Egyptian border where over half of Gaza’s population is now sheltering, many in tents.
Meanwhile, on 7 February, 35 Israeli NGOs and campaign groups, including Standing Together, Peace Now, B’Tselem, Gisha, and others, released a new statement calling for an immediate ceasefire, a comprehensive prisoner exchange, and the provision of humanitarian aid to Gaza. A massive billboard commissioned by Standing Together on Tel Aviv’s Ayalon highway reads: “This war must end: leave Gaza, release hostages, rebuild life.”
The social pressure from a global anti-war movement can help too. Its pressure will be sharper and, crucially, more principled if elements within protests that cheerlead Israel’s regional-imperialist rival Iran and its paramilitary allies and proxies (Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis) are clearly marginalised. Where workers can take action to block arms shipments bound for Israel, they should.
The Israeli government has made no move to a comprehensive evacuation plan for civilians, with Netanyahu first referring vaguely to possible evacuation to an area north of Rafah, and more recently to a “humanitarian zone” on the coast. In reality, there is no feasible way close to 1.5 million can be evacuated quickly and safely. An offensive on Rafah will be a massacre. Whilst Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant has said Israel has “no intention” of displacing Palestinians from Gaza into Egypt, satellite imagery suggests Egypt is building structures on its borders, leading to speculation that it is constructing walls and fences to keep out a possible influx of refugees fleeing the assault.
Numerous governments, including even the USA, have explicitly opposed Israel’s plan, insisting it must rethink. Netanyahu’s insistence the offensive will go ahead may be posturing bluster designed to present a strong-man image on the international stage. Or it may be a true indication of Israeli military plans.
Qatari officials helping to broker ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas say talks have “hit an impasse”. Meanwhile the death toll in Gaza continues to mount, with growing risk of further untold deaths from disease and other impacts of the destruction Israel’s war has wrought to housing, healthcare, and sanitation infrastructure.
Opposition
In recent days Netanyahu has reiterated Israel’s opposition to the establishment of a Palestinian state. The US’s favoured postwar roadmap involves progress towards an independent Palestine alongside Israel, governed by a revitalised Palestinian Authority, with political and financial aid from neighbouring Arab states. Netanyahu’s government, meanwhile, straightforwardly opposes any form of genuine Palestinian self-determination, preferring a perpetual state of war that endangers both Palestinian and Jewish Israeli lives.
What, then, can break the impasse? International diplomatic pressure on Israel can help. (As of 20 Feb, Keir Starmer’s abject Labour leadership is at last signalling it will vote to call for a ceasefire). Whilst Israel is a regionally powerful and highly militarised state, it is not a global power, and operates within a network of intersecting geopolitical alliances. Even right-wing Israeli governments value their security relationships with Arab neighbours such as Egypt and Jordan, and continued pressure from these states may have some effect. Britain, France, and the USA have all imposed sanctions on individual settlers implicated in anti-Palestinian violence, although this largely symbolic act is unlikely to have much effect on the mechanics of the settlement project.
Demolitions of Palestinian properties in occupied East Jerusalem have continued in recent weeks. On 12 February, Israeli settlers carried out a pogrom against the Palestinian village of Asira Kabliah, torching houses and shooting at Palestinians, wounding two.
It seems increasingly likely that the impasse may only be broken by the ousting of Netanyahu’s government, with its far-right elements ideologically committed to ethnically cleansing the Palestinians. On 17 February, thousands took to the streets of Tel Aviv for anti-government protests, with many demanding national elections be called sooner than the scheduled 2026 date. Those protests are, so far, smaller than the sustained mass demonstrations that took place against Netanyahu’s planned reforms to the judiciary, but anti-war and anti-government protests have grown steadily in recent weeks and months.
Polls show that, were early elections called, Netanyahu would lose heavily. His likely replacement, Benny Gantz, is hardly more progressive on the question of Israel’s relationship to the Palestinians, but the fact a Gantz government would not include far-right leaders of the settler movement such as Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich means it would create some social breathing space.
It has been a consistent refrain on the right, centre, and even parts of the left of Israeli politics for decades that no progress towards a Palestinian state is possible because there is no “partner for peace” on the Palestinian side. The claim is wrongheaded on its own terms; there are forces in Palestinian politics, both within the Palestinian community in Israel and in occupied territories, with whom Israel could have sought negotiations towards a political settlement. Even negotiations with the corrupt Fatah-led Palestinian Authority would have been preferable to Netanyahu’s policy of “managing the conflict.”
The major problem is that there has been no “partner for peace” on the Israeli side. As the overwhelmingly superior military party and as the occupying power, Israel holds almost all the cards; for decades, no substantial force in mainstream Israeli political life has had the courage or ambition to even advocate the resumption of a genuine peace process aiming to end the occupation. The occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza has been accepted as a permanent state of affairs, enabling Hamas, whose own chauvinism mirrors that of the Israeli right, to grow.
Palestinian political forces aiming for peace and equality can only assert themselves effectively when they know they have real partners in Israel. Currently, the forces that could grow into such partners lie predominantly outside of national electoral politics.
The more the Israeli anti-war movement can grow and assert itself, the less stable Netanyahu’s government becomes. Activists internationally who wish to see progress towards peace and equal rights should make it a priority to support that movement.