A Shield of Lies: Netanyahu’s Battle Against the World
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
It was a sign of someone desperate that his message has failed to take wing and make its way to better lands. With the strategy of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Gaza Strip sundered and falling over, leaving only a thick butcher’s bill (over 60,000 deaths for starters), extraordinary suffering and humanitarian catastrophe, he thought it wise to confront foreign press outlets on a late Sunday in the hope that the tide might turn away from his exemplary viciousness. There had been, he moaned like a wounded starlet, a “global campaign of lies” about Israel’s war in Gaza. In doing so, he merely inflated the arguments against him with boisterous credit and almost irrefutable plausibility.
The conference, which gave “an opportunity to puncture the lies and tell the truth,” involved the following points: Hamas still has thousands of fighters in Gaza; it vowed to repeat what it had done on October 7, 2023; it continued to expound the goal of wishing to destroy Israel even as it subjugated Gazans, stole their precious food, and shot those seeking to move to safe zones, the latter term being itself a monstrosity in the context of this conflict. Paternally, Netanyahu as the punishing father figure, thought he had deciphered the true desire of those in Gaza, which presumably would not have entailed the killing of Palestinians by the tens of thousands and starving the rest. Everything could be blamed on a militant organisation he had done so much to praise as a countering force against Fatah in the West Bank. As things stood now, Gazans seemed to be suffering from a highly developed sense of Stockholm’s syndrome, “begging us, and they’re begging the world: ‘Free us, Free us, and free Gaza from Hamas’.”
With a solid body of mendacity to work with, Netanyahu proceeded to build an edifice of fantasy few others outside Israel could contend with: that the same Israeli forces who starve, kill and maim the civilian populace of the Strip have no wish to impose an occupation but “free it from Hamas terrorists. The war can end tomorrow if Gaza, or rather if Hamas lays down its arms and releases all the remaining hostages.” Israeli policy was not one of starving the Palestinians into famine wrecks, skeletal ruin and physiological malfunction. That hideous criminal pursuit fell to Hamas, apparently responsible for the violent looting of aid trucks and the deliberate creation of “a shortage of supply.” Fantastically, Netanyahu blamed the United Nations for refusing “to distribute the thousands of trucks that we let into Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing,” a delightful complaint given his government’s overt hatred for a body he always wished to be rid of from the occupied territories. The synapses in Netanyahu-Land seemed frailer than ever, if not altogether snapped.
He then belted out the now familiar five-point vision of the Strip once Hamas is defeated. This elusive “day after” includes the following objectives: the disarming of Hamas, the freeing of all hostages, the demilitarising of the Gaza Strip, granting Israel “overriding security control”, the creation of a non-Israeli administration that will not “educate its children for terror, doesn’t pay terrorists and doesn’t launch terrorist attacks against Israel.” Unlike other proposals advanced by France, the UK and Canada, the Palestinian Authority is also excluded from the arrangements, since no Palestinian politician is worth the Israeli PM’s time. Netanyahu’s idea of a politically viable Palestinian is one manacled to the security regime of other powers.
The stage for the next slaughter is set, namely, the dismantling of “the two remaining Hamas strongholds in Gaza City and the Central Camps. Contrary to false claims, this is the best way to end the war, and the best way to end it speedily.” Netanyahu feigns a humanitarian streak in stating that the civilian population will be allowed to “leave the combat areas to designated safe zones.” The process of ethnic cleansing, or simply cleansing of the population, is to simply continue.
Oblivious to Netanyahu’s fortified wall of prejudice is that much of the groundwork for precisely those outcomes he hopes to avoid have already been laid. Whether it be Hamas or any other militant organisation, the notion of pacifist subordinate figures content with their status in any territory where Israel has the last word on everything is absurdly unrealistic.
Doing everything to make his case even less convincing, Netanyahu then told Israeli journalists after seeing the foreign scribblers off that he had never halted all humanitarian aid to Gaza. Even the patriotic Times of Israel found this a bit rich, noting that “his government had enacted that policy earlier this year.” The paper went on to quote the announcement from the premier’s office on March 2: “Prime Minister Netanyahu has decided that, as of this morning, all entry of goods and supplies into the Gaza Strip will cease.”
Netanyahu also refused to accept the proposition that Gaza’s population was starving. Shortages in supply yes; starvation no. “If we had wanted starvation, if that had been our policy, 2 million Gazans wouldn’t be living today after 20 months.” The same could be said about the supreme crime of all: “if we wanted to commit genocide, it would have taken exactly one afternoon.” A wise head might have told him that few who commit genocide or engineer circumstances of mass murder ever make the intention that obvious.
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