FRONTLINE: "Netanyahu, America and the Road to War in Gaza" (Kirk Documentary Group, Left/Right Docs, WGBH Educational Foundation, PBS, originally 2023, revised 2024)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The PBS Frontline series of TV documentaries ran on May 28 the rather awkwardly titled episode “Netanyahu, America and the Road to War in Gaza.” It’s the latest in their ongoing coverage of the continued hostility between Israel and Palestinians, especially in Gaza, and the show – directed by James Jacoby, co-written by him and Anya Bourg, and narrated by Will Lyman in his usual quiet but authoritative tone – attempts to be even-handed to both sides in this highly fraught issue. This particular program was first run on December 19, 2023, 2 ½ months since Hamas, the part political party and part terrorist organization that runs Gaza, launched their horrific attacks on Israel on October 7, 2023 and triggered Israel’s all-out campaign for revenge. I’ve long been convinced that Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, seized on Hamas’s attacks as a pretext for an all-out genocidal campaign to wipe out the Palestinian population once and for all, despite the efforts of U.S. President Joe Biden and others to embrace him publicly but try to restrain him privately. I’ve even posted to my Facebook page calling Netanyahu “the Jewish Hitler” and comparing his tactics in Gaza to the Nazis’ attempt at a “final solution to the Jewish problem.”

Like previous Frontline programs on Israel, Gaza and Hamas, this one began with then-U.S. President Bill Clinton brokering a deal between then-Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and then-Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat in 1993. The agreement was called the “Oslo Accord” after the Norwegian capital where most of the negotiations took place – though the final signing ceremony was held at the White House and, at Clinton’s insistence, Rabin and Arafat publicly shook hands. The ultimate objective was to create a new state of Palestine in the West Bank and Gaza that would peacefully coexist with Israel – only the Israeli hard-Right immediately opposed the deal on the ground that the Palestinians remained committed to the total destruction of Israel and they would use their state, if they got one, as a base to achieve that goal. Netanyahu emerged as the principal political figure of the Israeli Right and made it his goal, even before he first became Prime Minister of Israel in 1996, to make sure that the Palestinians never got a state of their own. Along the way, a Jewish religious fanatic assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, and his successor, Shimon Peres, lost his re-election bid. This program didn’t mention why, but a previous Frontline episode on the ultimate failure of the Oslo Accords did; instead of voting for Peres, Israel’s Arab citizens decided to boycott the election altogether, and this provided Netanyahu with the margin he needed for a slim victory.

It’s a mistake Arab-Americans are about to make themselves; in threatening to withhold their support for Biden and either sit out the 2024 Presidential election or vote for minor-party candidates, which in America’s political system amounts to the same thing, they risk defeating Biden and handing the Presidency back to Donald Trump, who during his first term fulfilled the whole wish list of the Jewish Right. Trump reversed decades of American support for the two-state solution, approved Israel building more settlements in the West Bank on land that was supposed to be part of the Palestinian state, and moved the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, thereby endorsing Netanyahu’s insistence that Jerusalem will remain Israeli territory forever and the Palestinians can forget about ever having it as their capital. Ultimately Netanyahu was voted out of office, but he came back in 2006 and has been there ever since except for a brief interregnum when he momentarily lost his party’s majority in the Knesset, Israel’s legislature. Netanyahu, like Trump, also faced serious criminal charges; in fact, three corruption trials against him were already in progress in Israel’s judicial system until October 7, 2023. Netanyahu decided to “reform” Israel’s judiciary to, among other things, end the prosecutions against him, and the result was huge protests in the streets of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities denouncing him as anti-democratic.

I’ve also long suspected that Netanyahu had advance knowledge of the October 7 attacks and allowed them to happen because, following Shakespeare’s advice to troubled leaders to “busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels,” he realized that an horrific attack on the Israeli population would unite the country behind him and in one stroke end his political problems. Even if he didn’t, Hamas’s attacks perfectly fit into Netanyahu’s strategy; by pledging an all-out campaign to defeat Hamas once and for all – even if that meant the utter destruction of Gaza and its 2 million people, which is what it has meant in practice – he was able to present himself as Israel’s savior. Netanyahu also has had plenty of experience dealing with U.S. Presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, and his negotiations with Bill Clinton, Barack Obama (whom he hated instantly, pointing out that Obama’s middle name was “Hussein” and embracing Trump’s conspiratorial allegation that Obama was really an African-born Muslim) and Joe Biden convinced him that, as much as Democratic Presidents might privately oppose him, they’d be totally in solidarity with him in public and he could “roll” them into continuing to provide Israel with military aid. I remember I once read a Foreign Affairs article on North Korea which said that no superpower ever let a client state push it around as much as China does with North Korea, and I thought, “Are you kidding? What about the U.S. and Israel?”

More recently, Biden’s decision to suspend one shipment of military aid to Israel – so-called “bunker-buster” bombs that have no purpose other than the utter destruction of entire buildings – aroused opposition among 26 House Democrats, led by Rep. Josh Gottenheimer (D-NJ). Gottenheimer’s letter read, “[W]ithholding weapons shipments to Israel … only emboldens our mutual enemies, including Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and other Iranian-backed proxies. … Seven months after October 7, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the end of the Holocaust, Iranian-backed terrorist proxies continue to fire rockets and mortars into Israel and at Americans from all directions. At the same time, anti-Semitism is spreading globally like wildfire.” It’s not like the Palestinians and their proxies are totally blameless – in fact, in one of my Zenger’s Newsmagazine editorials I coined the phrase “the terrorists’ veto,” an offtake of “the hecklers’ veto,” to describe the way extremists on both sides of a conflict can unilaterally block a peaceful resolution by committing some heinous act that brings potential negotiations to a screeching halt. Netanyahu came to power in 1996 in the first place after Hamas blew up at least two #18 buses in Tel Aviv, killing hundreds of Israelis, while Rabin’s assassination was an example of “the terrorists’ veto” on the other side.

Perhaps the most heart-rending missed opportunity mentioned on the Frontline documentary was told by Dennis Ross, former national security advisor to President Clinton, who recalled the last-ditch attempts Clinton made to revive Oslo in January 2001, just as Clinton was scheduled to leave office. According to Ross, the Israelis and Palestinians reached a tentative deal which Yasir Arafat rejected without seriously considering it. A Palestinian negotiator told Ross, “We in the delegation all wanted to accept it, and Arafat just sort of blew us away. Can you imagine where we would be today if we had said yes?” It’s also occurred to me that Israelis and Palestinians have two competing victim narratives, and that’s one of the reasons why this conflict is so intractable. Israelis justify their occupation of Palestine as their due following 5,000 years of exile from their historic Jewish homeland. In effect they’re saying they had the right to drive the Palestinian Arabs from that land by gunpoint because their ancestors drove the Philistines and Canaanites out of it by spearpoint five millenia earlier. They also claim that because the rest of the world failed to stop the Nazi Holocaust while it was still going on, the world owes the Jewish people a state. Palestinians in turn demand a reversal of the Nakba (literally “catastrophe”) by which the occupying Israelis drove them from their land in 1948.

The attempts on both sides to rewrite history for their own ideological purposes reached a bizarre level when Benjamin Netanyahu made a speech declaring that the real villain of the Holocaust was not Adolf Hitler, but the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Palestine’s principal Muslim cleric in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Netanyahu claimed that Hitler had merely wanted to resettle the European Jews in Madagascar, and the Grand Mufti had talked him into killing them all instead. A lot of Israelis who had personally survived the Holocaust knew better and called Netanyahu out on it, but once again, like Donald Trump, Netanyahu was able to ride out the controversy and remain in power. My personal belief is that the creation of the state of Israel on stolen Arab land in response to the Holocaust was a world-historical mistake – the classic example of the second wrong that doesn’t make a right – and I would want to see a South African-style one-state solution that would create a unified Palestine under Arab leadership with ironclad guarantees of the rights of the Jewish minority. But even before the current conflict, the chances of anything like that actually happening were pretty infinitesimal, and the combination of Hamas’s attacks and Israel’s genocidal response has blown them to smithereens along with killing tens of thousands of innocent Palestinians and reducing Gaza to a wasteland of destruction, starvation and want.