The record backs him up. He allowed Hamas to hold Gaza, and Qatar to finance the group, because its presence kept the Palestinian leadership divided. No one could demand that Netanyahu accept a Palestinian state so long as that state would be governed by Hamas. This was his strategy, and he and his advisers said so.
In the West Bank, Netanyahu allowed settlers to run wild and rendered Hamas’s rival, Al Fatah, feckless. The Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority cooperated on security with Israel, day after day, but rather than raise Al Fatah up as a negotiating partner, he humiliated it. Netanyahu made Al Fatah into a subcontractor of Israeli control and gave Palestinians nothing for it. Instead, he allowed settlers to continue to take the little they had. It is no accident that the Palestinian Authority’s legitimacy had collapsed even before the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7.
In recent months, I’ve been thinking, as many American Jews have, about antisemitism and anti-Zionism on campus. And I’ve been thinking, too, about the polls showing that support for Israel, in America, is generational. Look at the age breakdown in the December Times-Siena poll:
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Asked whether they sympathize more with the Israelis or the Palestinians, 63 percent of Americans 65 and older said the Israelis. Among those aged 18 to 29, 27 percent sympathized more with Israelis.
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Seventy percent of those 65 and up supported additional aid to Israel. Fifty-five percent of people 18 to 29 opposed it.
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Asked whether Israel should end its military campaign, even if Hamas has not been fully eliminated, in order to spare civilians, 67 percent 18 to 29 said they should. Only 30 percent 65 and up agreed.
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Asked whether Israel is seriously interested in peace, 54 percent over age 65 said it was. Fifty-nine percent 18 to 29 said it wasn’t.
This is crude, but I think there are, roughly, three generations in terms of American sentiment toward Israel. There are older Americans who knew Israel when it was young. They remember the impossibility and wonder of its creation. They remember the wars its neighbors launched to eradicate it and the seeming miracle of its survival and of all that it then built. This generation still feels Israel’s vulnerability. They still feel its possibility. This is Joe Biden’s generation. It is a great gift for Israel that it still, improbably, controls American politics.
Then there’s what I think of as the straddle generation. This is my generation. We only ever knew Israel as the strongest military power in the region. A nuclear Israel. An Israel that occupied Palestinian territories, sometimes brutally. But we also knew an Israel that seemed to be trying to find its way toward peace and coexistence. We knew the Israel of Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. We saw that the collapse of the 2000 Camp David summit was met by the second intifada, by years of suicide bombers rather than years of counteroffers. We also watched Israel build settlements across the West Bank, creating a one-state reality even as it spoke of a two-state solution. Polling shows, predictably, that our views of Israel are more mixed.
Then there’s younger Americans. They know only Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel. He has, after all, been prime minister almost continuously since 2009. They know an Israel that is the strongest country in the region, by far. They know an Israel where messianic ethnonationalists serve in the cabinet. They know an Israel that controls Palestinian life and land and intends to keep it that way. They see this as simpler: a country that oppresses and a people that is oppressed. They are not entirely right — too little agency is offered to Palestinians in this telling — but they are not entirely wrong.