Netanyahu's quest for political survival could be affecting the push for Mideast peace, U.S. election
Israeli prime minister's moves may be guided by self-interest, experts say
In May, after numerous failed attempts, it appeared U.S. negotiators had reached a deal on a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. U.S. President Joe Biden himself announced that Israel had come forward with a plan.
But while Biden seemed optimistic, there was silence from the prime minister of Israel.
Benjamin Netanyahu didn't say anything until more than two weeks later, when he released a video in which he criticized the Biden administration, his strongest ally, for withholding weapons shipments he described as vital for Israel's war effort.
It was another blow to a shaky ceasefire process. More than 100 hostages are still being held in Gaza after they were captured by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, when the group launched a surprise attack against Israel that Israeli officials say killed more than 1,200 people.
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Since then, Israel has waged a military campaign in the Gaza strip, with its airstrikes and ground offensives killing more than 43,000 people, according to Gaza's Health Ministry.
While experts and U.S. officials say Hamas is to blame for many of the problems around the negotiating table, some say there is more going on.
The Fifth Estate analyzed Netanyahu's actions over the last year and spoke with experts who have been at the negotiating table between Israelis and Palestinains to understand how the Israeli prime minister's moves may be guided by self-interest and may be having a ripple effect on the U.S. election.
Laura Blumenfeld, a former senior policy adviser to the U.S. State Department on Israel-Palestinian negotiations, says many Israelis are watching months of failed ceasefire negotiations and questioning Netanyahu's goals.
"They look at him cynically and say this is all about Netanyahu preserving his own security rather than the national security of Israel," Blumenfeld said.
"What I'm hearing, what's interesting from the intelligence community in Israel, is that for the first time in their lives — folks who've followed this for decades — the irrational actor in the Middle East is Benjamin Netanyahu."
Hostage families have staged several demonstrations outside Netanyahu's residence in Jerusalem and in the capital of Tel Aviv over the last year, urging him to get a deal done.
In June, after an Israeli-proposed ceasefire plan backed by the White House failed to finalize an agreement, the Hostage Families Forum blamed Netanyahu's "apprehension" regarding the proposal and said his action "abandons 120 hostages and violates the state's moral obligation to its citizens."
The war's influence on the U.S. presidential election
Critics of the Israeli prime minister also say Netanyahu may be dragging out and expanding the conflict in the Middle East to influence the result of next week's U.S. election by making the Biden administration look ineffective and to inflame anger over the war within the Democratic base.
In the U.S., tens of thousands of Arab Americans are upset with American support for Israeli's military campaign. Many have said they're not going to vote for Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris based on that. With the war still making headlines, it keeps the issue top of mind for voters in key swing states like Michigan and Wisconsin.
Netanyahu's hope, some experts say, is a win by Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump and a more friendly ally in the White House.
Thomas Friedman, a longtime Middle East watcher and New York Times columnist, wrote in September that Netanyahu "wants Trump to win and he wants to be able to tell Trump that he helped him win."
"Netanyahu clearly knows that he has Harris in a bind," Friedman wrote. "If he continues the war in Gaza until 'total victory,' with more civilian casualties, he will force Harris either to publicly criticize him and lose Jewish votes or bite her tongue and lose Arab and Muslim American votes in the key state of Michigan."
In October, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut laid out the concern on national television.
"I hope this is not true, but it's certainly a possibility that the Israeli government is not going to sign any diplomatic agreement prior to the American election as a means potentially to try to influence the result," he told CNN's Erin Burnett.
Under fire at home
To understand why Netanyahu seems to lack the urgency to reach a ceasefire deal, it's important to look at his political situation prior to the Oct. 7 attacks. He is a leader under pressure, facing multiple charges of corruption. In three separate cases, Netanyahu is charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust.
Early last year, his government's proposed changes to Israel's judicial system sparked months of intense backlash and some of the largest demonstrations the country has seen, with hundreds of thousands of protesters gathering in Tel Aviv.
If convicted, Netanyahu would be forced to step down and could face prison time, which is not without precedent. Former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert served 16 months of a 27-month sentence for one of the charges that Netanyahu is accused of.
The corruption trial, which began in 2020, has faced significant delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic and more recently the war in Gaza. However, this summer, a Jerusalem District Court ruled that Netanyahu will begin testifying in his criminal trial on Dec. 2.
Former U.S. State Department negotiator Aaron David Miller says the prospect of losing power and going to prison has greatly influenced Netanyahu's actions.
"The organizing principle of his world since the indictment, over the last five years, has been maintaining himself in power."
Since 2019, Israel has gone through five elections. In the most recent round, Netanyahu remained in power by relying on a coalition of his own Likud party and two right-wing parties.
Blumenfeld, now a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C., describes it as the "most extreme right-wing government in Israel's history."
Miller echoes that sentiment, saying the Religious Zionist Party and the Otzma Yehudit party, led respectively by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, represent "two Zionist parties headed by two of the most extreme ministers in the history of the state of Israel."
In June, Smotrich and Ben-Gvir threatened to topple the coalition government if Netanyahu agreed to a ceasefire deal with Hamas. In January, both ministers attended an event in Jerusalem hosted by the far-right settlement movement that proposed removing Palestinians from Gaza in favour of Jewish settlements.
Waiting out the U.S. election
Some experts say delaying a ceasefire deal allows Netanyahu to wait out the U.S. election and perhaps even influence the result by driving a wedge between the Democratic Party and voters angry about its support for Israel's war in Gaza.
"Even in the scenario that Trump tries to bring the war to an end, I think Netanyahu would feel it would be done in ways and with compensatory gifts to Israel that would allow Netanyahu to be strong in his domestic politics," said Daniel Levy, a former Israeli negotiator and founder of J Street, a Democratic lobby group focusing on U.S.-Israel relations.
Netanyahu celebrated a number of foreign policy moves in Trump's first administration, including moving the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, recognizing Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights and virtually ignoring Israeli settlement policy in the West Bank.
"I think that Benjamin Netanyahu knows that at a minimum, there'll be a sort of laissez-faire attitude toward some of the issues that are very important for Netanyahu to continue to manage his coalition," Miller said. "So if the ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir want to continue their policy in the West Bank, he's not going to get much pushback from Donald Trump."
In July, Netanyahu visited Trump at the former president's home in Florida. That visit came after Netanyahu spoke to the U.S. Congress and met with both Biden and Harris at the White House.
Miller says that the "pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago" to reconnect with Trump was a more significant political move than Netanyahu's address to Congress.
Sabotaging the ceasefire?
When it comes to whether Netanyahu has sabotaged a ceasefire deal, Miller suggests there are clear examples.
He points to a moment in July where he says his sources inside the U.S. State Department suggested they were close to the first phase of a deal involving the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners and detainees held by Israel.
But he says Netanyahu threw in a deal-breaker — control of a stretch of land known as the Philadelphi corridor, a strip of land between Gaza and Egypt that, while strategic, seemed to be of little importance to the Israeli military in previous years.
Ben Samuels, U.S. correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, says Netanyahu is "moving the goalposts" when it comes to agreeing on a ceasefire deal.
"American officials are very careful to stress that Hamas is the main obstacle to obtaining a ceasefire. That being said, Netanyahu is playing a spoiler role in his own right," said Samuels, who has been covering U.S.-Israel relations since 2020.
"He is placing these arbitrary demands that go against what the intelligence community and what the military community and what the hostage families all say should be the demands that should complete the ceasefire that he should accept."
Claims of deliberate interference
In October, during a White House media briefing, Biden was asked if he's worried that Netanyahu may be acting against the administration's interests.
"No administration has helped Israel more than I have, none, none, none," said Biden.
"And I think Bibi should remember that and whether he's trying to influence the election, I don't know, but I'm not counting on that."
While Biden has faced questions about whether he has any personal influence with Netanyahu, Trump, in the final weeks of the campaign, has mentioned a number of conversations with the Israeli prime minister.
"Bibi called me," he told the crowd in a speech in Latrobe, Pa., on Oct. 19.
"Bibi didn't listen to [Biden] and I tell you what — [Israel is] in a much stronger position than they were three months ago," Trump said.
Netanyahu himself has denied that he's deliberately delaying a ceasefire. In a September news conference with foreign media, he listed a number of dates in which he said he was ready to make a deal.
"I said I'm willing to make a deal. The real obstacle to making a deal is not Israel and it's not me. It's Hamas," Netanyahu told reporters.
The Fifth Estate reached out to Israel's Prime Minister's Office for an interview but did not receive a response.
Hamas leaders have also been accused of creating roadblocks to a ceasefire deal, notably by refusing to participate in negotiations in August because Hamas did not believe Israel was negotiating in good faith.
Inflaming Democratic divisions
The war has alienated some Democratic voters, especially in places like Michigan, where Arab American voters helped Biden win the state in 2020.
Now, many voters are saying they're so angry over how the Democratic administration has supported Israel's military operations that they'll skip the presidential vote at the top of the ticket, vote for Trump or vote for a third party.
"Even when I think about the choice of voting for Kamala Harris, I really believe she doesn't even want my vote," said Palestinian American Layla Elabed, a resident of Dearborn, Mich.
Elabed is a co-founder of the Uncommitted National Movement, which rallied more than 100,000 voters in Michigan to send a protest vote to the Democrats during February's Democratic primary.
She said she's skipping the presidential vote on election day and will only vote in state and local races further down the ballot.
"It's incredibly emotional for me to make that decision," said the 35-year-old who has family in the West Bank. "But I am voting my conscience right now. And neither of those candidates are candidates that I align with."
Trump won Michigan in 2016 by fewer than 11,000 votes. Biden won the state in 2020 by about 150,000 votes.
With more than 100,000 people choosing not to vote for Biden in the Michigan Democratic primary earlier this year, organizers of the Uncommitted National Movement say the anger they feel can't be ignored.
"These voters can swing this election come November if they really, really wanted to," Uncommitted co-founder Lexis Zeidan said in an interview with The Fifth Estate.
"They feel betrayed and they feel a lot of grief and they feel a lot of anger," she said. "They're trying to reason how they approach the election come November because people feel like they want to make a moral decision."
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