Netanyahu is leading Israel down a path of pariah status

As global opposition to the war grows, Benjamin Netanyahu is fighting for his political life, writes Donald Macintyre

- By Donald Macintyre

By Benjamin Netanyahu's standards, there was something almost ritualistic about his reaction to Keir Starmer's policy shift towards recognising a Palestinian state.

There was the tendentious accusation that such a state would be a “reward for monstrous terrorism”; a faint accusation of 1939-style passivity in the face of Nazism, with his reference to the “appeasement”. of Hamas; the hollow claim that an independent Palestine would pose a “jihadist” threat to Britain itself.

But, for now, the Israeli prime minister has more pressing worries than the rapidly mounting European discontent at the starvation and mass killing of civilians in Gaza. Because that discontent is apparently shared - at least on some days - by Donald Trump. Netanyahu has already hastily U-turned by agreeing to “humanitarian pauses” and the delivery of at least minimal UN aid to abate a famine he was still insisting just days ago did not exist.

This doesn’t mean that Trump is yet ready to apply irresistible pressure on Netanyahu to agree to a ceasefire on terms Hamas would accept. But either way, such concessions, however limited, were not what his two most ultranationalist and seemingly indispensable ministers, Bezalel Smotrich (who briefly threatened to quit at the beginning of the week when he heard about the aid U-turn) and Itamar Ben Gvir, signed up for. And that’s a problem for Netanyahu - because if they had resigned, that could have spelt the end of his coalition.

That malign dynamic has been central to Netanyahu’s pursuit for 22 months of what he accurately promised would be a war of “mighty revenge” after the murder and kidnapping of Israelis on 7 October 2023. The past week - the images of starvation, the moves by the UK, France, and now Canada, towards recognising Palestine, the pressure from Trump - have all thrown a renewed light on how Netanyahu has pursued the war in Gaza. They also raise the question of how long he can survive in power.