NY Times: Netanyahu is continuing Gaza war to help Trump win

The Jewish columnist accused the Israeli prime minister of not being America’s friend and only being interested in his political survival.

By Batya Jerenberg, World Israel News

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman accused the Israeli prime minister Tuesday of wanting to help former president Donald Trump win the upcoming U.S. elections to the extent that he would intensify the country’s war against Hamas.

Because “he wants Trump to win and he wants to be able to tell Trump that he helped him win,” Friedman wrote, he would “not be surprised” if Netanyahu “actually escalates in Gaza between now and Election Day to make life difficult for the Democrats running for office.”

This would be extremely problematic for the Democratic contender, Vice President Kamala Harris, he explained.

It would “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. As Harris will likely find it hard to do either, this will make her look weak to both American Jews and American Arabs.”

The recurring theme of the Jewish pundit, who is a fervent and longtime Netanyahu critic, was that the prime minister always acts in his own self-interest rather than that of his country.

He theorized that if Trump wins in November, Netanyahu would suddenly declare victory in Gaza and agree to a ceasefire to recover some live hostages, while he “mumbles a few words about Palestinian statehood in the far-off, distant future to get the Saudi-Israel normalization deal” – all to use as a platform for winning the next Israeli elections, which is “all that counts” to the prime minister.

To Friedman, Netanyahu is also blocking a deal for the 101 hostages still in Hamas captivity because he must stay in power, and this is dependent on keeping his coalition with “radical Jewish supremacists” alive.

He dismissed their belief, declared by Netanyahu and shared by a majority of Israelis, that an IDF retreat from the Philadelphi Corridor at the Gaza-Egypt border, through which Hamas armed itself to the teeth over decades of smuggling, was a terrorist demand that could not be met as it would allow Hamas to rearm and soon become a renewed threat to Israel’s security.

He also riposted that “the Israeli military did not think [Philadelphi] important enough to even occupy for the first seven months of the war.”

It is an established fact that the Biden administration delayed the IDF’s entry into Rafah to destroy Hamas forces in the border town and the adjacent Corridor for months by threatening Jerusalem with withholding desperately needed arms and diplomatic support.

Friedman took the opportunity as well to push for renewed negotiations with the Palestinian Authority (PA) as the answer for what to do with Gaza on the “day after” the war.

If Israel would “agree to open talks with the Palestinian Authority on a two-state solution, it would… create conditions for the U.A.E., Morocco and Egypt to send peacekeeping troops to Gaza in partnership with an upgraded Palestinian Authority, so Israel would not need a permanent occupation there and Hamas would be replaced by a legitimate, moderate Palestinian government — Hamas’s nightmare.”

The PA has yet to even condemn Hamas for its October 7 invasion and massacre of 1,200 people that set off the ongoing war, it is distrusted by a vast majority of the Palestinian population in both the Gaza Strip and Judea and Samaria, and no Arab country has yet expressed any willingness to put boots on the ground in the coastal enclave.

A solid majority of the Israeli public is also against the PA playing any role in Gaza, or resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict through the “two-state solution.”