What more could Bibi have done?

EDITORIAL: Turns out that Donald Trump’s warning, that “all hell would break out in the Middle East” if a deal wasn’t reached by the time he took office, was aimed more at his old pal Netanyahu than whatever is left of Hamas’s leadership.

Because, just like that, Bibi agreed to a worse peace deal than the one he’d been rubbishing since May 2024 even though Hamas signed the document that guaranteed releasing all hostages in a three-for-one prisoner exchange and a complete IDF withdrawal from Gaza.

That “didn’t come close to meeting the war aims”, which included complete eradication of Hamas and lasting strategic Israeli presence in Gaza, Netanyahu thundered before the press in Tel Aviv at the time.

Now, the Israeli government has agreed to free 30 Palestinians for each civilian and 50 for every solider released by Hamas, just as its tanks reluctantly getting out of the Philadelphi corridor along the Gaza-Egypt border and the Netzarim corridor that bisects the Gaza Strip make way for Hamas, battered but still functioning, to take back control of the entire region.

So, Hamas is still in charge and Palestinians celebrate “victory” even as the stench of death coming out of the ruins promises to substantially increase the death toll from 15 months of naked, brutal genocide. And the noose finally tightens around Netanyahu – even after he rained hell on Gaza, eliminated Hezbollah’s entire high command in Lebanon, conspired to remove the Assad regime from Syria and delivered a fatal blow to Iran’s axis of resistance across the region – as his far-right cabinet implodes and his army chief resigns.

Should his government fall, which is exactly what will happen unless he violates the ceasefire to please the extremists that hold it up – at the risk of angering Washington, of course – his corruption trial will resume and he will become only the second Israeli prime minister to serve time for misuse of office. Yet while Ehud Olmert spent only 16 months in jail, Bibi faces 10 years for bribery and a maximum of three years for fraud and breach of trust.

How different his, and Gaza’s, fate would have been if only his tactics of bombing and starving the Strip’s population had forced a repeat of the Naqba, the 1948 “catastrophe” that formed the cornerstone of the “dispossession” narrative of Palestinians and turned them into refugees so Jews could waltz into their homes.

Yet even as there is no family left in Gaza that hasn’t lost loved ones – men, women and children – to Israel’s bombs and the region is reduced to the world’s biggest per capita concentration of amputees, its “hungry, displaced, trapped, betrayed, and bleeding” residents (in the words of brave Palestinian journalist and author Ramzy Baroud) have just written the book on turning a tactical defeat into a major strategic victory; one that has already changed the power calculus that was firmly entrenched for three quarters of a century.

History will now remember that when war breaks out between a militarily vastly superior occupier, especially one backed by the strongest superpower bully the world has ever seen, and a helpless, isolated, occupied population with precious little outside support to count on, it turns into a battle of wills. And by just braving everything Israel threw at them, which included bullets, bombs, starvation, disease, rape, etc, the Palestinians have won that battle of wills.

Already much of the world views Israel very differently than it did till 6 October 2023. And even though Netanyahu laughed away ICC (International Criminal Court) arrest warrants for himself and his old defence minister Yoav Gallant, Israeli soldiers accused of carrying out the genocide in Gaza feel very differently about possible arrests whenever they travel to countries that recognise ICC’s jurisdiction. Indeed, some of Israel’s staunches traditional allies, especially in the heart of Europe, have openly said they’d carry out those arrests.

And, as the Israeli press itself is making sure nobody forgets, Hamas is far from destroyed and the hostages are still not all back.

There’s no doubt that Trump remains staunchly pro-Israel and he’s sure to have laced the ceasefire agreement with sweeteners for the Jewish state – as his reversal of the Biden administration’s year-old sanctions on illegal Israeli settlers in the West Bank shows – but fat lot of good that will do Bibi, especially if he’s forced out and arrested, as he wonders what more he could have done to get his own people to accept him as their saviour like he keeps telling them to.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2025