The government formed in late 2022 by Benjamin Netanyahu, along with Zionist groups even more radical than his own far-right party, is the most extremist in the state’s history. Less than ten months after its formation, this government seized on the opportunity it found in the October 7, 2023, operation in order to wage a genocidal war in the Gaza Strip that surpassed in horror all of Israel’s previous wars.

This occurred under a US president who openly professed his Zionism, while the impact of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood created a climate that prompted most other Western governments to declare their unreserved support for the horrific aggression launched by the Israeli armed forces, under the pretext of endorsing Israel’s right to “self-defense.” These combined circumstances encouraged Israel’s far-right government to perpetrate genocide in the Gaza Strip, destroying it with extreme brutality, and seek to expel its remaining residents, while simultaneously tightening the noose on the West Bank population in preparation for their own expulsion.

Many Western rulers, along with Arab ones, assumed that the Israeli aggression would limit itself to eliminating Hamas’s control over the Gaza Strip, which could thus be handed back over to the Palestinian Authority (PA) based in Ramallah. For this purpose, they relied on Joe Biden’s administration, which supported this scenario. However, a few months into the onslaught, it became clear to them, as it did to Biden himself, that Netanyahu was not prepared to pursue this path. Netanyahu has long boasted about eliminating the prospect of a “Palestinian state,” particularly in consolidating the continued division between the West Bank and Gaza by allowing Qatari funding to Hamas’s rule in Gaza, thus preventing the latter from being beholden to the PA.