When speaking about Israel today, it is easy to borrow the irony of British writer and historian Max Hastings, who has witnessed and chronicled many wars. Just as he once mocked America’s appetite for conflict by asking, ‘What if they started a war and nobody came?’, we may now invert the question for Israel: What if Benjamin Netanyahu woke up one day and found no wars left to start?

Hastings, who documented the failures of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan before Washington even reached its failure in Iran, possessed a sharp political instinct. Since his emergence in the mid-1990s, Netanyahu has possessed only one instinct: war as destiny and hostility as identity.

One dark night in October 1995, Netanyahu stood on a balcony overlooking Zion Square in Jerusalem while a banner reading ‘Death to Arabs’ was raised before him. At that moment, Yitzhak Rabin was striving for a historic peace agreement, while the Israeli right was pulling the country in the opposite direction.

Netanyahu was not just a young party leader; he was a pupil at the school of hatred, where he discovered the political power of incitement and the profitability of fear for the first time.

Netanyahu was not just a young party........

© Middle East Monitor