Netanyahu framed the October 7 attack as Israel’s 9/11, a strategic move to justify his brutal campaign in Gaza. Beneath the rhetoric, it’s a calculated step toward realizing his vision of Greater Israel.

Shortly after the October 7 attack, Benjamin Netanyahu’s client media began to call it Israel’s 9/11. He would call it akin to twenty 9/11s in a speech delivered to the U.S. Congress. This clever framing was meant to elicit a specific reaction from the American people. And in many ways, it worked. After 9/11, America reacted like a wounded bear and all rules of engagement were suspended in its invasion campaigns. Israel was seeking western support to go ahead and do the same in Gaza, the West Bank, and elsewhere. While Israel has always been a master of propaganda, spin and subterfuge, this was a false analogy.
America, in the aftermath of 9/11, had chosen to invade Afghanistan. While there was considerable anger among its fighting forces, the country that they decided to invade for the first time was neither in America’s backyard nor a closely guarded prison. Israel, on the other hand, has controlled what goes in and out of Gaza for decades. That is not all. Unlike America in Afghanistan, it has repeatedly carried out operations in Gaza before the invasion, and many believe that at the time of the attack, it had an exhaustive network of spies within the cordoned-off strip. This sounds true because we have already seen how effectively Israeli intelligence operates and carries out assassinations even in powerful countries that are hostile to it. Iran is one prominent example.
When your country has endured a significant shock in which a large number of civilians are killed and many taken hostage, your priority naturally has to be to recover the hostages. However, the Netanyahu government opted for a different course of action for obvious reasons. In a speech, the Israeli Prime Minister likened the Gazans to Amalekites, an ancient nomadic tribe mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, declared war on Hamas and unleashed reign of terror in Gaza. Here is what Book 1 of Samuel says about Amalekites: “Now go and completely destroy the entire Amalekite nation—men, women, children, babies, cattle, sheep, goats, camels, and donkeys.” It is plain from this reference what he intended to do, and one year later, we have seen ample proof to this effect. However, in the immediate aftermath, due to an international and social media backlash, his staff contacted journalists and claimed that the reference was not from the Books of Samuel but from Deuteronomy. Granted, the Deuteronomy reference does not detail women, children, and animals, but it calls for blotting out of Amalek’s memory, which essentially translates into the same thing. Shortly after the declaration of war, or what passes for it, the Israeli television channels started airing jingoistic and highly dehumanizing songs calling for the total destruction of Amalekites (read Palestinians). 

Israeli Prime Minister likened the Gazans to Amalekites, an ancient nomadic tribe mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, declared war on Hamas and unleashed reign of terror in Gaza. Here is what Book 1 of Samuel says about Amalekites: “Now go and completely destroy the entire Amalekite nation—men, women, children, babies, cattle, sheep, goats, camels, and donkeys.”

By declaring war on Hamas and not immediately seeking to rescue hostages, Netanyahu hoped to kill many birds with one stone. For several years, he has been hounded by corruption charges and cases. To stay in power and out of prison, Netanyahu has triggered many elections and passed laws to stop the Israeli courts from prosecuting him. This has caused a widespread backlash, and even on the eve of the October 7 attacks, thousands were out protesting his politics of division. A prolonged war infused with hysteria would potentially solve that problem. Then there was the question of re-annexing Gaza. Netanyahu had resigned from Ariel Sharon’s cabinet when, in 2005, Israel decided to pull out its forces from Gaza. A war like this would readily provide an excuse to reverse that, too. Likewise, episodes like these also have a lasting impact on younger minds who are quickly radicalized. In fact, this is how Netanyahu has radicalized an entire generation of Israelis to stay in power. So much so that when aerial strikes in Gaza were ordered in the recent past, western media carried pictures of Israeli watch parties on top of hills. Terrorizing and demoralizing Gazans can eventually prepare them mentally for eviction from their homeland. By totally decimating the local infrastructure, hitting civilian targets, and butchering women and children in broad daylight, you instill a permanent fear in the hearts of your victims that nothing is safe. Blocking exit routes for the moment is meant to ensure that enough pressure builds among the civilians to leave that when the routes open, they migrate to areas farthest from home ostensibly to avoid harm’s way.
But these are merely the goals he sought to achieve within Israel and the Palestinian territories. His goals outside this little space might be even bigger. Since Samuel P. Huntington came up with the idea of a clash of civilizations, Netanyahu and Israel have invested heavily in translating it into a security doctrine. As long as Muslims are viewed as enemies, the West is naturally going to root for Israel. In 2020, when other global concerns were shifting the focus away from Huntington’s construct, Netflix released a thriller in collaboration with the Israeli government called “Messiah”. In one scene, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, the protagonist, goes out of their way to lecture a rookie on the importance of their work and how every word is true. Huntington’s book is also on display. And that is not all. The vilest permutation of this concept, terrorism, enables countries like Israel to invest heavily in the development of occupation technology in the garb of creating counter-terror and counter-insurgency equipment. One example is the NSO (Niv, Shalev and Omri, the names of the company's founders) Group’s Pegasus spyware, which caused an international backlash. To see how profitable these ventures are, read “The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World” by Antony Loewenstein. Also, when a new war starts, old ammunition quickly runs out of stock, creating a profit-making opportunity for the international military-industrial complex. This opportunity ensures that the lobbying efforts of the arms manufacturers are in your and the war’s favor. Why else do you think both the Biden and Trump administrations faced such a backlash during their attempts to withdraw from Afghanistan? These lobbies are very useful allies to have.

To stay in power and out of prison, Netanyahu has triggered many elections and passed laws to stop the Israeli courts from prosecuting him. This has caused a widespread backlash, and even on the eve of the October 7 attacks, thousands were out protesting his politics of division.

Mind you, we are still not done with the full scope of Netanyahu’s goals. Since the barbarity on display could not be hidden from the public eye in the age of social media, he also hoped to see the revival of terrorism in Muslim countries. We have seen already how the notion of a clash between Islam and the West was beneficial to him and his far-right governments. In terrorism, however, he had found his political raison d'être. In 2016, he deliberately undermined the Obama administration and sponsored many anti-Clinton campaigns to ensure that Trump would take a tough stance against Muslims. But after the elimination of the ISIS leadership, Trump’s National Security Strategy put a dampener on his hopes by declaring an end to the global war on terror (GWOT). The U.S. now saw the great power competition as a more significant challenge than the degraded remnants of terror outfits. But this did not suit Netanyahu. Great power rivalry meant he would be asked to choose among the U.S., China and Russia. Whereas, as long as they all saw terrorism as the common enemy, the tip of the spear, Israel, would get all the dough. So, if the Muslim world exploded with a new wave of terror, all these concerns could be left behind. This is why he is still not ready to end the butchery of innocent Gazans.

The endgame is simple—total eviction of the entire Palestinian population and permanent erasure of the Palestinian identity from the region.

You may argue that these attempts are like a double-edged sword. Not only can such visuals generate anti-Israel sentiment in the West, but anti-Zionism can easily morph into antisemitism. That is, of course, a serious concern. However, it does not matter to him. To offset pressure from liberal, moderate, and humane Jewish groups in the West, particularly in the U.S., he has forged alliances with far-right extremists among both Jews and Christians. In fact, during the inauguration of the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, his preferred guests from the U.S. were card-carrying antisemitic pastors who believed that the foundation of greater Israel was essential for the second coming of Christ. The destruction of Israel after the second coming is not his lookout. Simply put, a rise in antisemitism in the West and elsewhere suits him. As long you feel unsafe in your own home, you will come under pressure from friends and family to migrate to Israel. More immigration means more cannon fodder for Netanyahu’s expansionist wars. For a long time, the Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer kept Netanyahu’s son Yair’s picture in its banner with the caption: our favorite Jew. 
With the help of such surrogates in the West, Netanyahu keeps shifting the Overton window for war. With the expansion of the war into Lebanon and the risk of broader conflict with Iran, Netanyahu has shifted attention away from Gaza and keeps milking it for political survival and gains. In the meantime, there hasn’t been any let up in his atrocities in Gaza. 
If you think that Israel has just been taken for a ride and the Israeli state does not condone this kind of butchery, you need to look again. Over the years, the Israeli state has established a system of apartheid. The Israeli courts, which now face an existential threat in the face of Netanyahu’s onslaught, have frequently ruled to dispossess the Palestinians of their belongings in favor of Israeli settlers. In his show, John Oliver recently presented a segment on how these settlers walk over to your house and just take it. The endgame is simple—total eviction of the entire Palestinian population and permanent erasure of the Palestinian identity from the region. People like Netanyahu are only karma’s idea of a payback. What Netanyahu has gained so far will last only during his life. And the damage his legacy has done to the carefully crafted fiction of Israel being a democratic state will last much longer.
Meanwhile, the horror show in Gaza continues unabated and keeps reviving the memory of Genghis Khan and Hulegu. Unsheltered displaced masses cannot even find time to pull bodies from the rubble. Disease is rampant. Hunger and poverty stark. Israeli forces use every barbaric method to terrorize the undefended population. Relief efforts are blocked, and dead bodies piled into open trucks are sent back into Gaza not only to strike fear in people’s minds but also to exacerbate the humanitarian crisis further. Some democracy you have got there. The purpose is plain. And Netanyahu, through the map he flashed in the UN General Assembly in 2023, has already given us all the necessary clues. The Greater Land of Israel map had placed the West Bank and Gaza within the boundaries of sovereign Israel. And the UN, which was instrumental in the creation of Israel, continues to come under Netanyahu and his minions.

The writer is an Islamabad-based TV journalist. 
Twitter: @FarrukhKPitafi 
E-mail: [email protected]