On Messianism once again - Isaac Chotiner interviewing Amos Harel in The New Yorker:

‘You say there isn’t a clear intent to develop settlements. But it’s very hard to read stories about the level of hunger in Gaza and not believe that the Israeli government does not want to allow sufficient food and aid to reach the people of Gaza, the children of Gaza.
Maybe this speaks to my limits as an observer, because I’m still an Israeli, and a patriot, and so on. My sense is that this has not been intentional starvation planned all along. So the situation, of course, is very, very dire. It goes back to the whole Gaza Humanitarian Foundation thing. It pretends to be American, but there are actually a lot of Israelis—and people who were not strangers to Netanyahu—involved in that as well. But it was very, very clear that there was no way that this could work. It was clear that this was an absolutely crazy plan that could not match the needs in Gaza. And remember, the day [the G.H.F.’s aid plan was deployed], Smotrich tweeted that today begins the defeat of Hamas. The so-called logic behind it was that Hamas was looting most of the aid coming in earlier, making money from it, selling it, reselling it for a price, and therefore providing for its fighters. [The Times reported that Israeli officials privately acknowledge that Hamas was not systematically looting United Nations aid. Reuters found that a U.S.A.I.D. report discovered “no evidence of systematic theft” by Hamas of humanitarian aid provided by the U.S.]

So what you are describing is a haphazard plan— They were well aware of the horrible risk, even if they were not intentionally starving people.
Seems like, at the very least, they do not care.

That’s my suspicion as well. And you didn’t see a lot of sympathy among Israeli leaders about starvation. Only when the world woke up did this finally become a crisis for the government.
What is your reading of how Israelis feel about the war, other than the importance of bringing the hostages home? There’s been some talk that the war has not been real to Israelis because the media, with your newspaper as an exception, has not really focussed on the human costs of it. Do you feel that there is any desire to end the war aside from the desire to get a hostage deal? Or is the death toll of Gazans not at all foremost in people’s minds? First of all, we’re very much detached from the reality inside Gaza as it’s described by the international media. If you look at the coverage on the Israeli TV stations and so on, it’s very, very limited. The images are sometimes censored, and there’s not much of a discussion there. And that goes back to October 7th. Everybody is still living October 7th. There is still grieving and not having any kind of empathy to what is going on elsewhere.’

(…)

‘Netanyahu pretty clearly does not care about the hostages, and he screwed up on October 7th. Wouldn’t this imply his political career is done after the next election? I’m getting borderline conspiratorial here. But the general sense among many analysts—and again, I’m not a political analyst, but I think it’s pretty clear to join the dots—is that he’s not going for full, free elections anymore. He’s going to lift a page out of Trump’s notebook, out of [Viktor] Orbán’s notebook, out of what happened in Poland in the recent decade or so, meaning that he will attempt to undermine the system and intimidate the center left. It’s already been done by putting Ben-Gvir in charge of the police. You see that all the time. You see the attitude toward demonstrators. The man who Netanyahu is trying to nominate to the internal security service is a messianist for the far right. [The man, David Zini, has reportedly said that Israel is governed by a judicial “dictatorship” and that the internal security service, Shin Bet, is loyal to the Prime Minister before the law.] These are the signs of what is happening. And, of course, the easiest way to do that would be to intimidate the Arab voters and the Arab parties.

But you are describing a country that, in a free and fair election, would reject him.

Yes. But there is something deeply messianic about him by now, and he believes that he is the man who needs to keep protecting the Jewish people from different threats, and that he has changed the course of the war with victories in Lebanon and Iran, and so on. He really, really believes that he should stay in power, and he will do everything he can to stay in power. Then there’s the legal issues.
People keep writing about the new Netanyahu. The old Netanyahu, we knew. We knew that he was manipulative. We knew that he would lie. We knew that he would do everything to survive. And yet, for instance, for many years, he was considered quite cautious in applying military force. He always feared unintended consequences, and he tried to avoid military casualties. He knew that things could go wrong quite quickly when you send the ground forces in. All of this has changed since 2023, if you look back to his decision to go for the pager operation, to strike the nuclear sites in Iran, and so on. His enemies from the center left kept saying he would never do that. It’s too dangerous. He knows it’s too risky. He would never bomb Iran. Well, he did, and he persuaded Trump to join in.

What you’re describing is someone who will essentially do anything to stay in power, and who has developed a certain messianism. That’s a slightly worrying combination.

Tell me about it.’

Read the interview here.

The Israelis are still living in the past. And the combination of ruthless survival instincts and Messianism will prove to be a fatal combination.

It’s already clear how fatal that combination is.