Integrated failures: coalition, Gaza, Iran (Yossi Alpher - June 9, 2025)

Yossi Alpher is an independent security analyst. He is the former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University, a former senior official with the Mossad, and a former IDF intelligence officer. Views and positions expressed here are those of the writer, and do not necessarily represent NJN's views and policy positions.

Q. What is the most obvious factor linking Netanyahu’s failures on all three fronts: the coalition, the Gaza war, and Iran’s nuclear ambitions?

A. The most obvious factor is war.

The ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) parties that support Prime Minister Netanyahu’s coalition also support the ongoing Gaza war effort--but refuse to participate in it as soldiers. The right-messianic-settler parties support the war and covet the Gaza territory; if the war ends, they will leave the coalition.

In other words, if the war in Gaza ends, Netanyahu’s coalition loses its right-messianic support and the government falls. On the other hand, as long as the war continues, the issues of conscription of the Haredi sector and the financial penalties that collective draft-dodging incurs for the Haredi community remain volatile and unsolvable. This virtually guarantees that the war will eventually catalyze Haredi departure from the coalition, bring it down, and usher in new elections.

If the Haredim leave in the days ahead--a distinct possibility in view of current Knesset initiatives--Israel could witness new Knesset elections as early as October 2025. Otherwise, elections are mandated by law no later than October 2026. But Netanyahu has already hinted that continuation of the Gaza war could lead him to seek to postpone elections beyond that deadline (there is a precedent from the Yom Kippur War of October 1973).

Q. War in Gaza for another year at least?

A. Meanwhile, the prime minister is going all out to prolong the war with minimum losses for Israel and somehow manageable or eventually reversible international condemnation--yet persuade the Haredim to remain in the coalition. Because of his legal difficulties, Netanyahu needs to remain in office at any cost, including Israel’s well-being.

Q. How is all that supposed to happen? So far it looks like a fiasco.

A. Currently the key appears to be the mysterious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF). It was registered in Delaware in February 2025. Its objective appears to be to demonstrably feed Gazan civilians without a direct connection either to Israel or to United Nations and other recognized international relief organizations, all of whose efforts the IDF has in recent months blocked.

Note that in the eyes of many Israelis the international humanitarian relief community, led by UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), is tainted by long-term collaboration with Hamas and other Gaza-based terrorists. UNRWA, it is further alleged, has essentially prolonged the refugee status of Gaza’s Palestinian refugee population rather than rehabilitating and resettling refugees. Yet UNRWA also efficiently fed, clothed, and educated Palestinian refugees in Gaza for several generations until Israel expelled it from the Strip early this year.

By comparison (or in contrast--take your pick), the GHF has thus far established four food distribution points in the Strip. So far, they are open intermittently and have been plagued by extreme violence and heavy Palestinian civilian casualties that are generally attributed to clashes between rioting Gazans and the IDF. The original head of GHF has resigned in protest at its operations, as has the Boston Consulting Group which was hired to help establish and run it. The organization’s funding sources are unclear and are alternately attributed to the IDF Southern Command and anonymous American Christian evangelicals, with the Trump administration reportedly offering $500 million in support.

Note, too, that the GHF operation, which looks more scandalous by the day, is accompanied by an Israeli effort to arm non-Hamas Gazan Bedouin clans that have family connections with neighboring Negev Bedouin. At least one part of the southern Strip near Rafah has reportedly been ‘liberated’ by these new ‘militias’. Their attraction for Israel is apparently their lack of a political agenda for Gaza that could compete with the schemes of right-messianic-settler factions in Netanyahu’s coalition who seek to resettle and annex the Strip.

Q. Déjà vu?

A. Definitely. In past decades, Israel armed local militias in Lebanon and in the West Bank as part of its efforts to combat Hezbollah and Palestinian opposition. These schemes never succeeded; they generally ended in violence and (e.g., the Lebanese Phalangists) in international scandal. In the case of Gaza, the emergence of the GHF was preceded by a concerted Israeli attempt to prevent the supply of food as a means of forcing the civilian population to pressure its Hamas rulers. This is starvation by any other name and, like its predecessors, also failed. Its proponents, misinformed IDF and government adherents of classic medieval siege tactics, have blackened Israel’s name.

Once again, as witnessed on October 7, 2023, Israeli security strategists have failed to understand their enemy. The GHF operation, however clumsy and misconceived, is intended as a means of rectifying the starvation accusations. So far it too has failed.

Q. A failure to understand the Hamas enemy presumably also explains the ongoing absence of a new ceasefire and hostage release on the Gaza front.

A. US-Hamas ceasefire/hostage talks have again stalled. Despite GHF and the militias, Hamas is still the dominant Arab actor in the Strip and its demands have not changed.

It should have been clear to both Israel and the US from the start of this war on October 7, 2023 that release by Hamas of all living hostages would be contingent on ending the war and leaving Hamas in at least partial control of the Strip. Under any alternative arrangement, Hamas understands that by releasing the last hostage it is signing its death warrant. Netanyahu, for his part, knows that both leaving Hamas in power and obtaining release of the last hostage will be understood as a failed end to the war and the end of his coalition.

Paradoxically, then, Hamas and Netanyahu both need to extend the war for their political survival. Under these circumstances, only overwhelming Israeli public pressure or overwhelming Trump administration pressure can end the war in Gaza. Trump has little reason to pressure Netanyahu as long as the US is not dragged into the Gaza war and as long as the Trump romance with the wealthy Persian Gulf oil states prospers despite the war in Gaza.

As for Israeli public pressure, in view of Netanyahu’s governing coalition majority, only the extreme religious parties in the government, each with a highly objectionable agenda for the war and for Israeli society, can conceivably apply it in the foreseeable future.

Q. The Gaza war connection is relevant to failure on the Iran front as well?

A. In the eyes of Israeli Intelligence--not just the Netanyahu government with its twisted agendas--Tehran remains bent on Israel’s destruction. Israel’s successful retaliation against Iran mere months ago rendered the regime there at least temporarily vulnerable to an attack designed to destroy Iranian nuclear capabilities. Such an attack would enjoy far more sweeping Israeli public support than the current war in Gaza.

But to be successful, an Israeli attack on Iran requires far-reaching collaboration with the US. Yet the Trump administration, which seeks to disengage from Middle East conflicts, is currently trying to negotiate with Tehran a nuclear freeze reminiscent of the JCPOA deal originally negotiated by the Obama administration and scuttled by Trump. At present, those negotiations are stalled, but not defunct.

From Netanyahu’s standpoint, a successful Israeli-American attack on Iran’s nuclear project--in effect, renewed war with Iran--could offer a popular excuse for disengaging from Gaza. Haredi and messianist threats to dismantle the coalition would then presumably have to wait. So here Trump is the obstacle.

Not that a renewed JCPOA-type US-Iran agreement, which Trump could yet salvage, is ideal from Israel’s standpoint. It would leave Iran’s extremist Islamist regime in place. And it would leave Israel to face, virtually alone, an Iran weakened by Israel’s earlier counter-attacks but still bent ideologically on Israel’s destruction and determined to exploit any new understandings with the US in order to rearm.

Q. Bottom line?

A. Barring (as usual) unforeseen circumstances, the only likely opportunity for change in Israel’s disastrous approach to Gaza and Gazans is if the Haredim leave the coalition over the issue of compulsory conscription, against the backdrop of a war that is draining Israel’s manpower reserves.

Yediot Aharonot columnist Sima Kadmon summed it up last Friday:

“What we’ve just seen is inconceivable: Not October 7, nor the endless war, nor abandoning the hostages in Gaza tunnels, nor the soldiers who have fallen for the sake of coalition survival, nor reservist fatigue, nor the situation of war-front evacuees, nor the economic and family tragedies, nor the international situation--none of this has led to coalition collapse. The only factor that (perhaps) is leading to collapse is the prime minister’s failure (not for lack of trying) to arrange for Haredim not to serve in the military while maintaining the riches they have accumulated at the expense of the other sectors, those who produce, work and serve.”

Meanwhile, arming Gazan anti-Hamas clans will come back to haunt Israel, just as did the pre-October 7 arming of Hamas--then, as now, with Netanyahu’s tacit approval.