Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich has been walking a tightrope since voting against the hostage deal in the fateful government meeting on Friday night, January 17.
He negotiated with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in order to receive guarantees that the deal would not prevent Israel from completing its other war goals – destroying Hamas’s military and governing capabilities and ensuring that Gaza would no longer pose a security threat to Israel.
In fact, Smotrich’s pressure on Netanyahu led to the security cabinet making three important decisions that Friday – a commitment to achieve all of the war goals, including a commitment to block Hamas’s ability to distribute humanitarian aid; the addition of another war goal, to improve security in the West Bank by ramping up counterterrorist operations; and a decision connected to fighting Hamas globally, which Smotrich said he could not elaborate on.
But Smotrich has also said that the deal is “catastrophic” and “dangerous” to Israeli security. Although he and his fellow ministers from the Religious Zionist Party voted against the deal, they did not leave the government.
In an interview with The Jerusalem Post, Smotrich said that he had “not slept for a week” over the decision, but that he eventually decided to remain in the government after becoming convinced that Netanyahu and the new Trump administration were committed to removing Hamas as a governing power from Gaza, including by force if necessary.
Negotiations over Phase 2 of the deal are scheduled to officially begin on Monday, and Hamas is unlikely to agree to release the remaining hostages if it does not receive in exchange an end to the war, with it remaining in power. If Hamas agrees to lay down its weapons and to its leaders leaving Gaza, as well as to releasing all of the hostages, then force will not be necessary, Smotrich said. But this is highly unlikely, and Smotrich is convinced that Israel will return to battle soon after Phase 1 ends at the beginning of March.
Smotrich argued that the deal would have gone through whether or not he left the government, and said that while he believed that the deal was a mistake, the majority of his coalition was in favor, and he could not “impose his minority opinion” on the rest.
“When I joined politics, my father said, ‘Look, Bezalel, politics is the arena of power…. Be very careful not to use power just because you have it, and always check whether there is a justification.’”
In this case, just because he had political clout did not mean that he had to use it by threatening to bring down the government. Smotrich has said, however, that if Phase 2 of the deal includes an end to the war without achieving its goals, he would not just leave the government; he would topple it.
He brushed aside criticism over the fact that despite his vote against the deal, he wrote on X that he was moved by the return of the hostages. This was “shallow,” he said. He also mentioned the father of a hostage who accused him of “voting to kill his son.” According to Smotrich, his vote against the deal was a “vote for life” – the lives of those who would no longer be targeted by Hamas. The US would never have agreed to a hostage swap with Nazi Germany that would have left the Nazis in power, Smotrich said, and neither should Israel.
The most dangerous part of the deal is the idea that taking Israelis hostage paid off and was enough to “bring Israel to its knees,” Smotrich said. This could result in attempts to kidnap Israelis or Jews abroad, which could be done fairly easily, and could force Israel to pay a heavy price. Israel needs to ensure that the end result will be an end to Hamas – and as such, a deterrent against future hostage-taking.
Smotrich also expressed criticism over the length of the war. The war should have been far quicker, he said, and part of what prolonged it was the Biden administration’s “arms embargo” and its delay of shipment of D9 military bulldozers, which are crucial for Israel’s urban warfare tactics. This also led to the death of soldiers, who ended up having to enter areas without using sufficient force.
Still, Smotrich said that Israel had already “changed the equation” of its prior urban warfare tactics, in that “civilians can no longer shield terrorists.” According to Smotrich, the new doctrine is that “anywhere where there is terror – we will evacuate the civilians and then flatten the area.” This brought about the return of Israel’s “relative advantage,” which it lost over the past 30 years due to the ineffectiveness of its immense firepower in urban guerrilla warfare, he said.
Smotrich’s reactions to Trump
There is “no such thing” as US President Donald Trump not allowing Israel to return to war, Smotrich added. Israel has the right to act as it sees fit. The question is whether it will be easier or harder – but the impression was that the Trump administration is on the same page, Smotrich said.
The “moderate axis,” in closed discussions, is requesting that we “go the distance” and totally destroy Hamas – Israel is doing the work for the Jordanians, Egyptians, Saudis, and others, Smotrich said.
TRUMP HAS indicated that he is interested in making peace in the Middle East, and many analysts believe that his ultimate goal is to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
According to Smotrich, the only way for Trump to receive a Nobel Prize is by projecting “great force” and enabling Israel to take out the entire Iranian axis. This will “make the world cleaner, more enlightened, and stronger,” and will make other countries want to join. “First [there] will be war, then peace,” he said in English. The “sure way” to achieve the opposite result is if Israel projects weakness, Smotrich said.
Smotrich described the combination of Israel’s projection of strength in the war and the Trump administration’s policies as a “historic opportunity” to change the Middle East and lead to a “giant sweep of development and prosperity.”
The only thing standing in the way, according to Smotrich, is the Palestinians, who “never did anything good and never brought any good to the world.” This needs to be “taken off the table,” and there will be no Palestinian state, Smotrich said.
He described supporters of Palestinian statehood as people committed to making the same mistake over and over. The Palestinians will never come to terms with Israel’s existence and will always seek to destroy it, Smotrich said. He did not differentiate in this regard between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. PA leader Mahmoud Abbas had yet to condemn the Hamas massacre, and a majority of Palestinians in the PA support Hamas and the massacre, he claimed. If the Palestinians were to receive statehood, Hamas would take over immediately, and then the West Bank would become “Gaza times 20,” he said.
The solution, instead, is to give Palestinian cities local civil authorities, but with “zero sovereignty,” he said. This was the “Palestinian Emirates plan” put forward by Bar-Ilan University’s Mordechai Kedar, he said. He also referenced his “Victory Plan” of 2017, in which he laid out his policies regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He added that there is no chance that a Palestinian state would be democratic. “The Palestinians under Israeli occupation have 1,000 times the rights” of Palestinians under self-rule. Palestinians in the West Bank will have “good lives” and will be prosperous, but will not enjoy the right to vote for a parliament, so as to ensure Israel’s Jewish majority. Smotrich acknowledged that this would entail a “democratic deficit.”
Palestinian nationalism is based entirely on combating Israel, and does not represent a historic collective, Smotrich said. Egypt, Jordan, and other countries have a collective history, and therefore Israel was able to diffuse conflicts with them by diplomatic means. The Palestinians, however, would never agree to end the conflict diplomatically, since this would “pull the rug” out from under them.
Smotrich claimed that history proved this. The United Nations Partition Plan in 1947, and generous peace proposals at Camp David in 2000 and Annapolis in 2007, were all accepted by Israel and rejected by the Palestinians, he said. During the Oslo Accords in the 1990s, the PA under Yasser Arafat recognized Israel and signed a series of agreements that are still in place and respected by the current government, but Arafat then proceeded to send “suicide bombers” into city centers, Smotrich said.
Smotrich admitted, however, that he has never met with leaders from the PA since he is “not willing to meet with terrorists,” who “incited and educated to terror.” He said that he had met with “local Palestinian leaders” who hate the PA’s corruption and simply want better lives.
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