‘No excuse’ for Netanyahu not making ceasefire deal, says Israeli activist

We spoke to the Israeli writer and activist Gershon Baskin who has in the past negotiated hostage deals between Israel and Hamas. We began by asking him whether Benjamin Netanyahu cares about Israeli isolation from their allies.

Gershon Baskin: It doesn’t seem to care. Israel just keeps on going on doing whatever it wants and has pretty much impunity. We are being increasingly isolated in the world, and as we’re waiting for the attack from Lebanon and from Iran, Israel’s airspace is being cut off from the world as we see more and more international airlines ceasing their flights to Israel. But that’s mainly because of the impending attack. We’ll see if this has any lasting political effect.

Matt Frei: Let’s get, first of all, to this appalling attack overnight against the school in Gaza City. It seems to me that every time we are edging closer towards some kind of deal, ceasefire for hostages, that something terrible happens.

Gershon Baskin: The problem with the question is that I don’t see Israel moving closer and closer to a deal. A deal has been on the table for quite some time. A deal could have been reached almost from the beginning of the war, but Netanyahu has refused to accept the deal. He refuses to accept the demands of Hamas, which one might be able to understand that Israel doesn’t want to surrender after the horrendous atrocities committed by Hamas on 7 October. That would be fine, perhaps, if we didn’t still have 115 Israeli hostages in Gaza, amongst them young women, children, elderly people, sick and wounded. There is no excuse, from my point of view, of the prime minister not making a deal with Hamas and bringing them home. Netanyahu keeps putting more conditions on the table and red lines. And the massacre that we saw in Gaza overnight is just another example of continuing on with the war without thinking about the longer term consequences for Israel, and certainly not caring anything about the Palestinian people.

Matt Frei: Do you think that he wants to continue with the war, as has been charged by many people? Because if the war is over, he might be out of power?

Gershon Baskin: If the war is over, he has to be out of power. There’s a growing cry in this country for new elections. There’s a demand from the public for an inquiry of investigation, headed by a supreme court judge in Israel, to determine the responsibility of Netanyahu, and the military and the intelligence, for the failures of 7 October and what led up to 7 October. And we’ve been experiencing now, for ten months, a lack of governance on the part of the Netanyahu government who simply are not doing their job.

Matt Frei: That accusation levelled against one man that, for his own personal interests, he’s trying to prolong the terrible suffering. That’s one hell of an accusation, isn’t it?

Gershon Baskin: I think it is, and I’m not a lone wolf here. This is being said by the mainstream of Israeli society, by people on our mainstream news stations every day, levelling this charge against Netanyahu. Members of his own government who resigned, Benny Gantz, the leader of the largest opposition party today, who said that he’s putting his own personal political interests in front of those of the country. This is unheard of in a democratic society.

Matt Frei: The political leader of Hamas was assassinated, we presume by the Israelis, although they haven’t fessed up to it. The hardliner Yahya Sinwar, the military leader of Hamas in Gaza, is now the head of the organisation. He apparently wants to continue the war as much as Netanyahu apparently does. So is that a sort of mirror image there?

Gershon Baskin: There is a mirror image. Talk about Siamese twins here in terms of their interest to continue the war. But to be honest and fair, we really don’t know what Yahya Sinwar wants, everyone seems to be speaking in his name and thinking that they know what he wants, but actually we haven’t heard anything from him.

Matt Frei: You, like everyone else in the country, have been expecting some kind of retaliation from Tehran and possibly from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. It hasn’t happened yet. Who in the region actually wants a wider war?

Gershon Baskin: It’s difficult for me to imagine that anyone would want a wider war. There are no winners. There are only losers. Everyone loses. The economy loses. People lose their lives and property. Look at the horrific damage in the Gaza Strip after 7 October. Gaza’s destroyed, two million people homeless. We cannot afford these kind of wars and we cannot morally accept them. We have crossed too many moral lines here and we need to be pulled back.