Benjamin Netanyahu’s persona bears an uncanny resemblance to Pahom, the protagonist of a short story by Leo Tolstoy set in Tsarist Russia.
Like Tolstoy’s other works, “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” is a timeless masterpiece that offers insights into human life even today. Consumed by greed, Pahom relentlessly sought to own as much land as possible. The landowner he was dealing with realized this and decided to test him. He invited him to set off on horseback across the open horizon before him so that he might obtain what he desired.
Their agreement was that Pahom would receive all the land he could cover on horseback between dawn and sunset. If he returned on time, he would receive all the land he had covered, but if he was even a single moment late after sunset, he would receive nothing.
Netanyahu, when he stood to speak before the United Nations General Assembly the September before last, was metaphorically crossing the stretches of land before him on horseback. When he began his speech, delegates immediately left the hall, outraged by the suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank at his hands. Nonetheless, he went on, unmoved by the departing delegates. He then presented a map of the region and declared that his government had been fighting a war on seven fronts.
He counted them, beginning with the Houthi front in Yemen, then the “Hamas” front in the Gaza Strip, the West Bank front, the Hezbollah front in southern Lebanon, the front of the groups attacking Israel from Syrian territory at the time, and the Popular Mobilization Forces in Iraq. Finally, he arrived at the seventh front: Iran.
In Tolstoy’s story, Pahom gets carried away. His excitement blinds him to the consequences of his actions. Consumed by his desire to cover and obtain as much distance as possible, he forgets that he must return before sunset, and that if the sun sets before he has returned, he will receive none of the land.
Tolstoy’s hero returns exhausted, and his judgment fails him. He collapses just before arriving at the starting point. He loses everything and obtains nothing, becoming the victim of the fantasies that possessed him and destroyed him in the final moments.
The prime minister of extremism in Tel Aviv, Pahom’s mirror image, forgot that he must return to Israel as he pursues the seven fronts. His return will force him to confront the reckoning he has tried to avoid since the beginning of the war on Gaza on October 7, 2023. Despite leaping from one front to another since then, he will ultimately have to face the challenges he continues to evade.
The issue was never the number of fronts; it would not change even if he were facing one hundred. The question is whether he can digest what he seeks to swallow. From what we have seen since he began, it appears he has bitten off more than he can chew. Even if he managed to chew it, his stomach would be too weak to digest it. If the stomach could digest it, his body would be too frail to absorb it. In the end, he will meet the same fate as Pahom.
The prime minister of extremism in Tel Aviv knows what he is fleeing from. The more he pushes forward, the more he sees his two fears awaiting him every evening. They invade his bedroom at night and accompany him at every step during the day.
First, he is seeing that evading the judiciary at home will not exempt him from appearing before a judge. Unless he receives a pardon from Israeli President Isaac Herzog, the court will keep waiting for him to stop rushing from one front to another. An unavoidable reckoning awaits. The pardon he had been counting on has been lost somewhere in President Herzog’s office, and the pressure Donald Trump is exerting on the Israeli president only strengthens Herzog’s insistence that the decision is his alone, not the American president’s.
The second thing he is discovering is that the war through which he devastated the Gaza Strip has shone a light on the Palestinian cause. Every neighborhood he destroyed in Gaza has added another state, or more, to the list of countries recognizing Palestine at the UN, and now over two-thirds of UN member states recognize it.
The seven fronts were, in reality, an escape from a more important front awaiting him in Israel, one that neither shifts nor changes. A decisive outcome is needed to change things, and a decisive outcome at home depends either on a pardon or on imprisonment. There is no third option. In Palestine, it depends either on the establishment of a Palestinian state or on Israel remaining insecure forever. Here too, there is no alternative and no third option.
