One of the laziest and most poisonous tropes in today’s discourse about Israel is the claim that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is deliberately prolonging the war in Gaza “for no reason” other than to protect his political skin or to avoid prison in his corruption trial. You can hear it from Israel’s enemies abroad, but you will also hear it from Israelis who despise him. It has become a mantra, repeated so often that its logical implications seem to escape those who mouth it.
Let us take this argument seriously for a moment. If Netanyahu is supposedly dragging out the war just to keep himself in office, or to buy time in court, then what does that mean for the people closest to him? Specifically, what does it mean for Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s confidant, cabinet minister, and one of the chief architects of Israel’s war strategy?
Dermer is not just a political figure. He is the father of two sons who are fighting inside Gaza right now. Every day of this war is not an abstraction for him. It is an immediate and deeply personal wager with the lives of his own children. He is not a distant policymaker pulling levers from a safe remove. He is a father watching his sons risk everything in a war he helps shape.
So let us be clear. If the critics are right, if this war is truly being prolonged “for no reason,” then Ron Dermer is knowingly and willingly sending his own sons into battle purely to protect Benjamin Netanyahu’s political career or shield him from prison. That is the unavoidable logic. To believe the talking point, you must believe that Dermer is so twisted, so inhuman, that he would gamble with the lives of his children in service of Netanyahu’s ambitions.
Do the critics actually believe that? Are they prepared to say out loud that Dermer is that sick, that depraved, that monstrous? Because that is precisely what their rhetoric implies. And if they do not believe it, then their argument collapses into incoherence. You cannot simultaneously say the war is being prolonged “for no reason” and avoid charging Dermer with the most grotesque betrayal a father could commit.
This is what happens when hatred of Netanyahu metastasizes. It blinds people to the human reality in front of them. It reduces Israelis, even those in power, to cardboard cutouts in a political morality play. It erases the fact that the leaders shaping these decisions are not cartoon villains but fathers and mothers with children in the line of fire. The obsession with Netanyahu has become so consuming that otherwise intelligent people have stopped hearing the words coming out of their own mouths.
You may loathe Netanyahu. You may despise his politics, his personality, or his record. Fine. But when you start insisting that the entire war is nothing but a cynical ploy to extend his career or delay his trial, you are making an accusation so deranged that it reveals more about you than it does about him. You are effectively saying that men like Ron Dermer, who wakes up every morning with his two sons in uniform, are either fools incapable of recognizing the risk to their children or monsters willing to sacrifice them for politics.
Those are the only two possibilities that follow from the critics’ logic. And neither is remotely plausible. Which means the slogan collapses under its own weight. It is not an argument but an act of spite, a way of scoring a cheap political point by pretending not to notice the human reality it implies.
So the next time you hear someone repeat that the war is being prolonged “for no reason,” ask them this: do you really believe Ron Dermer is an evil monster? Do you really think a father would sacrifice his own children on the altar of Netanyahu’s political survival, or to keep him out of prison? And if not, why are you peddling a slander so grotesque that you cannot even bring yourself to own it?
