Opinion
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says the intense phase of the Gaza war is almost finished. Does this mean that Netanyahu himself is nearly finished?
Most Israelis hope so. He’s not a popular figure. Eighty per cent of Israelis think he should take responsibility for the Hamas attack on October 7, according to a poll taken for Ma’ariv newspaper a couple of weeks after that shocking day.
Protesters during a demonstration against the Israeli government and BenJamin Netanyahu on January 6, 2024.Credit: Getty Images Europe
More Israelis would vote for a man who’s not even in parliament if an election were held today, according to a poll published on Friday. The Channel 12 poll found that Netanyahu would attract just 28 per cent of the vote against 36 per cent for former prime minister Naftali Bennett, who’s rumoured to be considering a comeback.
But so long as Netanyahu is waging war against Hamas, he has strong licence to remain as prime minister. “The instinct of most Israelis is ‘let’s finish the job’” of defeating Hamas, says the respected veteran Israeli journalist Ehud Yaari.
On Sunday, Netanyahu said that “the intense phase of the war is about to end in Rafah,” the last Hamas stronghold in Gaza. What will that mean for Netanyahu’s hold on power?
“I think that, with the end of major combat operations in Gaza, the incentive for Israelis to take to the streets again in huge numbers will kick in again,” assesses Yaari, a commentator for Israel’s Channel 12, a journalist of 55 years’ standing and a fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Illustration: Dionne Gain
On Sunday, tens of thousands of Israelis took to the streets to protest against Netanyahu. A former director-general of Israeli internal security agency Shin Bet, Yuval Diskin, told the crowd that Netanyahu was Israel’s “worst prime minister”.
Among the protesters at another demonstration against the PM a few days earlier was Benny Gantz, the former general and opposition party leader rival who, until June 9, was a member of Netanyahu’s war cabinet but now marches for his removal. After Gantz left the war cabinet, Netanyahu disbanded it and is more dependent than ever on his far-right coalition cronies.
But these protests are minor compared to the hundreds of thousands who last year turned out week after week against Netanyahu’s divisive judicial reform proposals, designed to strip the courts of the power to overrule the parliament. Those protests peaked at half a million or more, a big number in a country of 10 million, but ended after the October 7 terrorist attack.
Loading
Yaari had expected the people would have been turning out by the million already: “There are too many people who want him out, the great majority want him out – including most of the [military] reservists, about 350,000 of them, people with families and jobs and businesses.
“It hasn’t happened yet – I’m not sure why, there’s fatigue, there’s depression in the country after October 7,” Yaari tells me. “But I still believe we will see the street speaking, not violently, but in huge numbers.”
So what? Netanyahu is one of the great survivors of world politics. He’s held the prime ministership for over 16 years, a record for Israel, across three stints. He’s survived every sort of crisis including prosecutions for fraud and corruption, still pending in Israeli courts.
He showed no regard for last year’s big protests, or the opinion polls; why would he care now? He is determined not to lose power. If and when he does, he’ll have to face the full consequences of those criminal prosecutions as well as the full fury of the Israeli electorate.
Loading
That’s why US President Joe Biden, when asked this month whether there was any reason to think Netanyahu was prolonging the war for his own political self-preservation, said “there is every reason”.
Netanyahu has much to answer for but has avoided answering. Astonishingly, he had given no interviews to Israeli journalists since October 7, only to Americans. Until the weekend, when he still managed to avoid the tough questions by giving an interview to a sympathetic Channel 14.
The diplomatic correspondent for the Haaretz newspaper, Amir Tibon, on Sunday published a column posing three of the questions Israelis would most like to have Netanyahu answer. Headline: “The Three Questions Netanyahu Fears Most.”
First: “In 2009, when Netanyahu returned to power, did Hamas have the capability to conquer entire Israeli communities and slaughter more than a thousand Israelis in a single day? The answer: A resounding no. Hamas was on its knees.”
Loading
Second: “In 2009, when Netanyahu returned to power, did Hezbollah have the capability to cause widespread destruction in Israel’s major cities? The answer: Absolutely not. Hezbollah was greatly weakened.”
Third: “In 2009, when Netanyahu took power, how far was Iran from a nuclear breakthrough – and how close is it today?” His point is that Iran has made considerable progress under Netanyahu’s watch.
In sum, all of Israel’s enemies grew more dangerous and deadly under Netanyahu’s watch. Most Israelis also would like to ask Netanyahu to account for the failure to bring the hostages home. But the PM won’t have to be held to account at the polls until October, 2026, under the election schedule.
Yaari makes two arguments about people power on the streets of Israel. First is that “it’s not what Bibi” – Netanyahu’s nickname – “is willing to take, it’s a question of how far his parliamentary coalition will go”.
He points out that just last year a mass protest of half a million applied so much pressure on his coalition that it forced Netanyahu to cancel his decision to sack his defence minister.
Second, Yaari points to Israeli history: “We’ve had it happen before, after the Lebanon War in 1982 and in 1973 the Egypt war” better known as the Yom Kippur war. “We had much smaller numbers then than today, and both times they forced governments into collapse.”
He’s betting on the power of the Israeli people to take control of their destiny, but no one ever has made a shekel betting on the end of Netanyahu.
Peter Hartcher is international editor.
Most Viewed in World
Loading