JERUSALEM: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu became known as a security dog after being in an elite special forces unit that did some of Israel’s most dangerous hostage escapes.
The number of deaths, the traumatized stories, and the pictures of violence that came out of the southern Israeli towns near Gaza have shocked the whole country.
Netanyahu, 74, is in his sixth term as prime minister and leads one of Israel’s most extreme right-wing coalitions. He is coming under more and more pressure as anger over the mistakes that let the attack happen turns into shock.
He has refused to take responsibility, saying only that everyone will have to face tough questions after the war with Hamas is over. At one of his few news conferences, he waved off a question about whether he would step down.
But opinion studies show that most people in the country now blame him. This is because of pictures of cabinet ministers being abused in public when they get out of their official cars.
A poll from October 18–19 by the Maariv newspaper found that 48% of people wanted former Defense Minister Benny Gantz, who leads an opposition moderate party in a new unity government, to be prime minister, while only 28% wanted Netanyahu to be prime minister.
Nethanyahu is leaving. The intelligence and GSS (intelligence service) officers are the same as the top troops. In an editorial this week, the daily newspaper Israel Hayom said, “Because they failed.”
He is being tried on corruption charges, which he claims. His popularity had already been hurt by a bitter fight over plans to limit the Supreme Court’s power, which kept hundreds of thousands of Israelis out of the streets for months.
Since Israeli jets have killed more than 8,000 Palestinians in airstrikes, political effects have been put on hold for now. At the same time, Israeli tanks have broken through the blockaded area and are moving deeper inside.
But a lot will depend on how the operation goes—its stated goal is to destroy Hamas for good—and on whether his own party will stick with him even though more and more people want him to step down.
His friend says, “The government must deliver.”
Danny Danon, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party in parliament, said, “I’m not worried about the polls. I’m worried about results, and I think Prime Minister Netanyahu and the government must deliver.”
“We have seen too many cycles in the past where pressure forced the government not to complete the mission and to leave Hamas in power,” he stated.
“If the government will not deliver what it promised which is the eradication of Hamas, I am sure it will not be accepted – not by the public and not by the political system.”
However, the military test is not the only task. It is scary enough on its own.
Many people around the world are very wary of Netanyahu because he is close with extreme religious and nationalist groups. In the fight over judicial reform, he burned through the goodwill of even friends like the United States.
Along with pressure over problems like the steady growth of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, the number of deaths in the bombing of Gaza has been causing growing concern around the world.
The economy was already struggling because of the uncertainty surrounding the process of changing the courts, which was strongly opposed by most business leaders. Now, businesses in a wide range of industries, from building to food service, have reported big drops in sales.
Netanyahu is usually calm and collected, but lately he’s been acting more erratically. For example, this week he sent out a late-night tweet accusing his intelligence chiefs of not telling him about the Oct. 7 attack.
The tweet was taken down the next morning, and Netanyahu said sorry, but the damage had already been done, and people from all major parties and the press were very critical.
“He is a man who is unfit to serve as prime minister,” an editorialist in Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s most popular newspaper, wrote this week. The writer also said that Netanyahu should have quit or been removed from office right after the Oct. 7 attack.