Israel has the misfortune of being governed by a man who is widely disliked in his own land. Yet, in one of the world’s biggest mysteries, Binyamin Netanyahu has been in power for 16 years spread out over three terms, the longest tenure in the nation’s history.
Until Hamas terrorists attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, he was facing widespread political opposition, not just from its citizens. Several members of the military were also demonstrating against him. Most Israelis were angered by his inclusion of extreme right-wing elements in his cabinet, many of whom had ties to the Settlers in the West Bank. Netanyahu and his cabinet were busy trying to pass legislation that would limit the powers of the judiciary.
The attack of October 7 caught Israel totally off-guard, even more so than the attack by the armies of Egypt and Syria on Yom Kippur in 1973. In a daring raid, Hamas broke through the heavily guarded border with apparent ease and killed more than a thousand Israelis.
Netanyahu’s self-cultivated image of being Israel’s saviour was shattered. He was “destroyed emotionally,” to quote former prime minister Ehud Olmert. In an interview with POLITICO, Olmert argued Netanyahu suffered a “nervous breakdown” as he sought to avoid being thrown out of office for failing to safeguard national security in the murderous Hamas attacks of October 7. Olmert added, “Bibi has been working all his life on the false pretence that he is Mr. Security. He’s ‘Mr. Bullshit’.”
As his political fortunes hit a nadir, Netanyahu reached out to his political opponents in the Knesset and patched together a unity government, hoping to salvage his reputation. The US, which provides more than $3 billion to Israel every year, sent its secretary of state to Tel Aviv to show its commitment to Israel. In a photo-op that was seen around the world, he stood next to Netanyahu – and declared that he was standing next to him as an “American Jew”.
A few days later, US President Joe Biden arrived in Tel Aviv, stood next to Netanyahu, and declared himself to be a “Christian Zionist”.
The US counselled Israel to observe restraint and not get carried away with emotions. It cited the lessons the US had learned the hard way when it went after the terrorists who had carried out the heinous attacks of 9/11 on US soil. But Netanyahu had tuned everyone out.
In a carefully rehearsed script that must have been written prior to October 7, he directed the Israeli military to act in self-defence. To him, that did not mean carrying out a targeted attack against the terrorists who carried out the surprise attack. To him, it meant that the Israeli military would carry out an intense, around-the-clock bombardment of a small strip of land which was home to 2.3 million Palestinians. Gaza was bombed from the air, from the land, and from the sea.
Ostensibly to save civilian lives, he ordered one million civilians living in northern Gaza to move to the south within 24 hours or risk being bombarded. But oddly enough, he simultaneously turned off their water, food and energy supplies.
On October 24, the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that while he condemned in the strongest terms the massacre committed by Hamas on October 7, he wished to remind the world that it did not take place in a vacuum. He said that one cannot dissociate 56 years of occupation from our engagement with the tragedy that unfolded on that day.
Instead of offering a conciliatory note, Netanyahu, through his diplomats, demanded Guterres’s resignation, claiming that he supported Hamas and justified the massacre it carried out. The Israeli media also jumped on the bandwagon, asserting, among other things, that the UN chief “has demonstrated a stunning degree of moral bankruptcy.”
When 120 nations of the UN General Assembly voted for a resolution calling for a ceasefire, Israeli officials, acting no doubt on Netanyahu’s behalf, vilified the UN.
Professor Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian who teaches at the University of Exeter in the UK, has authored several books, including The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. He states that despite claiming to be the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel is only a democracy for its Jewish citizens and not for its Palestinian citizens.
He says the only way out for Israel is to elect a new government that “brings equal rights for everyone from the river to the sea and allows for the return of Palestinian refugees. Otherwise, the cycle of bloodshed will not end.”
A November 3 poll by Professor Camille Fox found that 75% of the Israeli public thinks Netanyahu should resign immediately or at the end of the war. A former Israeli general, Noam Tibon, told NPR: “Benjamin Netanyahu cannot stay even one more day on the chair of the prime minister. He is a failure, and he must go”
Professor Avi Shlaim, an Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford University, provides a much-needed historical perspective on the creation of Israel. He has authored seminal books on the subject, such as Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions Refutations, and The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.
He speaks with authority when he says: “If I had to choose an arbitrary date for the beginning of the conflict, I would opt for 1917. That is the year in which Britain issued the Balfour Declaration in support of a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine. In 1917, the Jews were only 10% of the population, the Arabs were 90%. The Jews owned only 2% of the land, and yet Britain’s intervention enabled the Zionist movement to embark on the systematic takeover of Palestine, which continues to this day.
“The British mandate in Palestine from 1922 to 1948 is what enabled the Zionist movement to establish itself, and [it also enabled them] to eventually, in 1948, proclaim and achieve independence. Now, I have never questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its original borders. These are the borders that were agreed upon between Israel and its neighbours in 1949 after the guns fell silent. These are the only internationally recognized borders that Israel has ever had and the ones that I still regard as legitimate.
“But there is no denying that the establishment of the state of Israel involved a monumental injustice to the Palestinians. This is what the Palestinians call the Nakba, the catastrophe. Three-fourths of a million Palestinians, more than half of the Arab population, became refugees, and the name Palestine was wiped off the map. This is the Nakba, this is the catastrophe.”
Turning to recent events, in another conversation, he said: “Israelis claim that they gave the Palestinians a chance to turn Gaza into the Singapore of the Middle East. But they did nothing of the sort. They turned Gaza into an open-air prison. The media attention has been on the Hamas attack and on Israel’s response, which is out of all proportion. I condemn both. I condemn the Hamas attack because it was against civilians. And killing civilians is wrong, period. But the Israeli response has been brutal and savage and out of all proportion. And revenge is not a policy. And what Israel is doing is state-sponsored terrorism. Or state terrorism. It’s on a much more serious scale than the attack on Israel.
“The point I really want to emphasise is that the conflict didn’t start on October 7. People don’t ask why Hamas launched this attack. And the answer is to be found in the context. And the context is the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967.”
In 2015, Israeli journalist Gideon Levy spoke to the National Press Club in Washington, DC and said Israel’s right-wing extremists had perfected the art of playing the victim. In their eyes, they were God’s chosen people and could only do good. That gave them the right to dehumanise the people whose land they were now living on (and this was reconfirmed recently by the Israeli defence minister when he called them “human animals”). They could kill them at will without a pang of guilt.
Levy said he asked Ehud Barak, later prime minister, what he would have done if he had been born into a Palestinian family. The truth came out when he said that he would have grown up to be a terrorist. On November 9, Levy wrote in Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper that he edits, that unless Israel examines its failings, soon it will be fighting another war.
The Palestinian death count continues to rise with every passing day. As of this writing, it has passed 11,000, which is more than nine times the Israeli death count from October 7. Initially, Netanyahu dismissed it as a Hamas fabrication, but later, he blamed it on Hamas “since they started the war and are using civilians as human shields.”
French President Emmanuel Macron has now called for a ceasefire. In Pavlovian fashion, Netanyahu rejected it, saying that a ceasefire would be tantamount to surrender.
Once global opposition to the wanton death and destruction he has brought to civilians in Gaza reaches a crescendo, Netanyahu will declare victory and call off his invasion. Of course, it will be a Pyrrhic victory at best.
Soon thereafter, he will most probably lose his position as prime minister. His popularity with Israelis has hit rock bottom. A November 3 poll by Professor Camille Fox found that 75% of the Israeli public thinks Netanyahu should resign immediately or at the end of the war. A former Israeli general, Noam Tibon, told NPR: “Benjamin Netanyahu cannot stay even one more day on the chair of the prime minister. He is a failure, and he must go.”
But it’s highly unlikely that he will have the strength of character to resign his position like Golda Meir did after the 1973 war.