Steven A. Cook
On Jan. 18, Gadi Eisenkot, a former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff who also serves as an observer on Israel’s war cabinet, assailed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a television interview. Eisenkot underlined what everyone already knows: Netanyahu bears responsibility for the political, security, and intelligence failures that culminated in the massacre of approximately 1,200 Israelis last October. He also averred that the prime minister has subordinated Israel’s war plans—and lack of plans for postwar Gaza—to his political needs and, in a sharp departure from government policy, declared that there will need to be a long pause in the fighting and negotiations with Hamas to secure the release of hostages.
Eisenkot, who is not a natural politician, was sure acting like one. Frustrated with Netanyahu, the retired lieutenant general went public to turn up the political pressure on the prime minister, who, according to leaks, is locked in a test of wills with his defense minister, the IDF senior command, and National Unity party leader Benny Gantz, who joined the war cabinet shortly after Hamas’s Oct. 7 attacks.
It’s fair to wonder about the wisdom of allowing Israel’s brutal domestic politics to spill out into the open in the midst of a terrible conflict, but Eisenkot’s interview seems to have forced a change in government policy. Netanyahu recently offered Hamas a two-month cease-fire—which the group rejected—in exchange for the release of all the hostages, including the remains of those who are now dead. Eisenkot’s blunt words also triggered several news articles speculating that Netanyahu may be losing his grip on power.
This possibility is exciting for Netanyahu’s opponents in Israel, where the stakes are high, but also inside the Beltway, where everyone loves to hate “Bibi.” Many in the Washington policy community and beyond will pop champagne corks the day Netanyahu finally falls, and the manifold failures of Oct. 7 suggest that this moment may be tantalizingly close.
But, contrary to appearances, Netanyahu may have a lot more life in him yet. I know that might sound crazy. As everyone knows, “Mr. Security” presided over the single-worst security breakdown in Israel’s history, which has taken the lives of about 1,400 Israelis and injured approximately 3,000. Unlike the heads of the IDF and Israel’s domestic security agency Shin Bet, Netanyahu refuses to take responsibility for the disaster. That is politically tin-eared, to say the least.
But it is still premature to declare Netanyahu’s political career over. If recent history is any guide, it is always rash to count the prime minister out well before anyone casts a ballot. In the five elections between 2009 and 2019 and the three since 2020 the Washington policy community expected someone not named Netanyahu to become prime minister, but he nevertheless remained premiere. When he was finally unable to cobble together a coalition in 2021 and went into opposition, it was only temporary. He came back the following year. Of course, responsibility for a devastating war renders Netanyahu uniquely vulnerable in the political battles to come, but he has a path to victory, if not redemption.
I can see my friends and colleagues looking at me as if I am from another planet as they dismiss me: “C’mon, Steven. You are being counterintuitive and provocative for the sake of it. Bibi is toast!” One would think, but one would also think the same about Donald Trump and his almost 100 criminal charges. Yet he is the presumptive Republican nominee for president this year with a decent chance of returning to the White House.
Setting aside Netanyahu for just a moment, the Financial Times published a revealing graph on Jan. 19, which demonstrated that, contrary to conventional wisdom, Israeli politics have not changed all that much since the beginning of the war—at least in terms of Knesset seats. Adding up the likely number of parliamentary mandates implied from current polling, parties on the right would control 58 mandates—slightly short of a majority to form a government.
The center—or what counts as the center in Israel—would control 48 seats. The Islamist United Arab List would get five, as would what is known as the Joint List, and Meretz would claim four seats. That comes to 62 seats. That seems great, but it seems unlikely that the Joint List would be invited to join a coalition given its mix of Marxist-Leninism, Arab nationalism, and anti-Zionism, meaning likely coalition members of the center and left could only count on gaining 57 seats. The folks from the Joint List could, of course, support a government from outside the coalition. Yet that is politically dicey for Gantz and Yair Lapid, who leads the Yesh Atid party, because they would be relying on the “non/anti-Zionist” group to ensure their government—a no-no in Israeli politics.
It is also true that parties on the right may not want to cooperate with Netanyahu, such as Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu, though he could conceivably be enticed into a coalition. Others such as Shas are free agents and would be willing to be a part of whatever coalition that promises the most resources. That is easier said than done, however. Lapid’s decidedly secularist Yesh Atid would have a hard time coming to terms with the decidedly not secularist Shas as a coalition partner. The point here is that the right has an edge in Israeli politics, regardless of how people feel about Netanyahu—who is polling at 15 percent approval in one poll but 40 percent in another one, which is almost exactly where he was polling before Oct. 7—that likely benefits the prime minister.
Add this political reality to the fact that 65 percent of Israelis oppose a two-state solution, most disapprove of the Palestinian Authority, and an overwhelming number support the government’s effort to “destroy” Hamas. You don’t have to be a political genius to understand how prevailing Israeli views on this combination of issues can be exploited politically. Netanyahu is going to run hard against the two-state solution, which means he is also going to run against everyone and anyone to whom he can tie the issue. That means even running against President Joe Biden—which takes an enormous amount chutzpah given what the White House has done for Israel, but that is politics—the European Union, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, and various other bogeymen.
The two-state solution is a problem for Gantz, whose National Unity party is the most popular among Israelis. Gantz has never publicly committed to a Palestinian state, but because most of Washington and Brussels regards him as preferable to Netanyahu, the prime minister can paint him as a stalking horse for the likes of U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and EU foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell—the Europeans recently promised “consequences” unless Netanyahu agrees to a Palestinian state—who would put Israel’s security in jeopardy through the now well-known mantra of “two states living side by side in peace.”
A larger number of Israelis bought into that idea prior to Oct. 7, which makes the West’s desire for the PA to be Israel’s partner ripe for political attack. The PA is corrupt, dysfunctional, and lacks legitimacy among the Palestinian population, which now favors Hamas. In addition, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has long been a leading voice denying the Holocaust and delegitimizing the Jewish connection to the land that is Israel and the West Bank. And when it comes to the Oct. 7 attacks, the PA has become a source of crude disinformation, notoriously claiming that the IDF was responsible for the massacre of hundreds of people at the Supernova music festival, not Hamas. Moreover, because Hamas’s favorability among Palestinians has risen since the war began, figures within or connected to Fatah—the main PLO faction that controls the PA—have changed their position on the group. Instead of trying to keep Hamas out of Palestinian government, they insist that there can be no political solution to the conflict with Israel without Hamas.
Netanyahu, who is a skilled politician, is going to leverage the two-state solution, using pressure from the EU and United States, Abbas, and the PA for all that they are worth politically. It is not hard to see how Netanyahu and his allies will shape a message around, “We were attacked, and now these foreigners want to put our fate in the hands of people like Abbas and Hamas. Let’s not let them, with their ally Gantz, do that.” Given the way that Israelis are collectively traumatized and aggrieved as a result of Oct. 7, it is a potent and possibly winning argument.
Netanyahu may be too damaged to prevail, but he will likely come closer to winning than many realize. Israelis have closed ranks and don’t care much what the world thinks about how they are fighting Hamas—an existential threat from their perspective. It is them against Hamas and the world. That is precisely what Netanyahu is counting on.
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