As of: February 4, 2024, 10:14 p.m
From: Foreign Policy
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Many see Benjamin Netanyahu as facing political extinction.
How Israel's prime minister could still be rewarded at the ballot box.
The former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff blames Benjamin Netanyahu for the October 7 Hamas attack.
The majority of the Israeli population supports their prime minister – at least in rejecting the two-state solution.
Despite all the criticism and disputes over judicial reform, this may well pay off in the next election.
This article is available for the first time in German - it was first published by
Foreign Policy
magazine on January 29, 2024 .
Jerusalem – On January 18, Gadi Eizenkot, former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and observer in the Israeli War Cabinet, attacked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a television interview.
Eizenkot emphasized what everyone already knows: Netanyahu bears responsibility for the political, security and intelligence failures that culminated in the massacre of around 1,200 Israelis and the start of the war in Israel last October.
The prime minister subordinated Israel's war plans - and the lack of post-war plans in Gaza - to his political needs and, in a sharp departure from government policy, declared that there would have to be a long pause in fighting and negotiations with Hamas to secure the release of the hostages .
Eizenkot, who is not a born politician, actually behaved like one.
Frustrated with Netanyahu, the retired lieutenant general went public to increase political pressure on the prime minister.
Netanyahu is, it has been leaked, in a showdown with his defense minister, the IDF high command and National Unity Party leader Benny Gantz.
Gantz joined the war cabinet shortly after the Hamas attacks on October 7.
Loss of power for Netanyahu in Israel: Media is already speculating
One may rightly question the wisdom of allowing Israel's brutal domestic policies to become public in the midst of a terrible conflict, but Eizenkot's interview appears to have forced a change in government policy.
Netanyahu recently offered Hamas a two-month ceasefire - which the group rejected - in return for the release of all hostages, including the remains of those now deceased.
Eizenkot's blunt words were also followed by several news articles speculating that Netanyahu could lose his power.
The USA, the UN and the EU have harshly criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for his rejection of the two-state solution.
© dpa
This possibility is exciting not only for Netanyahu's opponents in Israel, where a lot is at stake - but also in Washington circles where people love to hate "Bibi".
Many in the US political community and beyond will be popping the champagne corks when the hated Netanyahu finally falls.
The multiple failures of October 7 suggest that this moment is tantalizingly close.
But despite appearances, Netanyahu may still have a lot of life left in him.
I know that may sound crazy.
As everyone knows, “Mr.
Security” the worst security collapse in Israel’s history, which cost around 1,400 Israelis their lives and left around 3,000 injured.
Unlike the heads of the IDF and Israel's Shin Bet intelligence service, Netanyahu refuses to accept responsibility for the disaster.
This is, to say the least, a political disgrace.
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Israel's elections: Don't write off Netanyahu too quickly
But it is still too early to declare Netanyahu's political career over.
If recent history teaches us anything, it is always premature to predict who will be the Prime Minister long before the vote is cast.
In the five elections between 2009 and 2019 and the three since 2020, the political community in Washington expected someone other than Netanyahu to become prime minister - but he remained in office anyway.
When he was ultimately unable to cobble together a coalition in 2021 and went into opposition, it was only temporary.
He returned the following year.
Of course, responsibility for a devastating war makes Netanyahu particularly vulnerable in the political struggles to come, but he has a path to victory, if not redemption.
I can imagine my friends and colleagues looking at me like I was from another planet: “Come on, Steven.
You're counterintuitive and provocative just for the sake of it.
Bibi is finished!” You might think that, but you would also think the same about Donald Trump and his almost 100 criminal complaints.
Still, he is the presumptive Republican presidential nominee this year and has a good chance of returning to the White House.
Israel's right has an advantage over the coalition
Leaving Netanyahu aside for a moment, on January 19th the
Financial Times
published a revealing graphic showing that, contrary to popular belief, Israeli politics has not changed all that much since the start of the war - at least in terms of the number of Knesset members. Seats concerned.
If you add up the likely number of parliamentary mandates based on the current surveys, the right-wing parties would control 58 mandates - and would therefore just miss the majority needed to form a government.
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The center – or what is considered the center in Israel – would get 48 seats.
The Islamist United Arab List would get five seats, as would the so-called joint list, and Meretz would claim four seats.
That makes a total of 62 seats.
That seems great, but it seems unlikely that the Joint List would be invited into a coalition given its mix of Marxism-Leninism, Arab nationalism and anti-Zionism, meaning likely center and left coalition members are only looking at 57 seats could.
The people from the joint list could of course support a government from outside the coalition.
However, this is politically risky for Gantz and Yair Lapid, who leads the Yesh Atid party, as they would rely on the "anti-Zionist" group to secure their government - a taboo in Israeli politics.
It is also true that parties on the right may not want to work with Netanyahu, such as Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu, although luring him into a coalition is conceivable.
Others, such as Shas, are free and would be willing to join whichever coalition promises the most resources.
However, that is easier said than done.
Lapid's decidedly secularist Yesh Atid would have a hard time coming to terms with the decidedly non-secularist Shas as a coalition partner.
The point is that the right has an advantage in Israeli politics regardless of how people feel about Netanyahu - who is at 15 percent approval in one poll but at 40 percent in another, which is almost exactly the same as which he had before October 7 – which is likely to benefit the Prime Minister.
Majority in Israel supports Netanyahu's rejection of the two-state solution
What's more, 65 percent of Israelis reject a two-state solution, most disapprove of the Palestinian Authority, and an overwhelming number support the government's efforts to "destroy" Hamas.
It doesn't take a political genius to understand how prevailing Israeli views on this combination of issues can be exploited politically.
Netanyahu will crack down on the two-state solution, which means he will also take on anyone he can associate the issue with.
That means he's even running against US President Joe Biden - which requires tremendous chutzpah given what the White House has done for Israel, but such is politics - against the European Union, UN Secretary-General António Guterres and various other opponents.
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 he is widely viewed in Washington and Brussels as better than Netanyahu, the prime minister can portray him as a straw man for people like US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell - the Europeans have recently promised "consequences" if Netanyahu does not agree to a Palestinian state - which would threaten Israel's security through the now familiar mantra of "two states living side by side in peace."
A larger number of Israelis believed in this idea before October 7, making the West's desire for the Palestinian Authority as a partner with Israel ripe for political attack.
The Palestinian Authority is corrupt, dysfunctional and lacks legitimacy among the Palestinian population, who now favor Hamas.
Additionally, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has long been a leading voice denying the Holocaust and delegitimizing the Jewish connection to the Land of Israel and the West Bank.
In the context of the October 7 attacks, the Palestinian Authority has become a source of gross disinformation by claiming that the IDF, not Hamas, was responsible for the massacre of hundreds of people at the Supernova music festival.
Netanyahu could use hatred of Hamas to his advantage
Additionally, as Hamas's popularity has increased among Palestinians since the start of the war, people affiliated with or affiliated with Fatah - the main PLO faction that controls the Palestinian Authority - have changed their stance toward the group.
Instead of trying to keep Hamas out of the Palestinian government, they insist that without Hamas there can be no political solution to the conflict with Israel.
Netanyahu, who is a skillful politician, will undermine the two-state solution by making full use of pressure from the EU and the United States, Abbas and the Palestinian Authority to strengthen it politically.
It's not hard to see how Netanyahu and his allies will craft a message that says, "We've been attacked, and now these foreigners want to put our fate in the hands of people like Abbas and Hamas."
We don't want to let them and their ally Gantz get away with this.
Given the way Israelis are collectively traumatized and hurt as a result of October 7, this is a powerful and potentially winning argument.
Netanyahu may be too damaged to prevail.
But he's probably closer to victory than many people think.
The Israelis have closed ranks and care little about what the world thinks about how they are fighting Hamas - an existential threat, in their view.
They are the ones fighting against Hamas and the world.
And that's exactly what Netanyahu is counting on.
To the author
Steven A. Cook
is a columnist at Foreign Policy and Eni Enrico Mattei Senior Fellow for Middle East and African Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.
His latest book, The End of Ambition: America's Past, Present, and Future in the Middle East, will be published in June 2024.
Twitter (X): @stevenacook
We are currently testing machine translations. This article was automatically translated from English into German.
This article was first published in English in the magazine “ForeignPolicy.com” on January 29, 2024 - as part of a cooperation, it is now also available in translation to readers of the IPPEN.MEDIA portals.