CONUNDRUM: CAN WAR BE ENDED BY AN ELECTION?
First You Have to Get a Reluctant Prime Minister to Hold One
In a country at war, citizens tend to rally around their political leaders. But, as in so much else, Israel is different. As its reprisal war against Hamas for the atrocities of October 7th grinds on into a fourth month, cracks in the unity of its war cabinet are coming to the fore.
The issue is fundamental, what is the war’s purpose? Is it the total eradication of Hamas—Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s stated aim—or the return of the more than 100 people still held hostage by the terror group in Gaza?
As the Israeli work week ended last Thursday, General Gadi Eisenkot, minister without portfolio and former Israel Defense Force chief of staff, went on the record with the country’s channel 12 to say Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu’s war aim of destroying Hamas completely was unrealistic:
“Those who talk about an absolute defeat and lack of will and ability do not tell the truth. This is why there is no need to tell tall tales.”
Eisenkot, whose 25-year old son, Gal, and his 19 year old nephew, Maor, have been killed in the current fighting in Gaza, called for fresh elections.
“Lack of trust among the public in its government is no less severe than lack of unity during a war. We need to go to the polls and have an election in the next few months, in order to renew the trust as currently there is no trust.
He added,
“The state of Israel is a democracy and needs to ask itself, after such a serious event, how do we go forward with a leadership that is responsible for such an absolute failure?”
Netanyahu rejected the call saying Israel was at war and wartime was not the moment to hold an election. He has also said he expects the war to continue until 2025. It could be unity is his concern but it could also be the steep drop in public opinion about his government. Polling data collated up to January 18, showed a collapse in electoral support for Netanyahu’s Likud party.
Given the scale of the catastrophe of October 7th and the unknowable consequences of Israel’s extreme response—whether the extraordinary rise in anti-Semitism, and the squandering of good relations with many parts of the American political establishment are now permanent—the question is: why do Israeli voters keep returning Netanyahu to office?
Part of the answer lies in the nature of Israeli politics. The electoral laws are byzantine in their complexity and do not reward stable political parties. Factions led by men with big egos and thick skins join together at election time but do all their horsetrading for positions in government after votes have been cast. There are currently 15 parties in the Knesset and at least 35 more who failed to get enough votes to be represented. That’s 50+ political parties in a country whose voting age population is a little over six million.
This plethora of political egos makes Israeli politics positively Italianate in its instability: There have been seven elections in the last ten years as coalition after coalition proved unstable. But throughout this period of coalition building and almost immediate sabotaging there is usually one person who comes out on top: Bibi. Until the Hamas attack he had mastered the main political issue in Israel: dealing with the Occupation.
Have you ever seen a page of the Talmud? It is a chaotic looking thing.
In the middle of the page is a textual passage, usually about a religio-legal question. Surrounding it are various commentaries and annotations by scholars and rabbis compiled over hundreds of years. You have to be trained how to read and debate the text and commentaries to begin to understand it. Studying Talmud is literally a life-time’s work for some people.
Israeli political debate about the Occupation of Palestinian territory since the Six-Day war in 1967 is talmudic in nature. Imagine at the centre of the page is UN Resolution 242 calling on Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders. Surrounding the Resolution’s text are decades of commentaries on how and when to implement it, as well as ruminations on deeper questions like, Is it possible to have a modern nation state that is exclusively Jewish?. You have to know the history of comments by certain political sages to begin to understand the discussion.
The basic question remains unresolved. For some Israelis the occupied territories are a bargaining chip, to be slowly surrendered in return for security guarantees from Palestinians who live there. The first step would be recognition of Israel as a nation state—something Hamas has yet to do. This is the view of those who supported—and may still support—the Oslo peace process. For many years this was the program of Israel’s Labor Party, which governed the country continuously in the first 30 years of its existence.
For others, the West Bank is synonymous with the Biblical areas of Judaea and Samaria, where the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah existed. For them, these lands, regained by conquest in 1967, belong to Israel now and forever. The Arab population can either leave, or accept second class status. This was the view of Menahem Begin, founder of the Likud party, which has governed the country for most of the last 45 years. It was also the view of Bibi’s father, the historian Benzion Netanyahu.
From the moment the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993, Netanyahu and his party worked to neuter or even overturn them. Bibi personally inflamed the situation leading rallies where calls for the murder of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who had signed the Accords, were heard. Netanyahu said nothing to calm the chants. Two years later Rabin was assassinated.
In the election campaign that followed in 1996, Hamas suicide bombers killed 45 people in two attacks on busses in Jerusalem. At the time of the attacks, Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, was comfortably ahead. According to opinion polls at the start of the campaign Peres led Netanyahu, making his first run for the premiership, by more than 20 points. The Hamas attacks, and another by a group from the West Bank, eliminated that advantage.
The benefit of the violence—from Rabin’s assasination to the suicide bombings—went entirely to Netanyahu who won the election because he was seen as someone who would never negotiate with terrorists. The message he put out was that he alone could keep Israel safe. Emphasis on “alone.”
1996 would not be the first time that Hamas violence helped Netanyahu to power.
Another key to understanding Israeli politics: At the very top of society, sits a military-political group of leaders, mostly of Ashkenazic background, who run the country. None are soft touches. They are predominantly former generals or served in the Sayeret Matkal, the most secretive and elite of Israel’s Special Forces.
They all know each other. Their alliances and rivalries go back decades. Netanyahu was in the Sayeret under the command of his first successor as Prime Minister, Ehud Barak. The connections between the two go even deeper. Barak and his first wife were very close friends and neighbours of Yonatan Netanyahu, Bibi’s sainted older brother.
In 1976 Palestinian terrorists hijacked an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris and took the plane to Entebbe airport in Uganda. Yonatan Netanyahu was killed leading the raid that freed the Israeli hostages. It was Barak and his wife who broke the news to his widow and stayed with her in the terrible hours that followed. This kind of intimate connection runs deeper than party politics.
Years later, when Bibi was forming his second government—following another outbreak of Hamas violence—Barak, of the Labour Party, agreed to serve in the cabinet as Defense Minister.
One other thing sustains Netanyahu in office. He understands the relationship of the American branch of the Jewish Diaspora to success in Israeli politics. Netanyahu grew up in the US and attended high school in suburban Philadelphia in the mid-1960s. At the same time, I was in a suburban high school just a few miles down the road. I remember how in awe we young Jews were of Israelis. They seemed to be better Jews than us, stronger and tougher. I also remember the disdain in which Israelis held us. Many profiles of Netanyahu refer to the view that American Jews were soft in comparison to the pioneers building the Jewish state.
After his military service, Netanyahu returned to America and did a business degree at MIT and then went to work at Boston Consulting Group. Among his intake at the elite consulting firm was Mitt Romney, future Republican Senator and presidential candidate.
Bibi became a star for American Jewry during the first Gulf War. At the time, he was Israel’s ambassador to the UN. Netanyahu became a regular on CNN talking about the conflict in his flawless, unaccented English.
He built a personal constituency of support in the US, stoking the fantasies and loosening the wallets of right-wing Jews of the no-compromise with the Arabs variety.
As Prime Minister, his anti-Oslo beliefs do not square with the stated policies of the United States and Europe. To sustain the idea that perhaps a two-state solution might, maybe, could, some day happen Netanyahu has lied to presidents on either side of the Atlantic.
His economy with the truth has been noted. In 2011 at the G-20 summit in Cannes, then French President Nicholas Sarkozy, who is part-Jewish, was recorded in a sidebar conversation with President Barack Obama saying,
“I cannot stand him. He is a liar.”
Obama’s response: “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him every day.”
Netanyahu, the practiced liar, has been out in the open during the current conflict, at least to his Likud party backbenchers.
“I am the only one who will prevent a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank after the war,” he told a group of them in late November as his personal poll ratings plummeted.
There is an element of truth in his braggadocio. His strategy for preventing a Palestinian state was to allow Hamas to consolidate its power in Gaza and undermine the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Divide and Rule.
But he could not break old habits about “exaggerating” the truth. He reportedly also told some Likud MKs, that he had gone against the Biden administration by launching the ground assault into Gaza and attacking the al-Shifa hospital, supposedly the hub of Hamas’s extensive tunnel network in the Strip. The White House has denied Biden made any such request.
Beyond politics there is another reason Netanyahu has remained at the top of Israeli political life. In his years in power, Israeli society became rich, a hub of global high-tech with its adjunct culture of venture capitalists creating new means of finance. Tel Aviv, so long defined by low-rise, historic art deco and Bauhaus architecture went vertical, with glass towers sprouting up everywhere.
Israelis became complacent. The occupation was an off-stage noise. Economic issues, like the cost of living, became more important. Dysfunctional politics was priced in to most Israelis’ understanding of how their society worked. And Bibi at the top seemed as normal as sunrise/sunset.
That complacency spilled over into geo-politics. Resolution of the Palestinian issue faded in importance. There was a more important problem in the Middle East: Iran. With encouragement from the US, Israel signed the Abraham Accords normalizing relations with the Gulf States, just the other side of the Straits of Hormuz from the Islamic Republic.
2023 should have been a year of celebration and reflection in Israel: 75 years since the founding of the state, 50 years since it survived the near death experience of the Yom Kippur War. And as the year began there was a sense that Bibi’s time was coming to an end.
At the end of 2022, Israeli’s went to the polls for the fifth time in three years. Yet again Netanyahu managed to cobble together a coalition but only by agreeing to work with the two most extreme right-wing religious party leaders, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir. Both are dedicated to the complete annexation of the West Bank.
In the negotiations to form the government Smotrich was given the treasury brief which meant he could disburse funds to create more West Bank settlements. Ben Gvir was put in charge of security in the disputed area.
All three men agreed to reform Israel’s courts, the only effective check on government power in Israel’s poorly defined constitutional arrangements. Netanyahu, who is under criminal indictment, wanted to neuter the courts to prevent having to stand trial for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. Smotrich and Ben-Gvir didn’t want any judicial meddling in their attempts to build settlements.
On the first Saturday of 2023, January 7th, a protest took place against the judicial reform law. Every Saturday night for the next nine months more than 100,000 people turned out, a full cross-section of Israeli society, demanding Netanyahu scrap judicial reform.
Week after week, month after month, all over the country huge crowds demonstrated against the government plan. Air Force reserve pilots stopped reporting for training, other branches of the military reserves became mutinous. Netanyahu was warned by military leaders his judicial reforms were jeopardising national security. He persisted with the legislation anyway.
The only thing that stopped the protests and the political crisis for Netanyahu was the Hamas massacre on Saturday morning October 7th.
Once again the Islamists had managed to help sustain Netanyahu in power. At a time, when Israeli society was deeply divided, Hamas’s butchery helped Israelis rediscover national unity. Within hours, the protest movement turned from putting pressure on Netanyahu to leave office to one of providing aid for the devastated communities of southern Israel.
Now that unity is coming to an end. The crowds are coming out again on Saturday night demanding the focus of the government be the return of the remaining hostages and fresh elections to remove Netanyahu and the cabinethardliners. Currently General Gadi Eisenkot and his partner in the Blue and White electoral list, General Benny Gantz have a massive opinion poll lead.
But forcing an election will not be easy. From a distance it’s hard to figure out which will happen first: the fall of the Netanyahu government or the defeat of Hamas.
And in the interim the hostages remain underground in Gaza, while above ground the IDF wages war on Hamas and Palestinian civilians.
Here is a good link to the interview with Gadi Eisenkot
And some other sources if you want to find out more on Israeli politics and the relationship between Netanyahu and Hamas:
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-corruption-and-autocracy-nexus-the-case-of-king-bibi/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-qatar-money-prop-up-hamas.html