Israel's future depends on Netanyahu's final moves
National Post, 10 March 2024
The beginning of the end to the PM's time in office was the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. Israelis are now impatient for the end of the end
President Joe Biden announced in his State of the Union address on Thursday that the U.S. military will build a temporary Mediterranean port in Gaza. The new pier will facilitate the delivery of American humanitarian aid to Gaza, which has already begun with supplies being dropped from the air by parachute.
Metaphorically and politically, Biden’s pier might be one that he hopes Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu walks off into the sea — or at least the setting sun.
For nearly 30 years, Netanyahu has regarded himself as singularly — if not exclusively — capable of preserving Israeli security and prosperity. Many Israelis agreed. For 16 of the 28 years since his first election victory in 1996, he has been prime minister. No Israeli PM has been in office longer.
In recent years, Netanyahu has been consumed with staying in power and staying out of jail — the former considered by many to be his principal means of achieving the latter. He has outlasted many who predicted his exit, but now the end has come. Whether Israel prospers in a new Middle East will depend in large part upon how he handles this last phase of his premiership.
The beginning of the end was the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7. Netanyahu insists that the catastrophic failure of the Israeli intelligence apparatus, security services and military forces was not his fault. Nothing ever is. But the handwriting is on the wall in whichever language you care to read it.
The Hamas terror attacks were the greatest security breach since the Yom Kippur War exactly 50 years earlier. The prime minister at the time, Golda Meir, was gone within nine months. Netanyahu — the security prime minister who did not secure the country — will go as soon as Israelis decide that the immediate war emergency is over. Netanyahu thus has an interest in prolonging the war. It is a terrible thing to suggest that a leader might prolong a war for his own political advantage. Netanyahu would deny it. He always does.
In any case, Israel’s leadership, having seen the beginning of the end, is rather impatient for the end of the end. Netanyahu’s plausible successor, Benny Gantz, who is riding high in polls, was in Washington this week. He came to repair fractured relations with the Biden administration and to humiliate Netanyahu.
Netanyahu co-operated in the last, ordering the Israeli embassy in Washington to take no part in Gantz’s trip. So Gantz was welcomed to the White House and Netanyahu appeared simultaneously petulant and impotent.
Consider who the embassy was forbidden to assist. Gantz is a former Israeli defence chief, a former defence minister and a former “alternate prime minister” in a previous coalition led by Netanyahu. After the Hamas attacks, Gantz’s National Unity party joined Netanyahu’s Likud party in a unity government. Gantz is a minister in the current war cabinet.
Whatever Netanyahu’s umbrage at Gantz’s trip, he was received by the vice-president, secretary of state, secretary of defence and national security adviser. Meetings were held at the White House. Out of deference to protocol, he did not get a photo with Biden in the Oval Office, but the comments of Kamala Harris made it clear that Netanyahu is offside even with his closest ally. Had she hosted a fundraiser for him in the Roosevelt Room the message could not have been more clear.
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