One Israeli cabinet minister was barred from a hospital visitors’ entrance. Another’s bodyguards were drenched with coffee thrown by a bereaved man. A third had “traitor” and “imbecile” shouted at her as she came to comfort families evacuated during the horror.
The shock October 7 massacre by Hamas gunmen has rallied Israelis to one another. But there is little love shown for a government being widely accused of dropping the country’s guard and engulfing it in a Gaza war that is rattling the region. Whatever ensues, a day of judgment looms for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after a record-long career of political comebacks.
Public fury over some 1,300 Israeli fatalities has been further fuelled by Netanyahu’s signature self-styling as a Churchillian strategist who foresaw security threats.
Another backdrop is social polarisation this year over his religious-nationalist coalition’s judicial overhaul drive, which triggered walkouts by some military reservists and raised doubts about combat-readiness.
“October 2023 Debacle” read a headline in the top-selling daily Yedioth Ahronoth, language meant to recall Israel’s failure to anticipate a twin Egyptian and Syrian offensive in October 1973, which eventually led then-Prime Minister Golda Meir to resign.
That ouster put paid to the hegemony of Meir’s Centre-Left Labour party. Amotz Asa-El, research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, predicted a similar fate for Netanyahu and his long-dominant, conservative Likud party.
“It doesn’t matter if there’s a commission of inquiry or not, or whether or not he admits fault. All that matters is what ‘middle Israelis’ think - which is that this is a fiasco and that the prime minister is responsible,” Asa-El told Reuters. “He will go, and his entire establishment along with him.”
An opinion poll in Maariv newspaper found that 21 per cent of Israelis want Netanyahu to remain Prime Minister after the war. Sixty-six per cent said “someone else”.
Were an election held today, the poll found, Likud would lose a third of its seats while the centrist National Unity party of his main rival Benny Gantz would grow by a third.
But Israelis do not now want a ballot. They want action, and as the counter-offensive builds into a potential ground invasion, Gantz has set aside differences to join Netanyahu in an emergency cabinet.