Blames himself to save his career

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Benjamin Netanyahu  

Netanyahu blames himself - fighting for his political life  

Wolfgang Hansson 

This is a commenting text. Analysis and positions are the writer's.  

Published 14.09 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled Israel for 14 of the past 16 years.  

Yet he refuses to accept any responsibility for the gigantic intelligence lapse that led to the Hamas terror attack. On the contrary.  

In a tweet that he deleted yesterday after ten hours, Netanyahu blamed everything on the military and the intelligence services. 

It is clear that in addition to trying to crush Hamas, Netanyahu is also fighting for his political life at home. His contract with the Israeli people is to protect them from evil enemies. Any Hamas attack is a clear sign that he has failed.  

In a poll published last week, 80 percent of Israelis say they hold Netanyahu responsible for the intelligence fiasco that led to Hamas being able to infiltrate Israel and kill 1,400 Israelis.  

The prime minister himself refuses to accept any responsibility. 

On Saturday, for first time since the terrorist attack on October 7, he answered questions from journalists at a press conference. The Prime Minister was so hard on him that he sent out a tweet at 01.10 on Sunday night in which he once again blamed himself. 

"Under no circumstances and at no time was Prime Minister Netanyahu warned of Hamas' war plans. On the contrary, the assessment of the collective security apparatus, including the head of military intelligence and the head of Shin Bet, was that Hamas was discouraged and seeking a settlement”.  

This thus signals the supreme leader while his own country is at war. Unsurprisingly, his tweet sparked such an outcry that Netanyahu saw fit to delete it and apologize. But only after ten hours.  

Worth noting that although Netanyahu apologized for what he posted on X, formerly Twitter, he did not admit that he was wrong in substance. Just that he "said things that shouldn't have been said". 

          

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has ruled the country for a total of 14 years out of the last 16 that have passed. Photo: Abir Sultan / TT 

News Agency The cracks in the Israeli leadership are obvious to all and the personal animosity well known.  

Netanyahu has been at constant feud with opposition leader Benny Ganz, who is now part of the war cabinet.  

Earlier this year, Netanyahu fired Commander-in-Chief Yoav Gallant for opposing the prime minister's reform that would reduce the power of the Supreme Court and instead give it to a sitting government. An upsetting battle for the entire Israeli society and probably an important reason why Israel missed the threat from Hamas.  

Netanyahu was forced to reinstate Gallant after a few weeks but there is no love between the two men.  

Disagreement over what should be done on the battlefield is behind the delayed Israeli ground offensive that began this weekend but more as a practice than a full-scale attack. 

Israel's dilemma is how to crush the terror-labeled Hamas without at the same time taking the lives of the more than 200 Israelis that Hamas is holding hostage. In addition, Netanyahu is under intense pressure from US President Joe Biden and other Western leaders to protect the Palestinian civilian population in Gaza while hunting down Hamas.  

Israel also wants to avoid the outrage becoming so great in the Middle East that Iran and their proxy groups, above all Hizbollah in Lebanon, feel compelled to direct massive attacks against Israel and thus open a second front in the war.

Photo: Maya Aleruzzo/AP  

Netanyahu also wants to hold down Israeli losses. Big ones are something that will hit him after the war. 

- Netanyahu is in survival mode, Gadi Wolfsfeld, an expert in political communication at Reichman University, told the New York Times. The only thing that drives him is the will to keep power.  

That could explain why the War Cabinet has such a hard time agreeing. The others take a military perspective on the task they set out to carry out, the eradication of Hamas. While Netanyahu is constantly looking at how his decisions affect his chances of staying in power the day the war is over. He still has several corruption trials pending over him.  

It is also Netanyahu's strategy to weaken the Palestinian Authority in order to be able to point out that there is no reliable Palestinian partner to negotiate with, which has gone completely wrong. 

The war shows that it is not possible to ignore two million Palestinians in Gaza and three million in the West Bank and make them second-class citizens. Netanyahu has spent most of his 14 years in power undermining the prospects for a Palestinian state in the occupied West Bank. The only political solution to the more than 75-year-long land conflict between Jews and Palestinians that a unanimous outside world judges is possible.  

 

Netanyahu believes that he will be able to survive even this crisis as he has done many before.  

 

Not many others do. Not even if he succeeds in his goal of crushing Hamas.  

 

Smoke rises over Gaza after Israeli airstrikes on Monday 23 October. Photo: Ariel Schalit / TT News Agency