Was that it for Bibi Netanyahu? Withdrawn book about royals: author Scobie denies responsibility

You may not like me, but I guarantee Israel’s security. This promise has allowed Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu to remain in power for about fourteen years. However, on October 7 it turned out that this was an empty promise. The government, military and secret services grossly underestimated the deadly threat of a Hamas attack and enabled the worst murder of Jews since the Holocaust.

“Israeli’s failure on October 7 is increasingly looking like our failure on September 11,” noted retired CIA officer Ted Singer in the New York Times. “This failure shows that military and political leaders should have known that Hamas had planned the attack.”

An explosive document has surfaced

About a year ago, key Israeli authorities had a 40-page report detailing Hamas’s intentions. The New York Times has now announced this. The document, aptly titled “Walls of Jericho,” anticipates what actually happened on October 7. It contains details about the positions of Israeli soldiers, communications centers and other important information. Even the paragliders that Hamas fighters used to overcome the walls are listed.

All this was ignored by the Israeli authorities. “The document circulated widely among Israeli military and intelligence leaders,” said the New York Times. “But the experts decided that such an attack was beyond Hamas’ capabilities.”

The behavior of a general in the Gaza division is an example of how criminally the warnings were ignored. When informed about the training of Hamas fighters, he praised the analysis, but described the scenario described as “purely imaginary.” “In short: let’s wait and see,” he wrote back to the warning analyst.

It is not known to what extent Netanyahu and other government members had knowledge of the document. What is certain, however, is that he has hit a wall with his Hamas policy. The Prime Minister wanted to keep the conflict with the terrorist group at a low level; he advocated a strategy of ‘reducing the conflict’. But now this conflict has not diminished, but has exploded, leaving Netanyahu with his pants off.

Even before the New York Times revelations, the prime minister had lost the trust of Israelis. An opinion poll on November 22 and 23 showed that his ruling coalition would lose 23 of the current 64 seats in the Knesset. Netanyahu’s Likud party would lose almost half of its 32 seats. The striking feature of this survey, however, is the fact that “more than three-quarters of Israelis want Netanyahu to step down after the war,” notes political scientist and polling specialist Dahlia Scheindlin in ‘Foreign Affairs’.

Does this mean that a political earthquake is underway in Israel, in which the left will emerge victorious? Hardly likely. The Israelis would like Bibi to land on the moon, but the terrorist attack will likely drive the country even further to the right, demoscopist Scheindlin speculates. Benny Gantz could one day benefit from this. The former chief of staff of the Israeli army is politicizing right of center. He led the opposition until the outbreak of war. He is now a member of the provisional emergency government.

“Current surveys show that voters are turning to Gantz’s right-wing conservative National Unity Party,” Scheindlin notes. “If elections were held now, according to a November 24 poll, Gantz’s party would win 43 seats, 11 more than Likud in the 2022 elections and twice as many as Likud could currently hope to achieve.”

Given this mood among Israelis, Netanyahu has every interest in prolonging the war. This is the only way he can be sure of his power, because his coalition partners, the fundamentalists of the far right, have also lost favor with voters. How long he can resist the pressure for new elections remains to be seen. Israel’s main ally, the US, is also very interested in such elections.

The Americans are pushing for a two-state solution, because that is the only way to achieve something like peace in the Middle East. With Netanyahu this solution will never happen; no one doubts that anymore. But the Biden administration wants it, and it wants it now because it is under double pressure.

The terrible images from the Gaza Strip and the approximately 15,000 civilian deaths – including many children – are causing horror and anger not only in the Arab world. The gentle rapprochement between various states in the aftermath of the Abraham Accords is therefore in jeopardy, and the possibility that Saudi Arabia will also join this agreement is becoming increasingly illusory.

Even in the US, the slaughter of civilians is no longer accepted without resistance, especially among young Americans. Senator Bernie Sanders – a Jew – recently demanded in an op-ed in the Washington Post that the government attach conditions to aid in order to conduct the war in a more targeted manner. Meanwhile, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is pushing for an extension of the ceasefire in Jerusalem.

Suppose Netanyahu resigns, what then? “A plausible way out of the current crisis seems to be for Israel to move towards a Gantz government,” says demoscoper Scheindlin. However, this would not solve the Americans’ problem. Gantz is also not in favor of a two-state solution. When asked a year ago what he thought about it, he replied: “I’m against it.”