Only a man who attributes mythic dimensions to himself would be capable of dragging Israel into five elections, political chaos, social disintegration and a loss of trust by masses of people in the law enforcement system, in other words, in the state itself, responsible for a collapse of Israel’s deterrence and a blood-soaked war.
Gidi Weitz – Oct 20, 2023
The investigative material in the three corruption cases on which he is on trial provide not only a key to understanding the criminal suspicions against the prime minister. They provide a glimpse into the joint mindset of the family that is controlling our fate. In their minds, Netanyahu – like the State of Israel – is a major power facing the danger of extermination…
“Bibi says, ‘If I fall, the Jewish people falls,’” said Hollywood magnate Arnon Milchan, whose lavish gifts to the prime minister are the basis of another of the three corruption cases against the prime minister (in which Milchan is not a defendant). The prime minister, according to Milchan, is convinced that he is saving the Jews from a second Holocaust at time when powerful forces are working to oust him from office…
Under interrogation, the defendant himself has expressed a major sense of persecution – that representatives of the elites have waged war against him even though he alone saved the Israeli economy and halted Iran’s nuclear program through a series of dramatic decisions that he took despite opposition from Finance Ministry bureaucrats and defense brass. Netanyahu has an obsessive need to appropriate every achievement to himself and portray himself as a leader all alone, a Gulliver among the Lilliputians.
It’s also the strongest argument in the indictment that the public will file against him for culpability for the recklessness that led to the bloodbath in the south and the war.
If Netanyahu had acted in accordance with the tests of management that he had set for himself in the past, he would have faced justice, resigned and gone home. In his autobiography, which was published in English as “Bibi: My Story,” he relates that the major impetus for his getting captive Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit released in 2011 from Hamas – against the backdrop of social justice protests in Israel at the time – was his understanding that he needed widescale public support prior to a step that could end in war. That would be an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. In his view, a leader without public support and trust cannot manage a war.
At this point, one can only guess what Netanyahu’s political end will look like. Beyond the mass protests and the collapse of the coalition, the end could be the result of harsh conclusions from a future state commission of inquiry. By law, the president of the Supreme Court appoints the members of the commission panel, which is headed by a Supreme Court justice or district court judge – either retired or active.
In 1973, court President Shimon Agranat appointed himself to head the commission that investigated the Yom Kippur War, and in 1982, court President Yitzhak Kahan appointed himself to head the commission that investigated the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp massacres in Lebanon, committed by Israel’s Christian Lebanese allies.
A Brief History of the Netanyahu-Hamas Alliance
Due to public pressure, the government will be forced to appoint a state commission of inquiry. Acting Supreme Court President Uzi Vogelman could follow suit and appoint himself. But it’s unlikely that he would appoint himself given that the Supreme Court has two vacancies and is collapsing under the load. The natural candidate to head such a commission would be Esther Hayut, who this week retired as Supreme Court president to a moment of silence.
The limited number of Supreme Court justices and the absence of a permanent court president are the product of Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s destructive refusal to convene the Judicial Appointments Committee. He also insolently asked the court for more time to respond to legal challenges to his conduct, a request that the court has now granted. Instead of coming to his senses over his fantasies for revenge and convene the committee to appoint Isaac Amit as court president and to fill the two vacancies on the court, Levin has stuck to the fanatic approach that has brought us to the current situation.
At a time when the final scenes appear to be on the horizon, among Netanyahu’s rivals there are those who are convinced that his evasion of responsibility is a phase in his plans to survive onto the day after. They believe that now too, after his entire worldview has crumbled, as has how he views himself, Netanyahu hasn’t freed himself from his delusions of grandeur…
Even if the war ends with the flight of the leaders of Hamas from Gaza or the rescue of several of the hostages in a heroic Entebbe-style operation (prior to which Prime Minister Rabin prepared a letter of resignation in the event that it failed), the fumes of rage aren’t expected to dissipate.
“This will be a lot angrier than what happened after the Yom Kippur War,” one Likud cabinet member said this week. This time, Netanyahu will have difficulty plying a narrative to the masses that he has managed with dizzying success to market up to now – the narrative that he is Israel’s protector, that those challenging him are stabbing the nation in the back and endangering Israel’s very existence.
“It’s over,” one senior member of the governing coalition said this week. “The government won’t survive this.”
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After the truth-shower 