He first became prime minister in 1996, and has been pushing the country further right ever since. Most agree his political days are numbered – but the approach he established will prove very difficult to shift
An attack like Hamas’s 7 October massacre was not supposed to have been possible. Certainly not while prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in charge. He was, as his acolytes put it, “Mr Security”. He wanted to be remembered, he said, as “the protector of Israel”. He boasted that Israel had never known a more peaceful and prosperous time than the roughly 16 years he has been in power. It was under his successive administrations that Israel installed the Iron Dome system to intercept rockets from the Gaza Strip, and constructed, along the Gaza border, a 40-mile, $1.1bn fence, equipped with underground sensors, remote-controlled weapons and an expansive camera system. The success of Netanyahu’s vision of Fortress Israel could be measured in the imperceptibility of the Palestinians and their suffering from the comfort of a Tel Aviv cafe.
But the relative calm of the last decade-and-a-half was built upon a series of illusions: that the Palestinians and their aspirations for freedom could be hidden behind concrete barriers and ignored; that any remaining resistance could be managed through a combination of technology and overwhelming firepower; that the world, and especially Sunni Arab states, had grown so tired of the Palestinian issue that it could be removed from the global agenda, and consequently, that Israeli governments could do as they pleased and suffer few consequences.
The attack on 7 October shattered all these presumptions. Hamas gunmen on motorbikes and the backs of pickup trucks sailed through the “smart” barrier that cost more than the entire GDP of Grenada. Caught off guard, Israel’s army appeared almost immobilised, unable to regain control of some towns and kibbutzim for more than 48 hours. Every aspect of Netanyahu’s project collapsed on the Saturday morning Israelis have taken to calling “the black shabbat”.
Successive Netanyahu governments did not make Israelis safer. Instead, they made them vulnerable to attacks such as the one Hamas carried out. Netanyahu did not chart a path for Israel out of its dependence on the United States. Instead, he left Israel as dependent on its US backer as it was during the only comparable disaster in Israel’s history, the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Netanyahu promised to streamline the state and make government more efficient. Instead, Israel’s bureaucracy has been hollowed out, its social services underfunded and unresponsive….
Dogs of war / New acronym in Gaza: WCNSF – Wounded Child No Surviving Family
Netanyahu’s deliberate extremism has failed
Haaretz Editorial: Netanyahu Bears Responsibility for This Israel-Gaza War
Israel imposing apartheid on Palestinians, says former Mossad chief
Patrick Lawrence: Deeper Into Depravity
A Conspiracy of Silence / The Killing Floor of Gaza
Michael Brenner: Europe-Jews-Muslims
After the truth-shower 