Benjamin Netanyahu is one of the most contentious figures of modern history. Facing a corruption trial that began in May 2020 and is still ongoing as of February 2024, he is accused of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in three separate cases involving media moguls and wealthy associates. The prosecution claims that Netanyahu exchanged regulatory favors for favorable press coverage and received lavish gifts. Taking a page out of Donald Trump’s playbook, a man who has 91 felony counts against him, he denies any wrongdoing and calls the trial a political witch-hunt.
An emergency order from Israel’s justice minister following the events of October 7 has put the case on pause, and probably it will continue as long as the “emergency” lasts. Is it in the Prime Minister’s interest to keep the hostilities going?
After October 7, when Hamas attacked Israel and killed over 1,200 people, instead of garnering sympathy and support for a justifiable retaliation, he has become one of the most hated political figures in the world because of the disproportionate response to the terrorist attack. In three months, Israel has destroyed over 70 percent of homes in the embattled enclave of Gaza.
An extreme hardliner, his relentless bombing, that has thus far resulted in the death of over 27,000 people—most of them civilians and a majority of whom are women and children—has generated global criticism and accusations of genocide. Netanyahu pays no heed to such accusations, even when the 193-member U.N. General Assembly passed a resolution calling for a ceasefire. Ditto when the World Court ordered Israel to take action to prevent acts of genocide.
In a United Nations report we read: “The strike against Al Ahli Arab Hospital is an atrocity. We are equally outraged by the deadly strike on the same day on an UNRWA school located in Al Maghazi refugee camp that sheltered some 4000 displaced people, as well as two densely populated refugee camps.”
Netanyahu replies that the relentless bombing of Gaza will not stop, and that the widespread accusations of genocide are “outrageous.” But he continues to bomb civilian targets, including schools and hospitals, with the frequently unsubstantiated claim that these places are harboring Hamas leaders.
An observer notes that, “The excuse that Hamas is supposedly everywhere among the civilian population in Gaza gives him a plausible excuse in the eyes of many to bombard the Gaza Strip relentlessly while also forcibly relocating most if not all of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by circumstance if not official policy.”
Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago who has written about the history of aerial bombing, told WSJ, “The word ‘Gaza’ is going to go down in history along with Dresden [Germany] and other famous cities that have been bombed.” The report added that the 29,000 bombs dropped on the strip have targeted residential areas, Byzantine churches, hospitals and shopping malls and all civilian infrastructure has been damaged to an extent that they cannot be repaired.
The animosity against Netanyahu, who is widely seen as the most radical of the hardliners who wish not only to retaliate against a terrorist attack but also to punish Palestinians possibly just for existing, has grown exponentially—even among Jews and Israelis. He vows that as long as he has anything to say, there will never be a Palestinian state.
In an article in The New York Times, Steven Erlanger, reporting from Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, says, “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is on his last legs, it is widely believed, and will be forced to relinquish his post once the war against Hamas in Gaza ends.”
Erlanger goes on to call the Prime Minister “historically unpopular,” and that he is held responsible for the intelligence failure that led to the October 7 attack. Indeed, the suspicion is frequently expressed in comment boards that, “It smells to high heaven that the October 7th attack was a surprise to one of the world’s premier intelligence services.”
“We’d all like to look past Bibi,” said Anshel Pfeffer, an analyst with the left-leaning newspaper Haaretz. “But there is no way to force him to resign.”
Erlanger examines some of the ways that he could be forced out of office—none of them simple or easy. Citing experts who have long observed Netanyahu, he notes that he “is extremely skilled and experienced in playing rivals against one another and threatening them, sometimes on the basis of carefully kept dossiers, with political death if they move against him.” In short, we’re talking about political manipulation, blackmail and coercion.
If there were a way to force an election, the prediction is that Netanyahu’s Likud party “would be crushed.” Netanyahu has lost “perhaps 50 percent of his support” among Likud voters because of his security failures, his refusal to take responsibility for the debacle of Oct. 7 and for what they see as his “playing politics during the war.”
Until Netanyahu is replaced, there is little hope that the relentless bombing of Gaza will end until the entire territory is razed to the ground. In the meantime, anti-Israel sentiment grows, as does sympathy for the Palestinian people who are being ruthlessly squeezed into ever smaller spaces and deprived of humanitarian aid.
Perhaps it’s true, as Politico suggests, that Netanyahu is desperate to stay in office as the only means to stay out of jail and the way to do it is to keep the war going.
