Subheading to the article below:
People constantly ask me — almost all of them lovers of Israel living overseas, some of them politely, many of them not — why many Israelis so mistrust and, yes, loathe, our Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.He exudes such confidence and competence, they note, accurately. He’s so plainly intelligent, sharp and worldly. He’s Israel’s most successful politician, manifestly its most popular, a giant among rival political nobodies. And, most of all, he’s so stunningly articulate in English, the supreme advocate for Israel on the world public stage and doubtless behind closed doors with world leaders, too. Again and again, the questions are asked: Don’t Israelis realize how extraordinary a leader he is? And why are so many so critical of him?
I think it’s important to explain, taking no pleasure in doing so, and at the risk of prompting more opprobrium and accusations of disloyalty. I should stress that domestic opposition and mistrust vastly predates October 7, 2023, and indeed has risen and fallen throughout Netanyahu’s three decades at the top of Israeli politics, most of which he has spent as the electorate’s chosen prime minister. Partial list:
1. Because he has refused to take personal responsibility for the greatest disaster to have befallen modern Israel, when Hamas invaded the south and massacred some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and abducted 251 — even though he was the prime minister that day and had been for almost all of the preceding 16 years in which Hamas ran Gaza and built up its war machine. Because he had presided over a policy that allowed Qatari funding to help Hamas maintain its hold. Because he had accepted the defense establishment’s unfathomable assessment that Hamas was not single-mindedly bent on harming and ultimately destroying Israel. And because he did not heed the alarms sounded by some in the intelligence community in the final years, months, days and even hours before 3,000 Hamas-led terrorists burst through a flimsy high-tech border fence unprotected by actual troops.
My comment: The responsibility for now knowing about the October 7th attack from Hamas, is not with Bibi. It is with the Shin Bet, the Israel Security Service and the Army High Command, who all knew about it, but decided not to tell Netanyahu. Because they were operating on the belief that Hamas was busy with economic development in Gaza and was not interested in attacking Israel. I have written about this in more detail here.
Bibi was against giving back Gaza to the Arabs in 2005, and resigned in protest when it was done. He constantly warned about the "war machine" being built up by Hamas in Gaza. Horovitz's formulation above is a grotesque inversion of the facts.
2. Because they don’t quite understand what the IDF is doing in Gaza right now, under his direction, when Hamas has been defeated as an organized army, and soldiers’ lives are being lost to Hamas’s guerrilla attacks; when a ceasefire could enable the release of the 101 hostages held there, more of whom are dying as the weeks go by; and when a hostage-ceasefire deal will yield either an opportunity for the creation of the deradicalized Gaza all Israelis and the world seek, or, more likely, sooner or later see Hamas provide deadly reasons to necessitate, justify and legitimize a resumption of IDF operations against it.
This is cloud-cuckoo land. There is no way a "ceasefire" would lead to the release of the hostages, as previous ceasefires proved. Moreover, the failure of recent ceasefire negotiations was not down to Israel but to Hamas' refusals to agree.
The push to ceasefire, it seems to me, is not for peace, but for capitulation.
And as to what the IDF is still doing there in Gaza, it's to secure the victory. They've wiped out 23 or 24 garrisons. They need to get the 24th, and also the hostages.
3. Because they fear for Israeli democracy, given that Netanyahu spent the first nine months of this government’s lifespan attempting to bulldoze legislation through the Knesset that would turn Israel’s independent judiciary into a politicized tool of the governing majority, plowed ahead with that effort even as it bitterly divided Israel, has never indicated that this goal has been abandoned, and is now challenging the authority and legitimacy of the government’s chief legal adviser, Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara.
This is a furphy. I've covered its nonsense, with lengthy pieces from a rather more knowledgeable commenter, here.
4. Because he just fired his principled, experienced and straight-talking defense minister, Yoav Gallant, in the middle of a multifront war. Netanyahu says this was for words and deeds that contradicted government decisions and benefited the enemy. Gallant says it was for the triple crimes of prioritizing efforts to free the hostages, demanding that ultra-Orthodox males do military service, and insisting on the state commission of inquiry Netanyahu resolutely opposes to probe the October 7 failures and thus help ensure there can be no repeat. And Netanyahu then replaced that defense minister with an inexperienced yes-man.
Yoav Gallant is a traitor. He leaked secret War Cabinet decisions that went against him, and blamed Netanyahu for the failure to regain the hostages, when the responsibility is with Hamas. He is a grotesque narcissist, who deserved to be fired much earlier than he was.
5. Because while he is assured, polished and fluent in his numerous English-language appearances and interviews, in Hebrew he seems incapable of exuding a sense of empathy; he almost never speaks at length to Hebrew media, least of all to non-sycophantic Hebrew media; and his Hebrew press conferences are marked by hostility to provocative questions and derision for those who pose them.
I've seen his speeches in Hebrew. I don't speak Hebrew, but I don't see lack of empathy. Nor do those that have done translations of the speeches, for example, Yishai Fleisher.
The OR who sent me this article claimed that all Bibi did was talk "me, me, me, I, I, I". That's plainly wrong, per my post here. This is delusion, as deep as the delusion that "Trump is literally Hitler".
6. Because under his watch, the plight of the hostages is not a cause of national unanimity but a divisive issue. Families and ordinary Israelis pleading publicly for greater efforts for their release are implied by him and his loyalists to be dupes of Hamas and even enemies of the state — a designation he even intimated could be applied to Gallant. Families of the hostages spoke at both the US Republican and Democratic national conventions and were unanimously applauded and supported by the tens of thousands at both those events. By contrast, in the divisive climate engendered at home by Netanyahu, and also by the overt affiliation of some of the families and their supporters with anti-government protests, there is almost no sizable gathering in support of the hostages that passes off without heckling and confrontation by opponents, not to mention the heavy-handed intervention of a police force that is becoming increasingly brutalized under hoodlum minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
This is giving too much weight to the concerns of the families of hostages. There are many -- and I agree with them -- who argue that the release of any hostages taken by an Islamist group ought to be the bottom of priorities, no matter how much the pain to them and their families. Because the amount of care taken now hampers the quicker resolution of any conflict. And to keep hostage release at the top of the priorities only encourages more terrorism and more hostage taking. We used to have a concept, in the west, of "we don't negotiate with terrorists". We ought to get back to that. Tough love, sure. But likely better and more effective in the longer term than the way it's handled now.
7. Because he insists on maintaining the unjustifiable exemption from military and national service of army-age ultra-Orthodox males — at the height of a multifront war, with the standing army under immense strain, and even the heroic reservist forces starting to wilt, although he knows full well the consequences for the national psyche, economy and basic resilience of this abiding inequality — rather than risk destabilizing his coalition.
Agree this is an issue. He should cancel the exemption.
8. Because he has refused to visit some of the communities most devastated on October 7 — notably including Kibbutz Nir Oz, where even his deeply divisive Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich had the guts to make a lengthy and emotive visit on Tuesday; selects convenient representatives of the hostage and bereaved families with whom to meet; reliably speaks to the nation when there are military successes to highlight and doesn’t when things go wrong.
I dunno. This strikes me as remarkably biased by Horovitz's own views. And of course all politicians tend to speak of success rather than failure. When was the last time Biden spoke about the failure in his Afghanistan withdrawal? Yet Horovitz will never criticise him!
9. Because amid a welter of new allegations concerning the theft and leaking of IDF materials to and through the Prime Minister’s Office, and regarding efforts to rewrite the minutes of key meetings to reflect his stewardship of the war in a better light, his PMO on Tuesday implicitly turned on both the police and Shin Bet for daring to investigate, accusing them of “destroying the lives of young men with baseless claims in order to harm right-wing governance,” including by detaining suspects “for 20 days in a basement… in order to extract from them false claims against the prime minister.”
This is wrong from tip to toe. It's a complex issue, for which we count on Caroline Glick for the full story, here.
10. Because he mainstreamed the far-right Jewish supremacists Smotrich and Ben Gvir, and gave them central ministerial responsibilities. And because many Israelis worry that he will now capitulate to pressure from those two far-right leaders and their parties for ongoing Israeli control of Gaza and the resumption of Jewish settlement there — a demand that would place untenable strain on the army and require Israel to provide for two million hostile Palestinians, with unsustainable demographic and economic consequences. And that he might also now seek to dramatically expand West Bank settlement, including into areas that the previous Trump administration earmarked for limited Palestinian independence, further reducing any future potential for viable separation from the almost three million Palestinians there.
"Ongoing Israel control of Gaza..." is not a far-right idea, but a practical one. There's strong arguments for Israel sovereignty over Gaza, Judea and Sumeria. And for extension into the Syrian side of the Golan Heights, for that matter. Wherever Israel is in charge, people's lives are better. That's truth that the 22% of Israelis who are Arabs acknowledge and that the Druze of the Syrian side of Golan know. Wherever Hamas, the PA, Hezbollah or any other of the lunatic Islamic nutters control is hell for them, with only the unattainable promise of killing all the jews to keep them going in their delusions.
11. Because people they do trust to some extent, and who have been with him at key moments behind closed doors — including the likes of Gallant and opposition MK Gadi Eisenkot, an ex-IDF chief, bereaved father, and former war cabinet observer — accuse him of putting personal political interests above the good of the country.
A smear. Plain and simple. A scurrilous smear, which Horovitz ought to be ashamed to retail.
12. Because he seems to believe that he and he alone can and should advocate for Israel on the international stage, and has failed to establish a competent government public diplomacy organization capable of responding to events in real-time and strategically disseminating Israel’s broader narrative to traditional international media and via social media, and to other shapers of world public opinion.
A final wrap-up smear. Just in case we miss the message above. Nasty and unpersuasive.
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People visited the Soviet Union in its early days and declared "I have seen the future and it works". Others went there and were horrified. Outside the Soviet Union you had fellow travellers, who Lenin called the "useful idiots". And you had the trenchant critics, like the brilliance of George Orwell's 1984, describing the horrors of a socialist state.
So it is with Israel. And every other country. There is nothing magic about living in the country that gives you the true and unequivocal picture of a country. We all have our views. And these days with social media, with on-the-ground reporters telling us their stories, whith pictures and videos every hour, we have unprecedented access to a wide variety of views.
My own view about Bibi has not changed over the course of the war. I've only got more admiring of him. Despite the efforts of Israeli resident OR's to suggest otherwise. Especially, I'm not going to be convinced by a shallow, biased and tendentious article like the one above.
