LONDON: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing a fierce backlash in Israel over what has been perceived by many as political campaigning while his country’s two-month war on Gaza continues.
More than 17,000 Palestinians have been killed during the military operations, according to authorities in the territory.
Against the backdrop of an election many observers believe will be inevitable soon after the war ends, Netanyahu’s attempts to shore up his declining popularity among voters, many of whom blame him for catastrophic intelligence failures in the run-up to the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, have not gone unnoticed.
On Monday, he told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that the Hamas attack had resulted in the same number of Israeli deaths as the Oslo Accords, a 1993 peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, The Guardian reported.
The leaked statement was widely perceived as being politically motivated, sparking anger on the political left and right, including within Netanyahu’s own Likud party.
“Despite the pervasive view in Likud that Oslo was a disaster, there are some things that are best not said while half-a-million troops are inside Gaza and thousands of others are grieving, mourning and worried about their loved ones’ fate in Hamas captivity,” a senior Likud official told the right-wing Israel Hayom newspaper.
Another Likud official told the publication: “You can’t in a time of war revert to divisive and inciting talk against a large segment of the public, part of which is in uniform in Gaza, part of which is licking its wounds from the massacre.”
In another apparent attempt to boost his public image, Netanyahu indicated that he will refuse to yield to US pressure to shift its approach. It follows comments by President Joe Biden about the waning global support for Israel’s military operations in Gaza, and the need for change in the Israeli government.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid said it was “impossible to understand the level of detachment and cynicism of a prime minister who is running an evil political campaign at a time like this, the whole purpose of which is to remove responsibility from him, to blame others, to create hatred.”
Political analysts in Israel have suggested that Netanyahu’s position might become more precarious when the current, intense phase of the Israeli military’s ground offensive in Gaza winds down.
One expert, Dahlia Schiendlin, told The Guardian she expects a potential crisis to be triggered by friction within Likud or its far-right allies.
“It is hard to predict in Israel how coalitions end and the specific triggers of coalition collapse,” she said. “But I would say either it comes from splits within Likud or from the ultranationalist parties.
“What you see in survey research is that 70 to 75 percent of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign, with almost twice as many wanting him to go after the war than while it is ongoing.
“With how the war will end, and when, becoming a more open question … my guess is the number who want him to go sooner will go up.”
British Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer, who published a biography of Netanyahu in 2018, wrote in the newspaper Haaretz: “He knows once Israel scales down its ground offensive in Gaza — almost certainly in a few weeks — he won’t be able to hold back the political flood.
“In the not-too-distant future his governing coalition will lose its parliamentary majority and the Knesset will be dissolved. He will try to delay that moment but his political instincts tell him he will have to fight an election soon — and all the polls are saying he will lose, by a wide margin. So he’s trying to draw up the battle lines of the campaign.”
