One Israeli cabinet minister was barred from a hospital visitors’ entrance. Another’s bodyguards were drenched with coffee thrown by a bereaved man. A third had “traitor” and “imbecile” shouted at her as she came to comfort families evacuated during the horror.
The shock Oct. 7 massacre by Hamas gunmen has rallied Israelis to one another. But there is little love shown for a government being widely accused of dropping the country’s guard and engulfing it in a Gaza war that is rattling the region.
Whatever ensues, a day of judgment looms for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after a record-long career of political comebacks.
“October 2023 Debacle” read a headline in top-selling daily Yedioth Ahronoth, language meant to recall Israel’s failure to anticipate a twin Egyptian and Syrian offensive in October 1973, which eventually led then-Prime Minister Golda Meir to resign.
That ouster put paid to the hegemony of Meir’s centre-left Labour party. Amotz Asa-El, research fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem, predicted a similar fate for Netanyahu and his long-dominant, conservative Likud party.
“It doesn’t matter if there’s a commission of inquiry or not, or whether or not he admits fault. All that matters is what ‘middle Israelis’ think – which is that this is a fiasco and that the prime minister is responsible,” Asa-El told Reuters.
“He will go, and his entire establishment along with him.”
An opinion poll in Maariv newspaper found that 21% of Israelis want Netanyahu to remain prime minister after the war. Sixty-six percent said “someone else” and 13% were undecided.
Were an election held today, the poll found, Likud would lose a third of its seats while the centrist National Unity party of his main rival Benny Gantz would grow by a third – setting the latter up for top office.
