How Netanyahu's 'divide and conquer' strategy has backfired
It's most likely correct that the Israeli premier is toast, but until he is finally truly out of our lives, Netanyahu should still be regarded as 'armed and dangerous'
It’s nearly three weeks that Israel has been at war, and the whole world is waiting for the other shoe to drop. What we’ve seen until now has been horribly destructive of both life and property, but the worst may still be ahead of us. Although for Israel, the shocking reality of what happened on the morning of October 7 is still in the process of being digested.
I have been struck (and not only I) by how naturally and quickly Israeli civil society, in particular the wide-based “protest movement” that sprouted overnight in response to the government’s attempt to gut the country’s judicial system, changed gears as soon as war broke out, and has devoted itself since then to providing material and social support to anyone needing it. Both missions come out of the same patriotism and sense of solidarity that characterizes most of Israeli society, and it’s fortunate that it does, as we have a government that reflects neither of those values. If you imagined that the government, and the man who heads it, might have risen to the hour in response to the extreme state of emergency, you were deluding yourself.
This sad realization is what I tried to describe in the short piece below, which was published this week at the Spectator, out of London.
Link to the piece online (if you register, you can read the magazine for free for a month): https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/how-netanyahus-divide-and-conquer-strategy-backfired/
Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to the Hamas terror attack has been slow and incompetent. Many of the efforts to house, clothe, feed and transport those in need have been carried out by ordinary Israelis, rather than the government. Leading many of these initiatives are the same loosely organised groups that until 7 October were heading up the protest movement fighting Netanyahu’s plan to ‘reform’ the state’s judicial system.
The hundreds of thousands of Israelis who turned out every Saturday night from January were demonstrating against what they believed was a mortal threat to their country’s democracy. Now, they are rallying against a new threat to Israel. To the soldiers among them, it’s only natural now to give priority to defending the country from a physical danger. The same air force pilots who half a year ago said they would stop reporting for voluntary training flights so long as the government pushed ahead with its legislative agenda are now flying sorties over Gaza and Lebanon – just as they always said they would do. And the civilians are pitching in with money, supplies and their time.
The government, and in particular the man who heads it, is also exhibiting consistency – but in Netanyahu’s case, this is demonstrated by a single-minded focus on saving his regime. Israel’s leader has yet to acknowledge that he bears any responsibility for the catastrophic failures that allowed the Hamas attack to take place. His silence marks a stark contrast to the heads of nearly all of the security organisations, as well as several of the premier’s own ministers, all of whom admitted they had let the country down.
For the chief of staff, the head of the Shin Bet security service and others, the official day of reckoning will come only after the war, but they are likely to tender their resignations even before any commission of inquiry requires them to do so.
Not so Netanyahu. There has been no hint that he may have made any mistakes, nor that he sees himself as deserving any blame for the cock-up. Instead, Netanyahu points the finger of blame at the army. Bibi’s supporters say that the security forces were distracted by the democracy movement, which weakened Israel as a result, leaving it unprepared for the attack from Gaza. This is despite the fact that the army heads and even the defence minister were for months warning Netanyahu’s government that its insistence on pushing ahead with its divisive legislative agenda was damaging Israel’s military preparedness. When the defence minister himself, a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party, made such a claim publicly, last March, the prime minister fired him – though public outrage forced him to rescind that decision a few days later.
Even after the atrocities of 7 October, Netanyahu stalled for six days before accepting opposition leader Benny Gantz’s offer to join an emergency war cabinet. Netanyahu’s office also initially refused to cooperate with the retired general appointed by the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, to head the army’s reconstruction work in the communities damaged, some of them extensively, during the attack. Why? Because the general, Roni Numa, had signed a petition opposing one of the government’s bills.
Netanyahu has always sought to ‘divide and conquer’. As a political tactician, he’s the best there is at identifying and exacerbating the fissures in Israeli society, and then aligning himself with the camp that will guarantee him victory at the polls, regardless of its ideology. That is how he brought into his current government two violently racist and messianic parties that just a few years earlier were beyond the pale for him. That’s why, for the past 14 years, he has propped up the Hamas government in Gaza – yes, you read that right – while doing all he could to weaken the Palestinian Authority (PA) in control of the West Bank. This ensured he would never be pushed into any kind of peace process with the former, however unlikely its chances of success, and that Hamas and the PA would never reconcile.
None of these things made Israel a stronger or healthier society. But if that was ever Netanyahu’s goal, it long ago was overtaken by an obsession with remaining in power. And while the ‘divide and conquer’ strategy may have served him well in his career, it created a reality for his people that is best described as ‘divided we fall’.
Most Israelis now take it for granted that the war will be followed by an early election and that Netanyahu is toast. But that would probably require Likud, which he long ago cleansed of all non-sycophants, to replace him as chairman. This is unlikely. Even after Netanyahu was unable to eke out a victory in four successive elections between 2019 and 2021, and even though, between election rounds two and three, he was indicted on corruption charges in three different cases, the party failed to act.
Netanyahu’s legal overhaul would deprive Israel’s court system of the authority of judicial review. Bibi’s critics think his aim was to ensure the Supreme Court could no longer strike down any move by the Knesset to cancel his trial. Now that Israel is at war, his legislative shake-up is on hold. But so long as Netanyahu remains at risk of going to prison, and resists a plea bargain that would require him to plead guilty on lesser charges and to promise to retire from political life, he should be regarded as armed and dangerous.