In his more than three decades in politics, Benjamin Netanyahu has accrued almost as many nicknames as he has election wins. <\/p>\n
There\u2019s \u201cThe Magician\u201d for his uncanny ability to grab victory from the jaws of defeat. \u201cKing Bibi\u201d for staying atop Israeli politics longer than anyone else. And, universally, though not necessarily affectionately: plain old \u201cBibi\u201d. But there is another one he revelled in, and which now appears in tatters: \u201cMr Security.\u201d How did it all go so wrong? <\/p>\n
It remains unclear as to how more than 1,000 Hamas militants managed to take Israel by such devastatingly deadly surprise, murdering \u2013 as President Isaac Herzog wrote \u2013 more Jews in one day than at any time since the Holocaust. <\/p>\n
And for now, Netanyahu\u2019s opponents are not calling for Netanyahu to step down. \u201cI\u2019m not dealing now with who is to blame or why we were surprised,\u201d said former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, now leader of the opposition. \u201cIt\u2019s not the time, it\u2019s not the place.\u201d <\/p>\n
History certainly provides a useful comparison: the last time Israeli intelligence failed to anything like this degree \u2013 and with so many casualties \u2013 was almost 50 years ago to the day, when Egypt and Syria invaded Israel on Yom Kippur. <\/p>\n
That, though, was a war \u201cthat followed some kind of logic of norms and rules\u201d, said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute. \u201cWe negotiated peace with [Egyptian] President Sadat a few years later, with majority support of the Knesset. We\u2019re not going to negotiate any peace with Hamas. It\u2019s a different ballgame altogether.\u201d <\/p>\n
Some kind of negotiation \u2013 probably through intermediaries, such as Egypt \u2013 is inevitable. Even as Israel pummels Gaza with airstrikes, imposes a \u201ccomplete siege\u201d on the enclave, and prepares for a possible ground invasion to decimate Hamas, Netanyahu also needs to find a way to free the 150 or so hostages being held by the militants inside Gaza. <\/p>\n
This would have been a tall order in Netanyahu\u2019s prime. But after 10 months of facing down protests against his controversial and divisive judicial overhaul, his corruption case \u2013 and a near-death experience \u2013 this is battered and beaten Bibi, not the vintage version. <\/p>\n
It may come as scant consolation to him that Hamas has managed to reunite Israel. \u201cThe last thing Israelis care about right now is Netanyahu\u2019s political career,\u201d said Plesner, who also serves in the reserves of the Israeli special forces, where he is a major. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s also worth remembering that Bibi has been written off countless times before \u2013 only for him to return, Terminator-like, to trounce his opponents. This time, though, feels different. This time, he\u2019s been forced into a war he didn\u2019t choose when he may have been distracted by other things. <\/p>\n
Focusing on the judicial overhaul \u201cdidn\u2019t help\u201d, said Channel 12\u2019s Segal. But this invasion by Hamas, he said, would have been planned 12 to 18 months ago \u2013 when Netanyahu was in opposition. The miscalculation, he said, was that Hamas was after economic concessions, and a softening of Israel\u2019s blockade on Gaza. \u201cAt the end of the day it\u2019s a Nazi regime looking to destroy us all. And you can\u2019t live with a monster in your backyard.\u201d <\/p>\n
Whether Netanyahu and the Israel Defense Forces are able to slay the monster may become clearer in the coming days and weeks. He might succeed in forming a national unity \u201cemergency\u201d government that would insulate him from any calls to step down. In the short term, this could marginalise what Lapid describes as the more \u201cextreme\u201d and \u201cdysfunctional\u201d elements of Netanyahu\u2019s coalition. But even if they do move to the sidelines, their ideas may live on. <\/p>\n
Such has been the shock and anger over Hamas\u2019 spectacular assault that Israeli voters may ben open to more extreme ideas. \u201cA certain portion of the population will expect a very, very harsh response,\u201d said Plesner, \u201cand it will be based on a zero-sum game: it\u2019s either us or them.\u201d And this time, \u201cMr Security\u201d may fail to deliver. <\/p>\n\n
In his more than three decades in politics, Benjamin Netanyahu has accrued almost as many nicknames as he has election wins. There\u2019s \u201cThe Magician\u201d for his uncanny ability to grab victory from the jaws of defeat. \u201cKing Bibi\u201d for staying atop Israeli politics longer than anyone else. And, universally, though not necessarily affectionately: plain old <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":9910,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-9909","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9909"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9909\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}