Maybe we haven't sufficiently denigrated his lifestyle; in any event, he came by all the denigration honestly. But take note that his many detractors refrain from attacking him on one issue: his ideology. As far as all his critics are concerned, he has no ideology, only a deep desire to remain in office, a lust for power that knows no bounds. To them, the members of the anyone-but-Bibi brigade, he is a hollow opportunist, devoid of any worldview. If he ever had one, he sold it long ago, just to stay in power.
Haaretz Editor-in-Chief, Aluf Benn, thinks otherwise. According to him, Benjamin Netanyahu does have an overriding goal, and it is not necessarily staying in power. Netanyahu, says Benn, is fighting for a much greater objective: the permanent occupation of the Gaza Strip.
To reach it, the prime minister is willing to pay a heavy price, including abandoning the hostages and the risk of a regional war, provided that Israel controls Gaza forever. No one ever analyzed Netanyahu's motives in this way. The question of what motivates him is still crucial.
Benn's answer does not diminish the need to fight Netanyahu, but it does disclose the intellectual poverty of his opponents. They don't attack him for his ideology, only for his obscene lifestyle, because it's much more convenient for them.
It is also easy to attack Netanyahu over the October 7 failure because of his supreme responsibility, but this camp refrains from criticizing him for his worldview because it knows full well that it has no real ideological differences with him and no workable plan for pulling Israel out of the nadir into which it has sunk.
Of all the possible candidates to replace Netanyahu – Yoav Gallant, Benny Gantz, Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, Avigdor Lieberman, Gideon Sa'ar, Yossi Cohen and Yair Golan – there is not a single one who is willing to release all the Palestinian prisoners and withdraw from the entire Gaza Strip. In other words, there is no one who is genuinely in favor of ending the war and freeing the hostages. There is also no one who intends ever to withdraw to the pre-1967 borders.
This being the case, they avoid criticizing Netanyahu's plan. The crimes and failures of his government, which not only caused Israel to be accused of genocide, but also turned it into a rotten, corrupt and dysfunctional Third World country, are dispiriting. No less dispiriting is the fact that not one of his clamorous critics is proposing something different.
Netanyahu's ideology is much more dangerous than his flamboyant lifestyle and his corruption. Contrary to the opinion of his critics, he has adhered to his ideology over the years. Netanyahu never believed in agreements with the Palestinians. He is a devout believer in living by the sword forever; he has never retreated from it.
Ever since the transparent and almost admitted trick of "the Bar-Ilan speech,"Netanyahu has acted and prospered: He took the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state off the table for good, and prevented all engagement with other solutions.
He never believed in a diplomatic solution, and remained loyal to his belief. Next is conquering Gaza, and making this a permanent occupation adds another set of bricks to his plan to "solve" the Palestinian issue by war alone.
Netanyahu should have been attacked mercilessly for this worldview, before anything else, including his lifestyle. It is what sows the seeds of the country's destruction, long before the Wing of Zion plane, his son Yair, his wife Sara and the corruption trials.
The endless renovation of the house in Caesarea is abhorrent, as is the treatment of employees of the prime minister's residence, but Netanyahu's plan to perpetuate apartheid is the greatest danger posed by the most reviled/revered prime minister in Israeli history.
For this, for the immortalization of apartheid, no leader of a Zionist party can attack Netanyahu: from Itamar Ben-Gvir to Yair Golan, they all agree with him. And that is the true cause for despair, it is the greatest of all reasons for hopelessness.