In Lebanon, Netanyahu Quit While He Was Ahead. With Gaza, He's Waiting for Trump - Israel News - Haaretz.com
The cease-fire in the north after a two-month ground offensive and an agreement with Beirut under American and French auspices reminds us of the old Benjamin Netanyahu. That was the Bibi before his corruption trial, before the madness, before his alliance with the messianic and racist settler bloc, a time when he made sure to include in his government at least one party from the other side.
The old Netanyahu didn't seek unnecessary or prolonged wars, and when they broke out, he tried to end them quickly with an agreement. (Whether these agreements were good or bad is another story.)
That doctrine he employed at least partially in Lebanon. The war in Gaza symbolizes the complete opposite. Handcuffed and blackmailed by his far-right partners, he has no intention of ending it. He will fight to the last hostage. That's because the alternative is a high risk of his governing coalition collapsing and Netanyahu being dragged into an early election, which he fears he might lose – and for good reason.
Ehud Barak and Benjamin Netanyahu in 2012, back when the prime minister made sure to include in his government at least one party from the other side.Credit: Ariel Hermoni/Defense Ministry
The agreement he reached in Lebanon could be duplicated almost word for word in the south, where Israel has achieved more than it did in the north. We would get back the 101 hostages, half of whom are still alive. But even 420 days after the Hamas massacre, 13 months of ground operations in Gaza and the deaths of more than 800 soldiers and thousands wounded, no agreement is on the agenda.
Even a partial deal and the return of "dozens of hostages soon," as Netanyahu promised in the Knesset, doesn't seem likely. After all, Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national depression, is screaming at Einav Zangauker, "I will not release a thousand Sinwars." Zangauker's son remains a hostage in Hamas' tunnels.
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Another of Netanyahu's allies, Bezalel Smotrich, sees his party below the 3.25-percent electoral threshold in opinion polls. So an early election is a nonstarter.
The latest excuse is that Netanyahu is waiting for Donald Trump's return to the White House on January 20. One excuse replaces another, but the absence of initiative and goodwill remains unchanged. And, one again, vilified U.S. President Joe Biden turns the other cheek, calls Netanyahu and urges him to move forward with a deal.
Today, nobody can say that Biden is motivated by electoral considerations. He's simply a person saddened by the lives being sacrificed in the tunnels because the Israeli government is filled with scoundrels.
A protest by mothers of combat soldiers in Tel Aviv this week.Credit: Moti Milrod
Not one of the 10 ministers in the security cabinet who voted for the Lebanon deal and is praising it to the public (or is staying silent for fear of offending the base) has dared suggest a similar deal in Gaza.
They all know that there's nothing to do there except for soldiers to get killed and wounded as the ground is prepared for a military government that will be followed by the first settlements. The future residents are looking over the Gaza border and whetting their chops.
Target bank
The government has more urgent things to do than worry about the hostages, like improving the right-wing bloc's chances of winning elections via a racist, clearly illegal bill that would ease the way to disqualifying Arab candidates. This is a key component of Netanyahu's plan to reduce the chances of the opposition winning the next election.
According to most opinion polls, the opposition would win 69 of the Knesset's 120 seats, 10 of which would go to the Arab parties Hadash-Ta'al and United Arab List, both of which are effectively disqualified from joining any prospective coalition. The coalition would win 51 seats.
The coalition's election legislation is likely to be invalidated by the Supreme Court. Maybe the attempt to cut Arab Israelis out of politics will have a boomerang effect and Arab voters will flock to the polls.
But even Election Day is in the government's racist crosshairs. The scuttlebutt is that the day voters go to the polls, thousands of settlers will descend from the hills, raid Arab communities and terrorize the people. Ben-Gvir's armed militias will rampage through the big cities; everybody has guns, as you may recall.
Relatives of hostages at a Knesset committee meeting this month.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
For Netanyahu, losing the next election isn't an option. The person occupying the White House sought to destroy the democratic process in the United States in January 2021, but his Israeli twin brother can rest easy.
Along with this election bill, the coalition is laying siege to the media. On Sunday, the cabinet unanimously approved ending all commercial dealings with Haaretz. Ministries will be required to cancel advertising subscriptions. In a preliminary vote later in the week, the Knesset approved legislation to close the public broadcasting corporation, Kan.
We couldn't have asked for a better presenter than Tally Gotliv, the Knesset's chief lunatic, to submit the bill that was initiated by Shlomo Karhi before his appointment as communications minister.
Gotliv and Karhi – both by chance in Likud rather than in Ben-Gvir's Otzma Yehudit – are openly flirting with autocracy and fascism. (In Karhi's case, it's fascism with a kippa.) Even Army Radio is in the crosshairs.
Well, somebody needs to avenge the firing of Jacob Bardugo as a commentator on Army Radio. This guy is a bully and a businessman who became the chief mouthpiece of conspiracies in the service of Netanyahu.
The magic word is "privatization." In the Knesset on Wednesday. Karhi said he was like a "liberal" who supports the sale of all government-owned media outlets.
This liberal from hell also announced that he had collected the signatures of 13 ministers who support the dismissal of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara. Four more signatures and he'll have more than half the cabinet on his side and Netanyahu will have to bring firing her up for discussion.
Justice Minister Yariv Levin hasn't been absent either. He's continuing his campaign against the Supreme Court as if the October 7 massacre never happened – and he was one of the indirect perpetrators. As we saw Thursday in a meeting of the Judicial Appointments Committee, there is no trick he won't pull to remove Justice Isaac Amit from the post of acting Supreme Court president.
Likud lawmaker Tally Gotliv speaking in the Knesset this week.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
The target bank of the government and its leader is inexhaustible. Last Saturday night, Netanyahu uploaded a criminal video that embodied all the elements of his personality. With one of his spokesman suspected of taking part in the leak of classified information, we saw his ugly incitement against the head of the Shin Bet security service, Ronen Bar, and the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Herzl Halevi.
It was a pathetic act of playing the victim, an effort to send messages to the main suspect. It contained a bevy of lies and blatant manipulation of facts related to the incident.
Netanyahu is so preoccupied with the affair that he forgot to mention anything about the murder of the Chabad emissary in Abu Dhabi, Rabbi Zvi Kogan, who at that time was believed – a suspicion now confirmed – to have been kidnapped and murdered. It was nine and a quarter minutes of sensory overload.
A flare for drama
Sara Netanyahu's request to be recognized as a terror victim in connection with the flares shot at the family home in Caesarea contains so many elements that the term "delusional" is an understatement. In fact, the letter drafted by her lawyer is from beginning to end testimony to the complainant's mental state, which has nothing to do with the incident itself.
Truly mind-boggling is the statement that the date the suspects chose was "deliberately set" near the annual commemoration of the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The rationale: The three protesters wanted to murder her and her husband as revenge for Rabin's assassination.
No doubt she believes this, otherwise she wouldn't have dictated this line to the attorney. She also filed an official complaint for "suspected attempted murder."
Maybe because of the trauma, the survivor flew to Miami this week to visit her eldest son. There's nothing like a few weeks with Yair to calm stormy winds.
Sara Netanyahu in Jerusalem this month. She turns every marginal incident involving herself into a catastrophe of biblical proportions.Credit: Olivier Fitoussi
The Crime Victims' Rights Law is designed to give victims a say about actions taken regarding the accused, like a plea bargain or a request for clemency. Typically, the law is used (appropriately) in sexual offenses. But Sara wasn't at home when the flare fell into her yard. As far as is known, she was in Jerusalem, 120 kilometers (75 miles) away.
That the Lady has a habit of turning every marginal incident involving herself into a catastrophe of biblical proportions is nothing new. The March 2023 protest in front of the Tel Aviv beauty salon became an "attempted lynching" accompanied by a Turkish drama-style photo in which she buries her head in her husband's shirt after the "rescue."
Two penis-shaped balloons that were carried to a protest in front of the prime minister's Jerusalem residence were called a "sexual assault." In a meeting with Holocaust survivors, she said that she too was the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, even though her father, Shmuel Ben-Artzi, immigrated to Israel from Poland in 1933, six years before the start of World War II.
This week I had the opportunity to watch Alexis Bloom's documentary "The Bibi Files," one of whose producers is Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker. It's both a great blessing and a great shame that the film is being shown abroad (it can't be shown in Israel due to the law prohibiting police interrogations from being broadcast).
The blessing is that finally, people who haven't lived in Israel for the past two decades have a chance to see the trio who run our lives. Benjamin Netanyahu, who doesn't remember anything (this itself is a reason for despair), writhes in front of the interrogators like an eel in distress. The rude and impudent Yair insults them while the Lady rants and boasts of the enormous respect she and her husband receive on "the red carpets."
The shame is that we still haven't managed to rid ourselves of this malady, this Bermuda Triangle. It looks like they might manage to get rid of us first.