Like Hamas, Benjamin Netanyahu also must go

Undoubtedly Gaza’s leadership is discredited. Indubitably the Israeli prime minister is disgraced.

Before the war, both were obstacles to peace. After the war, both will still be obstacles to peace.

Unless each is dislodged, Gaza and Israel are doomed, each in its own way.

It has been three months since the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre claimed more than 1,200 Israeli lives. In the aftermath, more than 20,000 Palestinian lives have been lost to Israel’s counterattack.

While Gaza burns, Israel seethes. Now, a political reckoning looms on the home front for Israelis.

This week, the Israeli Supreme Court weighed in with seismic rulings on Netanyahu’s past — and the country’s democratic future. In a New Year’s rebuff of his prime ministerial power grab, the justices issued a stark reminder that the Jewish state is not only fighting for its survival but its soul.

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Breaking News Headlines & Top Stories | The Star

• Dec 31, 1969
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Breaking News Headlines & Top Stories | The Star

• Dec 31, 1969
• Comments

In the months leading up to the Hamas attack, Israel was at war with itself. Deadlocked after five democratic elections, Israel emerged with a coalition government cobbled together by Netanyahu with the most extremist politicians in its 75-year history.

That he should consort with so dishonourable a cabal of cabinet ministers — renegades who violated the law, racists who breached human rights, radicals who scorned democratic norms — could only be explained by Netanyahu’s utter desperation. When I interviewed him as prime minister in the late 1990s, he was consumed by fear of losing political power; today, he worries about losing his personal freedom.

Netanyahu stands accused of fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in three ongoing cases. His best defence was to go on the offence, perpetrating a constitutional coup to perpetuate his grip on power and protect him from the judicial process.

Then and now, he presides over a parliamentary majority of convenience and expedience, giving unfathomable power to the most improbable potentates — outliers and outlaws on the margins of Israeli society awarded key portfolios in finance and security.

Emboldened and empowered, Netanyahu attempted to jury-rig the judicial process by directing his coalition of lawbreakers to undermine the legal system at its core. His government spearheaded the gutting of the Supreme Court’s traditional powers, curbing its authority to review the “reasonableness” of any legislation rammed through by his parliamentary majority while protecting him from being unseated by the attorney general.

The power play left Israeli society deeply divided over the past year, marked by massive street protests and parliamentary resistance. It exposed deep cleavages — not merely right versus left, but religious against secular, hawks opposed to what remains of the doves in a crumbling peace camp.

When you divide Israeli society, you divide the military, and vice versa, for it is a country of conscripts and reservists. Thousands of reservists signed petitions and joined protests, refusing to report for scheduled duty and training.

Israel’s far-right reign of racists and extremists gave every advantage to the settler movement in the occupied West Bank — ordering the military to look the other way when they established illegal outposts, while looking after them protectively in the most exposed areas that required additional troop deployments.

Against that backdrop of division, distraction and deployments, what better time for Hamas to strike? On Oct. 7, with Israel’s defences and democracy at their lowest point, with Netanyahu at the helm of a hobbled nation, Hamas struck.

In the aftermath, Israeli society came together. Reservists who had condemned the government reported for duty to defend the country.

The Hamas incursion came on Netanyahu’s watch. At the time, Israelis imagined it was only a matter of time before he announced remorse, accepted responsibility and acceded to resignation.

Three months later, he has once again shown himself to be a demagogue without democratic impulses, an improviser without vision, a tactician without strategy, a prime minister without a plan. It is painfully apparent that no one in his government is looking ahead to the next three months or three years in Gaza.

The latest battle plan shared by the war cabinet calls for more or less the same — a scorched earth policy without a real world blueprint for a postwar arrangement. Despite Netanyahu’s early hyperbole that he would destroy Hamas, he can only degrade it, not eliminate its terrorist network entirely.

Hamas tunnels can be blocked off, but a totalitarian ideology is harder to bury. The only certainty is that Israel cannot occupy Gaza again, as it did until its unilateral withdrawal in 2005.

The default alternative is some form of Arab administration that involves what remains of the Palestinian Authority in combination with friendly countries from the region whose resources — human and financial — could buttress the rebuilding and restoration of a Gaza without walls or tunnels.

The prerequisite, to be sure, is the evisceration of Hamas, if not quite its elimination. But the precursor to all that, without a doubt, is the exit of Netanyahu and his revanchist government.

The Supreme Court reminded Israel this week that no democracy can tailor its laws to protect a sitting prime minister, for no one is above the law; it also ruled that no legislature can place itself beyond judicial review, for the separation of powers cannot be undone. Taken together, these are devastating indictments of the country’s recent past, but also point the way to a more hopeful future.

The prime minister who projected strength has only made Israel vulnerable. As long as he remains in power, Israel will be hampered in war and held back in peace.