Israel still has not forgiven Prime Minister Golda Meier for failing to prevent the invasion of the Syrian and Egyptian armies in the Yom Kippur War. 50 years have passed and her figure is not rehabilitated. The same thing or worse will happen to Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister who has governed this country the longest. Opinions gathered on the street, conversations with academics and state officials, confirm that his government will fall as soon as the war is over.
“He has no chance, he is the person most responsible for this tragedy,” says Rabbi Uri Ayalón. “Not that he won't come to see us,” warns Dana Mizrahi, a survivor of one of the kibbutz that Hamas attacked near Gaza and where she killed 1,200 people, many of them in cold blood.
Netanyahu has not visited the wounded so as not to suffer the same fate as two of his ministers, greeted with shouts and expelled in anger.
Nor, in all his years in office, has he visited the communities surrounding the Gaza Strip, kibbutz inhabited by people nostalgic for the first Labor Party. When someone asked him why he responded that “in any case they don't vote for me.”
The prime minister has not taken any responsibility for security and intelligence failures. Nor has any of his ministers done so, except for the Environment Minister, who did so yesterday in an interview and apologized.
Benny Gantz, one of his main political adversaries, offered to enter the government last Sunday, but it was not until Wednesday that the prime minister agreed to have him on his team. Apparently, according to information collected in various media, the brakes were put on by Sarah Netanyahu, fearful of the future that awaits her husband, prosecuted for corruption, when the war ends. Before making a deal, she was waiting for some good news from the front, something she could hold on to to counteract the guilt that now weighs on her husband.
Egyptian intelligence warned a week earlier that Hamas was preparing something unprecedented, but its Israeli colleagues did not see any concrete threat.
Military leaders have long warned of the decline suffered by the armed forces. The last to warn of the gradual loss of capabilities was the Minister of Defense, Yoav Gallant, a few months ago, and Netanyahu chose to dismiss him. If he kept the position it was thanks to pressure from the street, to the demonstrations in favor of him and against the prime minister.
Netanyahu presides over the most conservative and religious government in history. Among his ministers there are supremacists and messianists who have sown hatred against the Palestinians. His words have triggered violence in the West Bank.
It was these radicals who pressured him to order military units to be moved from Gaza to the West Bank to protect various religious services at Hawara, the tombs of Joseph and Rachel. The troops left their posts along the strip on the eve of the Hamas incursion.
Netanyahu has gone on television to affirm that Hamas's days are numbered and that the military response will be unprecedentedly harsh, but he has not had any words for the victims or their families, nor for the hostages now held captive in Gaza. He has not yet called a press conference and it is not likely that he will do so.
