Haaretz on Netanyahu’s desperation

Despite his best efforts, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu keeps bumping his head on a polling glass ceiling that refuses to crack. His Likud party is stuck in the low twenties in projected Knesset seats, a far cry from the 32 seats it won in 2022, and his coalition bloc is being overtaken by the opposition camp – led by Gadi Eisenkot – which is nudging the magic parliamentary majority number of 61 seats.

So the premier has decided to go into an encyclopaedic form of election hyperdrive, assembling, agitating and exploiting every possible front to extract more votes while, Steve Bannon-style, flooding the zone to inundate, confuse and exhaust the opposition. And he seems to be taking inspiration from the most ravenous incarnations of AI.

Just in the last day or so, Netanyahu has sent Israeli warplanes to bomb Idlib in Syria, southern Lebanon and the Gaza beachfront. His government has released tenders for construction in the E1 area of the West Bank, which everyone knows is aimed to thwart the territorial contiguity of any future Palestinian state. He has allowed settlers to continue intimidating Palestinian families in Qusra, while not even rapping the knuckles of his national security minister, Itamar-Ben-Gvir, who called to kill “30 or 40” Gazans a day.

He celebrated the retrieval from Syria of the body of the last remaining IDF casualty of the 1982 battle of Sultan Yacoub, Yehuda Katz, with the stunningly hypocritical claim that he has always been “committed” to bringing Israel’s missing and hostages home, as if he can memory hole his serial torpedoing of negotiations to release the suffering hostages held by Hamas.

He praised U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s announcement that the U.S. would sanction the president of the International Criminal Court, which just happens to have a warrant out for his arrest on charges of war crimes. He engineered a sycophantic list of Likud candidates, mocking its internal elections process while fittingly rewarding the architects of his assault on Israel’s democracy. …

But for Netanyahu, 69 days before his fate is decided at the ballot box, the instant gratification of bombs and demagoguery easily beats the slower burn of diplomacy and strategy. The lives and safety of Israelis and Palestinians, together with international law and whatever remains here of political norms, are just collateral damage.