Are The Walls Closing In On Netanyahu?

Robert Inlakesh 

Source: Al Mayadeen English

After October 7, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was faced with a massive crisis, worse than the Zionist Entity has ever faced.

Almost a year into the genocidal campaign against Gaza and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has failed to achieve his stated war goals. Now, it appears that he is willing to sacrifice the entire Zionist project in the hope that if he wages war for long enough, his problems will simply go away. Eventually he will have to make a major decision to change the dynamics of the war.

Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu is many things, including a war criminal, a racist and a narcissist, but what he is more than anything is a political survivor; likely owing to the infinite ability to draw from the most depraved aspects of his aforementioned traits. Through his quest for survival however, he has managed to shape Israeli society in his own image and bring to the surface, the most genocidal traits of the Zionist settler-colonial project.

For the past 30 years, Benjamin Netanyahu has been playing other career politicians against each other, weaponizing whatever divisions he discovers in the Israeli political climate and building the power of a fanatical religious-nationalist settler movement. Although the Israeli PM may have liked to not have resorted to maintaining his position of power through the helping hand of the extremist Religious Zionism alliance, he has no other options on the table. As he attempts to continue navigating his way through the political minefield he currently inhabits, he risks collapse under the immense pressure.

It is undeniable that the Zionist Project has always been expansionist and genocidal in its nature, as it is predicated on eliminating in whole or part the indigenous population of Palestine in order to build an ethno-State. Therefore, taking the approach that the current Israeli government is somehow worse in its intentions than any of the others is a poor argument. However, Benjamin Netanyahu is an interesting figure to study, as he hastens the collapse of the Zionist Entity and understanding his predicament is to understand that of the Zionist regime.

Out Of Options

As mentioned above, Netanyahu is a political survivor, there is no doubt about this fact at all. But, for one man to remain in power for so long, in the way he has, there comes a point when fundamental problems inevitably arise. 

Through his journey in Israeli politics, he has always sought to play the role of the persecuted resistance to some kind of conspiracy which comes from the Israeli so-called Left. In order to keep up this argument, he has successfully managed to change the goalpost of what constitutes a “Left” in the Israeli political system. When he first became Prime Minister in 1996, the “Left” was the Israeli Labour Party, who were not Leftists and could perhaps be labeled Centrist at best. However, Labour died a death from which it never truly recovered with the Oslo Accords and has by this point become a nominal factor.

On the other hand, as each election cycle passed, more and more Right-Wing parties would rise in the Israeli political system, many of which were created due to some sort of disagreement with Benjamin Netanyahu. With the Israeli society slowly migrating further and further Right, into the most extreme ideologies imaginable, the goal post has kept moving, to the point that any sense of an Israeli “Centrist” or Liberal group is so marginal that they constitute a joke, take for example the Meretz Party, that’s about as “Left” as is acceptable and even then they are fringe. This is with the exception of the Palestinian citizens of “Israel” parties of course.

In the background, as Netanyahu was slowly dragging the political system and society further and further to the Right, while using the phrase “Leftist” to describe other Right-Wing politicians and parties, he was also aiding the growth of a rather powerful settler extremist movement. After the withdrawal of the illegal settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, the settler movement began to develop and become stronger to ensure that their aspirations of settlement expansion would never be threatened again. Benjamin Netanyahu saw an opportunity in aiding this movement and now we are at the point where he must rely upon them.

The problem for Israeli politics is that the settler movement is stupid, they are loud and obnoxious, they openly speak about their genocidal and settlement expansion goals, not understanding that there must be an intelligent strategy to achieve further expansionism. For many of those in the Likud Party today, they are just as openly extreme as their Religious Zionism alliance partners and feel emboldened to act this way. In such a climate, Benjamin Netanyahu also feels comfortable issuing his own genocidal opinions and almost no Israeli takes issue with what he is saying. So, ultimately, the Israelis are showing their true face to the world and the mask has fallen off completely, which makes it significantly harder for the Zionists to get away with their war crimes and disgusting behavior, as it can no longer be ignored.

Saying this, after October 7, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was faced with a massive crisis, worse than the Zionist Entity has ever faced. Instead of buckling under pressure and ending the war quickly, he decided that the best way to survive was to continue the war indefinitely instead and ride it out until such a time that a solution would fall in his lap. In order to maintain the legitimacy to continue the war - which is ultimately aimed at exterminating as many Palestinians as will be allowed by their Western allies, while completely annihilating the entire territory’s infrastructure - he understood that October 7 had to be transformed into something that it clearly was not. 

So, he manufactured a narrative, based upon a completely ridiculous series of sob stories, from beheaded babies, to mass rapes, toddlers in the attic, all designed to make people think that what happened was not in any way a military assault with strategic military aims, all designed to try and change the misery that the people of Gaza were experiencing on a day-to-day basis. That’s why we all heard the framing that this was “the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust”, because Netanyahu needed the legitimacy to commit the worst atrocity ever broadcast on live television in the way it currently is. 

However, it's more than 11-months later and he hasn’t achieved any of his war goals and is instead submerged in a war of attrition that his army was never prepared for. Although the Biden administration hasn’t the backbone, nor the intelligent leadership to force an end to the war, it is clear that Washington wants it to end and is being damaged by it. Saying this, there are no real world consequences for Netanyahu from Washington and so he sees no reason to stop yet, but this situation is not sustainable.

Benjamin Netanyahu has managed to build an Israeli society and coalition of genocidal maniacs, which do not understand the need for compromise, political prudence or restraint. Therefore, the majority of Israelis want to see the war continue, but with one major caveat, they want their captives who are held in Gaza to return. This point has to be made clear, the hundreds of thousands of Israelis who are protesting for a ceasefire agreement are not seeking an end to the campaign to destroy Gaza, they just want an agreement which will get their prisoners back and have no care in the world for Palestinian civilian life. According to a recent Pew Poll, 70% of Israeli Jews believe that publicly displaying empathy for civilians in Gaza should not be allowed and all the polling done on their support for the war suggests that the number of them that believe too much force has been used is in the low single digits (percentage wise).

So, the genocidal leader now faces a problem with his racist public, a good portion of them want their captives returned in a prisoner swap and they understand that the war will not achieve this. This portion of the Israeli population is also primarily composed of those who hate Netanyahu and his coalition, again this has nothing to do with opposing his policies against Palestinians, they don’t like his personality and don’t want to see the regime become a theocracy. This is now creating major problems for the Prime Minister and threatens to become economically taxing on the Zionist Entity if the situation escalates.

Also, it is only so long until a regional war erupts. Faced with a difficult domestic situation, where he cannot go against the will of his religious-nationalist coalition, even though it would be strategically smarter for the Zionist Entity’s survival. So, he needs a distraction, one that is so huge that nobody will care about Gaza after it and that is a regional conflagration, most likely with Lebanon.

When Benjamin Netanyahu authorized the assassination strikes against Hezbollah commander Fouad Shukr in Beirut and Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran, it is likely that he expected immediate responses that could end up causing a limited regional battle. Yet, the responses are yet to come from Iran and Ansarallah, while Hezbollah is effectively playing mind games against the Zionist regime by essentially saying: maybe we’ll strike again, maybe we consider this case closed. This puts the regional resistance in a position to monitor ongoing developments and act according to their own calculations, instead of responding at a time favorable to the Israelis themselves.

The other wild card here is the West Bank, which could suddenly become a major problem for the Israelis overnight. Although this front has been a lot less pivotal than had been anticipated, there is still huge potential for an explosion of violence there, one which will massively impact Zionist regime. This is why the majority of the Israeli military’s forces have been deployed to the West Bank, in greater numbers than they were to Gaza, in order to try and prevent such a scenario.

The time is ticking and we may see some kind of new aggression against Lebanon and/or Iran soon, as the situation heads to an ultimatum: Either sign a ceasefire agreement, or expand the war and hope for the best.