Israel still does not forgive Prime Minister Golda Meir for not preventing the invasion of the armies of Syria and Egypt in the Yom Kippur war. Fifty years have passed and his figure has not been rehabilitated. The same or worse will happen to Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister who has ruled this country the longest. Opinions collected on the street, conversations with academics and State officials, confirm that his Government will fall as soon as the war ends.
“He has no chance, he is the most responsible for this tragedy”, says Rabbi Uri. “Not that he won’t come to see us,” warns Dana Mizrahi, a survivor of one of the kibbutzim that Hamas attacked near Gaza and where it killed 1,200 people, many of them in cold blood.
Netanyahu has not visited the wounded in order not to suffer the same fate as two of his ministers, who were greeted with shouts and kicked out.
During all his years in office, he has also not visited the communities surrounding the Gaza Strip, kibbutzim inhabited by those nostalgic for the first Labor period. When someone asked him why, he replied that “in any case, they don’t vote for me”.
The Prime Minister has not taken any responsibility for the security and intelligence failures. Neither has it been assumed by any of its ministers, except for the Environment Minister, who did so in an interview yesterday and apologized.
Benny Gantz, one of his main political opponents, offered to enter the Government on Sunday, but it was not until Wednesday that the Prime Minister agreed to have him in his team. Apparently, according to information collected in various media, the brake was put by Sara Netanyahu, fearful of the future that awaits her husband, prosecuted for corruption, when the war ends. Before agreeing, she was hoping for some good news from the front, something to hold on to to offset the guilt now weighing on her husband.
Egyptian intelligence warned a week earlier that Hamas was preparing an unprecedented action, but their Israeli colleagues did not appreciate any concrete threat.
Military chiefs have been warning of the decline of the armed forces for some time. The last to warn of the gradual loss of capabilities was the Minister of Defense, Yoav, a few months ago, and Netanyahu chose to dismiss him. If he kept the position it was thanks to the pressure of the street, to the demonstrations in his favor and against the prime minister.
Netanyahu presides over the most conservative and religious Government in history. Among his ministers, there are supremacists and messians who have sown hatred against the Palestinians. His words have sparked violence in the West Bank.
It was these radicals who pressured him to order the transfer of military units from Gaza to the West Bank to protect several religious services at Hawara, the tombs of Joseph and Rachel. Troops left their posts along the strip on the eve of the Hamas incursion.
Netanyahu has gone on television to claim that Hamas’ days are numbered and that the military response will be unprecedentedly harsh, but he has had no words for the victims or their families, nor for the hostages now captives in Gaza. He has not yet called a press conference and is not likely to call one.
