At the top of Benjamin Netanyahu's agenda: self-preservation
Israel's PM has sided with coalition partners over families of hostages, foreign allies
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began addressing a solemn ceremony in Jerusalem earlier this week commemorating the country's dead from wars and other hostilities, Nir Galon rose to his feet and proceeded with a silent, one-man protest.
Standing near the rear of the open-air auditorium, the 43-year-old Jerusalem IT entrepreneur unfurled a large Israeli flag with the date Oct. 7 etched in red and held it aloft until Netanyahu finished speaking.
As the prime minister, without looking up, returned to his seat in the front row, another man in the audience yelled "Garbage!"
"He doesn't have the moral right to be here," Galon told CBC News after the ceremony.
Like many Israelis, Galon blames Netanyahu for not preventing the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, which left more than 1,200 dead and resulted in the capture of more than 250 hostages. Israel responded with a ferocious military campaign in Gaza that has killed upwards of 35,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
Egyptian and Qatari mediators, prodded by CIA director William Burns, have tried for weeks to cajole both Hamas and Israel into accepting a truce along with a prisoner and hostage swap. The Palestinian militant group has held firm on a permanent ceasefire with an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, something Netanyahu has said is totally out of the question.
Those talks appear to be in stasis, and Galon questions Netanyahu's motivation.
"I don't know what is his interest — is he making a decision because it's in his political interest or because he actually cares about people?"
Top among Netanyahu's personal interests is avoiding a criminal trial on a series of charges, including breach of trust and accepting bribes, which could proceed full steam ahead were he to lose the prime minister's job.
An alliance with 'Jewish supremacists'
Netanyahu not only boasts Israel's most successful electoral record — having won six general elections — but his mastery of the dark arts of political survival has so far enabled him to successfully navigate the fallout from the Oct. 7 attack and deflect blame.
His partners in Israel's coalition government include far-right parties led by cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, whom left-leaning Israeli publications have called "Jewish supremacists."
Both men have called for Israel to sacrifice the remaining Israeli hostages and pursue the war against Hamas until the bitter end, with the ultimate goal of driving Palestinians out of Gaza and repopulating the territory with Jewish settlers.
Such calls for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza have infuriated Israel's allies, including the United States, and led to despair for the families of Israel's hostages. But Netanyahu has resisted every plea to distance himself from his far-right benefactors.
"The most important calculation [for Netanyahu] is how not to resign and stay in power. And he's done that," said Mitchell Barak, an American-Israeli political consultant and pollster based in Jerusalem.
With the support of the far-right parties, Netanyahu holds a four-seat majority in the Knesset, Israel's parliament. In spite of the withering and unrelenting daily criticism he receives from those on Israel's left and in the political centre over his responsibility for the failures on Oct. 7 and the conduct of the war, so far the parliamentary math has not shifted and he remains firmly in charge.
"For now, he's got a solid group of people who are backing him — until they decide not to," Barak said. "His greatest fear is within the Knesset. The thing that can bring him down now is within the Knesset."
In the aftermath of last year's attacks, Netanyahu forged an emergency war cabinet, bringing in rival ministers from other parties in a bid to create a unified approach to the war against Hamas.
But on Wednesday, long-running fissures in that unity cracked wide open when Defence Minister Yoav Gallant said Netanyahu's refusal to outline a strategy for running Gaza after the war had become untenable.
Defiance over conduct of war
Gallant said the administration of the territory must be turned over to "non-hostile" Palestinians with the involvement of the international community — something Netanyahu and his right-wing partners have adamantly rejected, because they see it as a possible precursor to the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Gallant's position is roughly in sync with what the Biden administration in the U.S. has been advocating as part of its plan to wind down the fighting in Gaza and set the conditions for a longer-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian question.
Netanyahu has forcibly resisted.
"There is no alternative to military victory," he said in a video released by the prime minister's office on the same day as Gallant's message. "The attempt to bypass it with this or that claim is simply detached from reality."
Barak said publicly defying the U.S. may work to Netanyahu's advantage should he end up fighting another election.
"He's like the victim — he man that wants to save Israel and Joe Biden is stopping him," Barak said. "That's the familiar place that he likes to be in."
Even so, recent public opinion surveys in Israel suggest Netanyahu is facing sizable political headwinds as he tries to push forward with the military operation in the southern Gaza city of Rafah, possibly at the expense of a peace deal.
A survey by the Israel Democracy Institute published on May 13 indicated a majority (56 per cent) of the Jewish public in Israel sees a deal for the hostages as a higher priority than continuing with the war. The result held even for people who identified as voting for Netanyahu's Likud party in the last election.
'He's sacrificing Israel's national security'
Eran Etzion, a former diplomat and Israeli political strategist, said the disconnect between the Netanyahu government and the Israeli public may yet pressure some of his coalition partners to reconsider their support.
"Netanyahu has long forgotten, or has long abandoned, this position of a reasonable prime minister," Etzion told CBC News from his home outside Jerusalem.
"He's acting completely out of his narrow political interests. He's sacrificing Israel's national security. He's acting against the will of 80 per cent of Israelis, against the deeper strategic interests of Israel in terms of its relations with the Americans, relations with Egypt."
Egypt, a one-time enemy that has forged a key security partnership over the past four decades, has fiercely criticized Israel for proceeding with its incursion into Gaza. There are multiple reports that Egypt may downgrade its diplomatic relationship.
But for many Israelis, it's the downturn in relations with the U.S. — Israel's biggest provider of weapons — that is most worrying.
Etzion said it appears that through its near-daily public admonitions, the Biden administration is trying to go over Netanyahu's head and speak to Israelis directly.
"What the Americans are trying to do is to demonstrate to the Israeli public that ... their government is not representing their interests, and their government is actually working against their interests," Etzion said. "This is true around the negotiating table [with Hamas] and it's true in the wider sense of where this war is going."
After seven months of combat, Israeli forces are now returning to northern and central parts of Gaza where earlier they said Hamas had been subdued. In neighbouring Israeli communities, air raid sirens warning of rocket launches from Gaza have become a familiar sound again.
U.S. officials, such as Secretary of State Antony Blinken, have warned that Israel risks anarchy, chaos and an unending insurgency unless it comes up with a sustainable plan for the future of the territory.
Religious exemptions
So far, Netanyahu's defiance of the U.S. and the broader international community over the attacks on Rafah, along with his refusal to sack his extremist cabinet ministers for advocating war crimes in Gaza, has not cost him his political majority.
One potential threat, however, could upend the political math.
While serving in the military is mandatory for Israeli Jews, ultra-orthodox men have been able to avoid conscription by signing up for Torah study instead.
The country's high court has ordered an end to subsidies for Torah students, setting up another political fight between the country's far right and other parties, who argue the Haredim, as they're known, should have to do their part in defending the country.
The Haredim community has an extremely high birthrate and is expected to make up 40 per cent of Israel's population in the coming decades.
Benny Gantz, the leader of the Israel Resilience Party, who is a member of Netanyahu's coalition and his war cabinet, has said he will quit the government if the religious exemptions persist.
"There's a real problem within his cabinet, within his government," said Mitchell Barak, the political communications consultant.
But even if the government collapses over the Haredim issue, Barak said Netanyahu's defeat in a subsequent election is not a foregone conclusion, despite his current unpopularity.
"I think he's focusing on the issue of [rejecting] a Palestinian state at this point — and thinking that that's his ticket [for getting re-elected]."
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