After the war’s first three months, these past six months have marked Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s finest hour. He is not to be excused for October 7 (although new disclosures about October 7 itself may make that moot), and should step down after the wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Judea-Samaria end — but only if a satisfactory alternative emerges. By contrast, if no one better than Benny Gantz, Naftali Bennett, or Yair Lapid emerges, what can one say? Cut one’s nose to spite one’s face?
Of course Netanyahu cannot always be trusted when he speaks. The caution signal is the moment he says “Ezrachei Yisrael” (Citizens of Israel). He has presented himself long enough in public life for people to know they must take his words with more grains of salt than Lot’s wife. He ran on campaigns to annex parts of Judea and Samaria, and it never happened. Was he lying? Did he ever intend to annex the Jordan Valley? Or was it all a ruse to scare Arab countries into entering into peace accords with Israel “in return for a promise not to annex the Jordan Valley,” which he never really intended to do anyway even though he promised he would? He has run fearlessly on the right, then imposed construction freezes. Arabs have built countless illegal homes in Area C and the Negev that have not been torn down. Did he face pressures we do not know? No one working on the premise of honesty can read him.
Some of those closest in his inner political circle ultimately have emerged hating him the most after he misled or outright lied to them too often. No, Avigdor Liberman is not a saint. Neither is Naftali Bennett. Nor Ayelet Shaked. Nor Gideon Sa’ar. Nor Benny Gantz. Most of them are just plain jealous of his abilities and tried to unseat him before their acrimonious break with him.
But there comes a time, after a quarter century, that no one can deny that Bibi does not always play with a full deck. We all saw it in broad daylight when he manipulated the November 2020 budget fight to avoid honoring his signed rotation agreement to alternate the premiership with Gantz.
In Bibi’s defense, perhaps almost anyone would become untrustworthy at some point after realizing there is something disgraceful in the Israeli political culture that causes anyone and everyone to leak, double-cross, and turn coats. The whole Oslo Disaster never could have happened if traitors elected on Raful Eitan’s right-wing Tzomet platform did not sell out for personal gain to vote for Oslo. For example, Dr. Gonen Segev, Minister of Energy and Infrastructure, voted for Oslo and got that ministry. In time, the good doctor was convicted of forgery, credit card fraud, attempted drug smuggling, and spying for Iran.
Anyone Netanyahu talks to eventually becomes a subpoenaed witness to testify against him over some bogus charge. Even the indictment process: a single Bibi hater has the power unilaterally to file indictments to destroy him, engendering demands that he step down before he even has a day in court. Suddenly, the head of government faces getting impeached, convicted, and imprisoned over cigars and champagne gifts that, although unbecoming in the Likud tradition of personal modesty manifested by Menachem Begin and Yitzchak Shamir, seem perfectly legal.
The Israeli sport of proffering felony charges against authority figures is exaggerated in a country where a few toxically bad apples indeed crossed the line. Those few cases have generated a culture, as in America’s new anti-Trump lawfare, where the Stalin-Castro model predominates: prosecute your political opponents.
That is the Netanyahu defense. One day he learns that a media owner with whom he spoke confidentially is testifying against him. Another day, his closest personal aide will testify. His wife’s maid will testify. If this or that one won’t testify, then the Shin Bet will pull out despicable recordings exposing an illicit sexual tryst that will force someone to testify and say what they tell him to say, or his wife will leave him, his children never again will respect him, and his coworkers and neighbors will whisper when he enters a room.
In Bibi’s defense, there comes a time when anyone with half a brain has to decide not to talk to anyone but his wife and son, to conceal every last thing he is thinking, and to mislead even his closest aides because — as a proven fact — no one can be trusted.
And the leaks. Every person in his orbit has something to leak to Maariv, Yediot — certainly Haaretz — and channels 11, 12, and 13. Israel not only is the Land of Milk and Honey, and the Land of the Deer (“Eretz Tzvi”) but also the Land of the Leaks. If Noah’s Ark had as many leaks as the Israeli cabinet has, we all never would have been born because the Ark and the animals would have submerged faster than the Bismarck, Titanic, or the Edmund Fitzgerald.
So it’s all a morass. He cannot be trusted completely. And he cannot trust the people around him. And they don’t trust each other. The only one whom Naftali Bennett, Benny Gantz, and Yair Lapid all agree they can trust more than each other is Mansour Abbas, head of the Israel branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. He, their true and trustworthy coalition partner. Can you imagine governing Israel the past nine months with Ra’am holding the coalition’s deciding four seats?
So Netanyahu is under enormous pressure all the time. He failed horribly on Hamas, although what happened on October 7 is still not clear, and — regardless of whether he was misled by people he trusted or whether the intelligence services dropped the ball — blame falls on him, if only for years of allowing Qatar to send billions into Gaza, for not stopping or even knowing about the tunnel building, and the arms flowing from Egypt to Gaza, for not fighting the very first or second ceasefire violations to complete victory.
As with Rudy Giuliani’s successful “Broken Windows” philosophy of policing, Israel should have gone into full war mode when Hamas first was dropping incendiary balloons onto Sderot farms. He is at fault for tolerating too much for too long, although it is far from certain Israelis would have supported going to war then.
Yet, he now is showing his mettle — not just with his always great speeches but by acting with determination (prodded by coalition partners Smotrich and Ben Gvir). The world criticism is enormous. Yet, during this, his finest hour, he has not (yet) backed down. The man lives — truly — with a target on his back. An international criminal warrant commands his arrest. Isn’t it interesting that the International Criminal Court issued no warrant for Benny Gantz, then co-head of the War Cabinet, nor for Eisenkot? The Jew haters at the ICC and ICJ knew who led with strength and who by bombast.
Dramatic changes in the polling reflect that the greater Israeli population has begun figuring it out, too. When Gantz was polling ahead of Bibi by 2-1, the weekly poll topped the front page of Maariv’s Friday edition. Now, with Likud and the right ascendant, Maariv buries its weekly poll between health-worker strikes, high school strikes, and the latest magic vitamin for reproducing or the latest celebrity divorce.
Bibi’s new mettle stems from his love of the country but also partly from having no choice but to be strong — or his coalition will collapse. And part of it because the polls initially had been so awful after October 7 that he could not risk allowing his coalition to crumble. He had to wait many months for the polls to turn. No choice but to show true grit.
Israel’s insidious, often treasonous, Left are consumed by the other BDS: Bibi Derangement Syndrome. It is not unreasonable for even a conservative Republican to recoil from Donald Trump. However, just as a small group of them hate Trump so much that they will vote for extreme leftists like Hillary, Biden, and Harris to stop him from straightening out America, so the Never Bibi crowd are consumed by irrational hate.
They project their own craziness onto him. They assume illogical motives and convince each other. Their most popular projection: Bibi is wantonly extending the timeline of the Gaza war, causing hostage deaths, solely to avoid being put on trial, and he is adding Hezbollah in Lebanon and Fatah and Hamas in Jenin and Tul Karm, all to delay going on trial.
In a way, their concern has a strong basis in American history. They can point to how George Washington could have won the American Revolution against England in one month but dragged it out for years to avoid being tried for receiving cigars and champagne. Abraham Lincoln could have won the Civil War in a month but instead dragged it out for nearly five years from 1861-1865 because he wanted to avoid being indicted for receiving cigars and champagne, and he would not let it wind down until he was safely within a month of getting assassinated, thereby avoiding prosecution. Franklin Roosevelt could have won World War II in three weeks but dragged it on almost four years from December 7, 1941 until, upon dying in April 1945, he finally was safe from being indicted for accepting cigars and champagne. With FDR safe from cigar-champagne prosecution, Truman dropped the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs four months later — all finished. So there is ample history behind the Left’s conspiracy theory.
Here is an alternate theory: Netanyahu has agreed to five previous ceasefires with Hamas. Each time he was warned by some it would backfire; each time he did it anyway. Each time Hamas re-armed and with more lethal weapons, evolved newer strategies learned from the prior round, built tunnels, learned paragliding, and upped the ante for next time. Despite conferences throughout Israel begging Netanyahu to fight to win, he kept ceasing fire on the brink of victory, laying the groundwork for the next more severe round -under pressure from the US. But this time, with polls down, he finally decided he may as well salvage his post-October 7 legacy by getting the job done for once and for all: truly to eviscerate Hamas. To get Sinwar and Mashal. To block the Philadelphi Corridor to finally seal the open spigot of weapons flowing from Egypt to Gaza, facilitated daily by bribed Egyptian guards and officials. Moreover, this time frame means that maybe — just maybe — Trump will arrive and give the green light and necessary weapons to close the deal promptly thereafter.
Or maybe he realizes that this is a fight for Israel's survival.
Bibi knows he has made too many foolish “peace deals” with Hamas over the years. He constantly has capitulated to pressure from families of hostages. Under that pressure for compassion, Israel has released Sheikh Yassin, who proceeded to create Hamas; Yahya Sinwar, who proceeded to lead Hamas; and hundreds more who have murdered many for each single Israeli hostage freed. Of course every Israeli hostage is a universe. But the Prime Minister has to say “No.” This painful year of war cannot culminate with freeing busloads of mass murderers for the next generation and giving up control of the corridor which enabled Egypt's big time betrayal of its signature on a peace treaty with Israel.
After 40 years of Gilad Shalit deals and compassion, Israel now has become maybe the only country in the world into which rockets and missiles are shot daily across every one of its borders, while Arab barbarians roam Israel’s streets stabbing innocent and unaware people at random, ramming others with cars, shooting them. This anarchy does not transpire in any other civilized Western country. Maybe in Africa. Maybe in parts of South America or Chicago. It has to stop.
An entire nation now mourns six more Israelis found murdered by Hamas, shot only days earlier. The Usual Suspects are back on the Tel Aviv street, elevated in real time by the same renegade Israeli media that ignored the orange-shirt demonstrations of 2006 warning presciently that all this would happen.
They demand that Bibi cave to all Hamas’s demands so as to obtain the 20 or 30 living hostages that they hope remain. Any Jew with a heart understands their demand and anguish. However, any Jew with a head understands this time is different. There needs to be a settling of accounts, even if it means flattening all of Gaza, Beirut, and Jenin-Tulkarm-Ramallah.
In their hate for Bibi, the Kaplan demonstrators inadvertently have contributed mightily to the deaths of their loved ones. Sinwar and other Hamas, Hezbollah, and Fatah thugs watch and tell themselves: “It’s working. We’re breaking Israeli morale. We do not have to step down from our demands. The demonstrators will bring down Netanyahu for us. Those Tel Aviv leftists are our secret weapon without even knowing it. Let’s tighten the squeeze on them today and kill six more. That will make them even more delirious.”
Yes, the demonstrators are killing their loved ones. If those demonstrators were guided by wisdom, they instead would be marching with signs reading “Flatten Gaza,” “Nuke Hamas,” “Victory,” “No Ceasefire,” and “Make Sinwar into a Real Woman.”
The issues with Prime Minister Netanyahu are many, but his conduct these past six months has been his finest hour. In America, today’s Democrats are not one iota worse on Israel than they ever have been, but, with G-d’s help, Bibi has miraculously turned 99 percent of the Republican Party into Jabotinsky Zionists, abandoning any “Two State Solution,” and endorsing a full-pronged effort to eradicate Sinwar, Nasrallah, and Arabs in Judea-Samaria, en route to a single Jewish country from the River to the Sea.
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