Benjamin Netanyahu
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, October 10: A year ago, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov called upon the world to understand Russian invasion of Ukraine with the template of Israel-Palestine conflict. Understand that Ukraine is Palestine and Russia is the US, he mischievously implored in a video which was circulated by the Russian embassy in Geneva in 2022.
Israel has seemingly launched an information blitzkrieg with horror stories from the Hamas attack involving decapitated babies, civilians burnt to death in their houses, hostages taken, and women abused and raped. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed revenge, and he a shared a video on X of the bombing of the residential complexes in Gaza.
But the voices within Israel and abroad are forcefully arguing that Bibi (Netanyahu) has blood on his hands. The Arab World had been wary of his policy of annexation of the Palestinian land, and this was a ground for them signing the Abraham Accords to normalize ties with Israel but Bibi was from changing his pandering to the ultra-right politics as he packed his ruling alliance with extremist elements.
“Netanyahu’s politics of division have done terrible damages to Israel. Bibi prioritized a judicial putsch to strip the Supreme Court of its power to oversee his government. In the process, he fractured Israeli society and military,” Thomas Friedman, a leading foreign affairs commentator, wrote in the New York Times.
The Israeli daily Haaretz in its Editorial, a day after the Hamas attack when it became evident that hundreds of civilians have been killed, was most stinging against Bibi. “The disaster that befell Israel on the holiday of Simchat Torah is the clear responsibility of one person: Benjamin Netanyahu,” Haaretz opined.
The daily further argued that “the prime minister, who has prided himself on his vast political experience and irreplaceable wisdom in security matters, completely failed to identify the dangers he was consciously leading Israel into when establishing a government of annexation and dispossession, when appointing Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir to key positions, while embracing a foreign policy that openly ignored the existence and rights of Palestinians.”
Ami Ayalon, who was a top ranking official of Israeli domestic intelligence Shin Beth, told Le Figaro in an interview that “a large part of the responsibility (Hamas attack) lies, of course, with the government”. “The commanders of all security organizations told (Netanyahu) that the policy conducted was bad and that it was obvious that it would be used by our enemies. They perceived a moment of great division around the crisis caused in the country by the justice reform,” La Figaro quoted Ayalon in the interview.
He was further quoted by the French daily, saying that “the Israeli government has done everything to ensure that Fatah and the Palestinian Authority are no longer a partner, because they have given power to Hamas”.
While the Opposition leaders in Israel have thrown their weight behind the Israeli prime minister to deal with war situation, the strategic thinkers are underlying that a return to peace talk may be in the interest of Tel Aviv, noting that the civilian casualty in the Gaza strip could erode sympathy for the country which always lives with an existential threat.
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