[EuoropeSays] Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s greatest political asset is no longer Benjamin Netanyahu. It is the opposition. For years, his rivals have mistaken national exhaustion with Netanyahu for public faith in them. They have changed leaders, renamed parties, assembled coalitions, and returned each time to the same message: I am not Netanyahu. That may be a protest slogan. It is not a governing philosophy, and it is nowhere near enough for the Israel that now exists.
 Indeed.
This is not an argument for absolving Netanyahu. October 7 happened on his watch,
| …October 7 happened on a great many people’s watch. That they have to live with it in a small country where all the players know each other, and much of the citizenry knows many of them personally, is all the punishment needed, it seems to me… |
and the conception that Hamas could be contained, deterred, and managed collapsed in blood.
| Which is why even the Israeli left, except for the professional protest idiots, has given up looking for a partner for peace among the Palestinians, as they used to say. |
The military and intelligence establishment failed to understand Hamas, interpret the signs it possessed, and defend Israeli communities when the attack began.
No published inquiry has established that Netanyahu received a precise operational warning and simply ignored it. But political responsibility is larger than a document placed on a prime minister’s desk. Netanyahu presided over the doctrine that failed, and he must answer for it.
The doctrine didn't originate with Bibi - he inherited it, along with a country having half-socialist economy.
| But he owns rapidly accelerating the freeing of at least part of the economy, a process started by Menachem Begin. |
Accountability, however, is not amnesia. David Ben-Gurion declared the state. But the powerful, technological, globally consequential country the opposition now asks to inherit is, in no small part, Netanyahu’s modern Israel. Israel is no longer a struggling young nation begging to enter the room.
It is a regional military power, a global technology center, an OECD economy, and a country that built open partnerships with Arab governments once considered unreachable. Netanyahu did not build that Israel alone. No leader could. Yet his economic reforms, strategic focus, campaign against Iran, and the Abraham Accords helped shape the Israel that his rivals now claim they can lead.
Replacing Netanyahu, therefore, requires more than persuading Israelis that they are tired of him. A successor must preserve what he helped build, repair what failed under him, and govern at a higher level.
| I thought Naftali Bennet was going to be the one, but he is not hard enough. |
|