A Referendum on Netanyahu

Both the Likud and its various opponents have decided to make the upcoming election all about the current prime minister, with one left-wing politician adopting “just not Bibi” as her unofficial slogan. But there is still much popular support for the prime minister and, despite conventional wisdom in the U.S., this has little to do with dislike of the American president, as Haviv Rettig Gur explains:

Foreign observers routinely misunderstand Netanyahu’s popularity in the Israeli electorate. In 2009, when U.S. President Barack Obama pressured Netanyahu on settlement construction, eventually extracting from him a ten-month settlement freeze, Obama’s formerly sky-high popularity among Israelis plummeted. In the years since, many American officials, Obama included, interpreted this decline as a sign of Netanyahu’s popularity: when the two leaders bickered, Israelis rallied around their own.

But Netanyahu’s approval ratings didn’t soar when Obama’s crashed. Israelis wrote off America’s leader on the basis of his own failings, as they saw them. His tiffs with Netanyahu were secondary to the perception among many Israelis that Obama seemed to be shortsightedly expecting them, after the second intifada, the second Lebanon war, and a fresh war in Gaza, to trust once again in their neighbors’ peaceful intentions. . . .

[A] poll over the weekend found that just 36 percent of Israelis view Netanyahu as the most fit candidate for the job of prime minister among those running. Yet these numbers mark little change from the past. Netanyahu has won elections not because of his own popularity, but because of his opponents’ unpopularity.

Read more at Times of Israel

More about: Barack Obama, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli politics, Knesset, Likud

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF