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07-04-2024
JERUSALEM: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s week began with the chants of thousands of protesters demanding a hostage deal and early elections outside the Knesset and his official residence. It ended with a scolding from US President Joe Biden over the Israeli military’s killing of seven humanitarian aid workers and the rapidly spiraling humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
In between, the Israeli prime minister’s chief political rival and war cabinet member raised his voice in support of early elections for the first time, ratcheting up the political pressure and yet, Netanyahu’s grip on power doesn’t appear to be in any imminent danger of slipping away.
Even as the walls appear to be closing in and a majority of Israelis continue to disapprove of Netanyahu’s performance, the mounting international and domestic political pressure has yet to fundamentally change the dynamics of his governing coalition whose collapse would trigger new elections nor his willingness to remain in office.
“I don’t think that there’s any leader in the world that faces so many fronts has to cope with so many fronts internal and external,” said Aviv Bushinsky, a former adviser to Netanyahu. “(but in Israel), we don’t talk about approval rating, we talk about the coalition.”
Netanyahu has repeatedly faced seemingly-certain political death during his decades-long career in politics, but has managed to survive and become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister in part by tending to the interests of allies in his governing coalition who will keep him in power.
“I had the privilege to lose the elections with Netanyahu in ’99. And for two years, we were working on his rehabilitation, the new Bibi at the time,” Bushinsky said. “The most fundamental thing that Netanyahu learned, it wasn’t a behavioral mistake. It was a political mistake. Never betray your natural allies, the other parties in the right wing.”
That concept has never been truer for Netanyahu than in this current governing coalition, the most right-wing in Israel’s history. And even as Netanyahu faces a slew of political headwinds, none of the members of that governing coalition, or of his own party, have indicated any serious intent of leaving the government and triggering its collapse.
A bruhaha over whether ultra-Orthodox Jews should be conscripted into the Israeli military has recently presented a new threat to his coalition, given the diverging interests of key members of his Likud party and ultra-Orthodox parties in his coalition but Israeli political analysts now estimate it will likely be months before the issue comes to a head and presents any real threat to his government.
Netanyahu is facing mounting public displays of discontent, from the families of Israeli hostages as well as the growing number of people taking to the streets of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem to demand new elections but while their numbers are growing, the protests have yet to come close to matching the scale of the protests opposing his judicial reform plans before the war. (Int’l News Desk)
