Member-only story
The Israeli government doesn’t care about its citizens — and they’re angry about it.
Netanyahu has disbanded the Israeli war cabinet formed after October 7th with the opposition. This happened following opposition leader Benny Gantz quitting the cabinet, alleging that Netanyahu has deliberately been frustrating negotiation efforts to return the hostages for political purposes.
There is clearly truth to this, as the government has all but admitted that hostages are a secondary or even tertiary concern for them at this stage. Minister Bezalel Smotrich told families of the hostages currently in Gaza that Israel would ‘leave no stone unturned’ in efforts to rescue their loved ones, but emphasized he would not support any deal with Hamas that includes bringing an end to the war.
Whispers of potential civil war within the Zionist entity have circulated for some time, but they seem all the more prescient as pressure mounts within the country.
This has all been aggravated by a report that Israeli officials knew about the threat of an attack well before October 7th, and chose to ignore the intelligence which detailed Hamas’s intended plan with eye-watering precision.
Settlers in the North of Israel want their government to assure them of security and safety, but safety is the promise that Netanyahu rose to power on and he broke that promise spectacularly on October 7th.
To mitigate against this, Israel is attempting to warp the narrative to its advantage. In order to reassert its dual citizenship as both victim and hero, to pander to the extremists within its community while desperately trying to change international opinion, Israel is trying to rope the wider region into a war.
But how will this war pan out given IOF spokesperson Daniel Hagari has publicly admitted what we’ve been saying all along: that Hamas cannot be defeated militarily?
Hagari’s confession also comes with an accusation. He essentially accuses the government of misleading the Israelis, and “kicking sand in their eyes”.
This, in a high militarized country like Israel, is decidedly mutinous talk. The fractures in Israeli society cannot withstand the mounting pressures on the country, much less another war.
