Israel is reeling from an unbearable tragedy. But does it change anything?

Source: JTA

More to read:
Izrael w stanie wojny

By Ron Kampeas September 1, 2024 6:13 pm

Minutes after the announcement that the bodies of six hostages had been found in the Gaza Strip, the main organization of hostage families announced that it would “stop” the country in protest.

On Sunday night, tens of thousands of people heeded that call. The country’s main labor federation called a general strike, shuttering businesses and schools nationwide.

Earlier in the day, for the first time since Oct. 7, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apologized for not rescuing hostages, even as he blamed Hamas for the deadlock in negotiations. And President Joe Biden said he was more determined than ever to reach a deal.

The events of Saturday and Sunday, which have brought Israel to a halt and raised its political acrimony to new heights, prompted a question: Would the tragedy of the six hostages’ deaths become an inflection point in Israel’s war with Hamas, nearly a year after it began?

Israeli political experts said they were not ready to predict that the crisis is about to shift direction. Netanyahu is too steadfast in his resistance to further compromise to reach a ceasefire for hostages deal, they said. And the current political seasons in Israel and the United States are too volatile to say anything with certainty, they added.

Still, the experts saw signs of change. Here’s a look at three areas that might see shifts in the coming weeks.

Does Israel’s government withstand the crisis?

Netanyahu’s right-wing government has endured since Oct. 7, when Hamas raided the country, a fact that seemed improbable to many in the days following Hamas’ attack. The parliamentary opposition, and crowds of thousands of weekly protesters, have relentlessly decried the monumental failure of military intelligence and preparedness that allowed the terror group to inflict the massacre on Israel which saw — 1,200 people killed and more than 250 abducted.

Still, Netanyahu maintains a solid majority of 64 out of 120 seats in Israel’s Knesset, which has so far protected him from any challenges to his leadership. That may continue despite the current upheaval.

“The demonstrations really don’t change the political situation,” said Dahlia Scheindlin, a public opinion analyst and a fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.

Gilad Erdan, a former ambassador to the United Nations and to Washington who is close to Netanyahu, told Fox News that the killings, though to have been perpetrated by Hamas in recent days, actually helped the prime minister’s case for resisting a ceasefire under the terms currently on the table.

“A ceasefire is a word that sounds positive, but a ceasefire means Hamas can survive and get a free pass after what they have done,” he said. “And that would be a terrible mistake.”

Nimrod Novik, a former adviser to Shimon Peres, the late center-left prime minister and president, said Oct. 7 had not moved the public as much as he expected; more people had turned out to protest Netanyahu’s planned overhaul of the courts in the months before the war than have turned out until now to demand a ceasefire.

“I was wrong in assuming that after Oct. 7 and a government that proved MIA in the ensuing months, we’re going to have more [protests] in 2024 than in 2023. And it did not materialize,” said Novik, the Israel fellow at the Israel Policy Forum, a group that advocates for the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Gayil Talshir, a professor of political science at Hebrew University, said the burdens that Israelis have borne since Oct. 7 — the massive call-ups to the military reserves, the tens of thousands of civilians still evacuated from their homes on Israel’s borders with Gaza and Lebanon — inhibited protest.

Nonetheless, this moment was different, the analysts said.

The murder of six hostages who were alive until hours before their would-be rescuers arrived, coming just over a day after the cabinet rejected a ceasefire deal that did not include a heavy Israeli military presence on the Gaza-Egypt border, where weapons had been smuggled to Hamas, made the crisis real for Israelis, Talshir said.

“This was the crisis, the breaking point,” she said. “What happened yesterday was in a way, the reification of where Netanyahu is actually leading. That combination [of the cabinet vote and the news of the murders] struck a chord in the Israeli heart, which was very hard to do before.”

Scheindlin said the announcement of the countrywide strike on Monday by the national trade union federation, the Histadrut, could be a game-changer.

“The only thing that has a chance of changing the political situation is material pressure,” she said. “So the Histadrut is a big deal.”

She was watching WhatsApp groups she belonged to, a popular medium for organizing activism and sharing information in Israel, to see which municipalities would join the strike. So far, Jewish settlements in the West Bank whose residents tend to support Netanyahu were resisting, which could ease some of the pressure on the prime minister, reassuring him that his base remains intact.

But the anger at Netanyahu crosses party lines to some extent. Novik noted that the Histadrut is led by members of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, who have so far been reluctant to undermine him.

“The fact that over the last 12 hours, they changed their mind and removed their objection, may suggest that something more comprehensive is in store,” he said.

Talshir said the direct political consequences of the past two days would not be immediate because the Knesset is on a break until late October, after the High Holidays.

As pressure mounts, Yoav Gallant, the defense minister who reportedly argued fervently for accepting the latest deal last Thursday, and repeated that call on Sunday, might be able round up enough members of the coalition to threaten to walk out, Talshir said.

So far, far-right members of the coalition such as Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir have opposed a ceasefire, giving Netanyahu an incentive to hang tough. A politically moderate insurgency by Gallant could topple the government or at least get Netanyahu to change course.

“Who we have to watch is the more moderate security-oriented right wing in Israel, which is with the rest of the center and the left and all the families of the hostages out there in the streets,” she said.

But Eytan Gilboa, the director of the Center for International Communication at Bar-Ilan University, said he was already seeing hints that Netanyahu was not going to budge and was in fact doubling down, with attacks from Netanyahu backers saying the strikers were giving succor to Hamas boss Yahiyeh Sinwar, Israel’s foremost public enemy.

“The public relations machinery of Netanyahu is going to work,” Gilboa said. “He is producing talking points to his followers, and I’ve already seen some of them, they are accusing the demonstrators as well of helping Sinwar.”

How does the discovery of the hostages affect the war?

(more...)