Israelis take to the streets of Tel Aviv after the IDF admits to killing hostages<\/p>\n
Although “Israel does not have to hold elections until 2026,” write the Financial Times<\/a><\/em>\u2019s James Shotter and Neri Zilber, “the country’s political class is positioning itself for a vote much sooner \u2014 as the veneer of unity that has covered Israeli politics since the outbreak of the war begins to fade.”<\/p>\n With polls seeming to show them benefiting from Netanyahu\u2019s state of disgrace, centrist figures like Gadi Eisenkot and Yair Lapid are calling on Netanyahu to set a date for elections now. No one believes he will.<\/p>\n But in the current situation, horserace polling is almost worthless<\/strong> as a guide to the future. The outcome of the next election will be decided by whatever momentous developments end up triggering a vote; but no one today knows what those developments will be.<\/p>\n For a taste of how volatile the atmosphere is<\/strong>, consider the following quote, attributed by the Financial Times<\/a><\/em><\/strong> to “a person familiar with Netanyahu’s thinking”:<\/p>\n Either Netanyahu secures an achievement on the battlefield and himself initiates snap elections, or elections will be forced in the coming months, including because of mass demonstrations and the fact that many of the security chiefs will have resigned by then.<\/p>\n In a similar vein, a recent edition of Haaretz<\/em> carried an article<\/a> by one of its senior political columnists headlined: \u201cIsrael is heading towards street battles between the far right and families of hostages.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n A countdown has begun<\/strong>. It was triggered last week by murmurings from the multinational consortium of spooks<\/a> that has been negotiating with Hamas over the release of the Israeli hostages. The spy leaders put Netanyahu on notice that he would soon find himself facing an offer \u2014 his last, best offer \u2014 to free the captives.<\/p>\n The price will be\u00a0steep. <\/strong>There will need to be a ceasefire agreement substantial enough to at least grind the war\u2019s momentum to a halt. Israel will need to release hundreds or even thousands of Palestinian prisoners, many of whom will be Hamas militants, some of whom will be suspected of armed attacks against Israelis, and a few of whom might even have participated in the October 7 attacks.<\/p>\n The leaders of the centrist parties will support the deal as the only way to bring the hostages home. Netanyahu\u2019s far-right coalition partners will condemn it in the wildest terms. Netanyahu himself will have to give an answer, yes or no. Everything will depend on what he does then.<\/p>\n The reason the situation is so flammable <\/strong>is that, to put it bluntly, the whole Israeli leadership class took the country to war on the basis of a lie. And that lie is now being exposed.<\/p>\n They assured their public that “destroying Hamas” by military means was a feasible war objective. Not just feasible, but indispensable \u2014 the condition for all further progress. They saw to it that the lie was parroted by the leaders of all the other nations of the Rules-Based International Order \u2014 the Axis of Rules, for lack of a better term \u2014 starting with the Head Ruler in Charge, Joe Biden.<\/p>\n And when Israel\u2019s leaders said it, their public believed them<\/strong>. Worse, many Israelis \u2014 enclosed as they are in a suffocating bubble of wartime jingoism \u2014 likely still<\/em> believe it. But they\u2019re about to be rudely disabused, and no one can predict how they\u2019ll react once they find out they\u2019ve been misled.<\/p>\n Under different circumstances, the Israeli political class might have been able to let the public down gently. There could have been a slow, controlled leak of the early inflated expectations, a gradual shifting of the “victory” goalposts; a decent interval could have elapsed before, eventually, “peace with honor” could be declared and the reservists could go back to their jobs.<\/p>\n What made that path impassable were the hostages. <\/strong>Since October, their plight has been the focal point around which all public life in Israel has revolved. Their family dramas have become entangled in the country\u2019s poisonous ideological polarization between left and right, or, more accurately, nationalist\/religious versus cosmopolitan\/secular.<\/p>\n The hostages\u2019 families, with their daily protests and vigils, have become the nucleus of a reborn anti-Netanyahu protest movement \u2014 generally “left”-coded but thoroughly patriotic and Zionist \u2014 whose main demand, besides Netanyahu\u2019s resignation and the calling of elections, is for the government to prioritize the freeing of the hostages over the war\u2019s other great objective, the “destruction” of Hamas.<\/p>\n This dilemma of war policy \u2014 “free the hostages” or “destroy Hamas”<\/strong> \u2014 has marked the cleavage line between Israel\u2019s clashing sociopolitical blocs.<\/p>\n When the war began, Netanyahu and the Right had a stock reply to the families\u2019 pleas: “Military pressure is what will free the hostages.” In other words, there was no conflict between the two war objectives. And at first, most Israelis seemed satisfied with that answer.<\/p>\n But then reality set in.<\/strong> Like a drug suddenly wearing off, a remarkably swift tonal change in the public mood has taken place over the past several weeks.<\/p>\n Two disquieting episodes<\/strong> seem to have played a role in the sea-change. The first was the shocking mid-December incident<\/a> in which, as if in some too-neatly-plotted play, three Israeli hostages managed to escape their captors in Gaza only to be shot by IDF snipers \u2014 despite waving a white flag on a stick, shouting for help in Hebrew, and going shirtless to show they weren\u2019t carrying explosives.<\/p>\n Besides making it clear how the IDF treats Gaza civilians \u2014 which is, of course, what the snipers mistakenly assumed the escaped hostages to be \u2014 the episode drove home to Israelis that “military pressure” was more likely to kill the hostages than to save them.<\/strong><\/p>\n The second incident<\/a> was possibly even more disturbing. Two weeks after Maayan Sherman, the mother of a nineteen-year-old captive, was notified by the government that her son, Ron, had been murdered by Hamas in captivity, she received a visit from a pathologist. He informed her that an extensive battery of CAT scans had been performed on her son\u2019s body \u2014 which the government hadn\u2019t told her about \u2014 and that no injuries, broken bones, or evidence of strangulation had been found. As a result, the official report listed the cause of death as unknown. But Sherman says an “IDF source” admitted to her that it was likely her son had died from poison gas used by the army itself, in an attempt to kill Ron\u2019s captors.<\/p>\n Sherman at first “was surprised that the IDF had approached her at its initiative,” Haaretz<\/em><\/strong> reports:<\/p>\n As to whether that was in fact the army’s idea or that of the pathologist, Dr. Alon Krispin, director of the National Center of Forensic Medicine, who signed off on the report the family received, replies, “It was an agreement between me and the IDF.”<\/p>\n He explains to Haaretz<\/em><\/strong> that, “I approached the Sherman family because I thought that, as citizens, they deserved to know in a direct way what happened to their son, and not by means of documents and bureaucracy.<\/p>\n He declined to say any more.<\/p>\n Realizing she\u2019d been lied to by her government, Sherman decided not to mince words: “Ron was indeed murdered,” she wrote on social media. “Not by Hamas \u2026 not by stray bullets and not in an exchange of fire. This was deliberate murder. Bombing with poison gas.”<\/strong><\/p>\n An accumulation of testimonies from former captives released during the late-November truce added to the picture. “We were in tunnels, terrified that it would not be Hamas, but Israel, that would kill us, and then they would say Hamas killed you.” <\/a>The situation they described was unfathomable: amid two months of relentless and terrifying IDF bombing, the only thing that prevented their deaths at the hands of the State of Israel was the determination of Hamas terrorists to keep them alive.<\/strong><\/p>\n Finally, on January 20, the New York Times<\/a><\/em><\/strong> reported that IDF generals had reached the inevitable conclusion: Hamas could not be defeated militarily in a timeframe compatible with the rescue of the hostages:<\/p>\n Israel has established control over a smaller part of Gaza at this point in the war than it originally envisaged in battle plans from the start of the invasion, which were reviewed by The New York Times. That slower than expected pace has led some commanders to privately express their frustrations over the civilian government\u2019s strategy for Gaza, and led them to conclude that the freedom of more than 100 Israeli hostages still in Gaza can be secured only through diplomatic rather than military means.<\/strong><\/p>\n The dual objectives of freeing the hostages and destroying Hamas are now mutually incompatible, according to interviews with four senior military leaders, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they were not permitted to speak publicly about their personal opinions.<\/p>\n These generals spoke to the Times<\/em><\/strong> behind a cloak of anonymity. But Netanyahu will have no such luxury. Soon he\u2019ll be presented with a choice: accept a hostage release deal that amounts to a public confession that “destroying Hamas” was never achievable \u2014 or sacrifice the lives of the hostages.<\/p>\n A preview of this moment of truth was recently sketched<\/a> by Haaretz<\/em><\/strong> political columnist Yossi Verter:<\/p>\n Such a deal would spark a political debate inside the coalition and in the public. Those opposed to it will be led by [far-right ministers] Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. Israel’s sensible public and leaders will be its supporters. We might wind up with extreme right-wingers confronting family members of hostages on the streets<\/strong>. Of course, Netanyahu will watch from the gallery, rubbing his hands with delight.<\/p>\n In 2011, Israel agreed to trade more than a thousand Palestinian prisoner<\/strong>s \u2014 including high-level Hamas militants \u2014 to get back a single captured Israeli soldier, a shy, frail nineteen-year-old named Gilad Shalit, whose plight had become a national cause c\u00e9l\u00e8bre. (One of the released prisoners was Yahya Sinwar, who went on to become one of the main plotters of the October 7 attack.)<\/p>\n Just after Shalit\u2019s release, in the first interview ever granted<\/a> by a Hamas leader to an Israeli media outlet, Salah al-Arouri \u2014 known as a veteran planner of cloak-and-dagger operations \u2014 spoke with unconcealed admiration for what the Zionist enemy had done.<\/p>\n “To do what Israel did shows the value Israeli society places on human life,” he told Israel Army Radio via phone from Damascus, on October 2, 2011, in what reporters described as “perfect Hebrew.”<\/p>\n “This is a pillar of Israel’s strength \u2014 to wage a war to free one man<\/strong>, to free a thousand prisoners for him. This is the strength of a society and an army. As someone from the outside, as an enemy, I would prefer that Israel abandon that value, even at the cost of not freeing our prisoners.”<\/p>\n Four weeks ago, al-Arouri was assassinated in Beirut<\/strong> on Netanyahu\u2019s orders. But there\u2019s a good chance that in the coming weeks, Netanyahu will make it up to al-Arouri by posthumously granting his wish.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n