Opening Knesset amid rocket fire, PM warns Iran and Hezbollah against 2nd front
Siren alerts interrupt first day of parliament’s winter session; Lapid, President Herzog back government’s war goal of destroying Hamas
Carrie Keller-Lynn is a former political and legal correspondent for The Times of Israel
Opening Israel’s wartime Knesset session in the midst of rocket barrages aimed at Jerusalem and elsewhere on Monday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a warning to Hezbollah and Iran, urging them to stay on the sidelines of the fighting, as the Israel Defense Forces prepares to launch a ground operation in the Gaza Strip in its bid to uproot Hamas.
Calling on the world to unite to join Israel’s push to defeat Hamas, Netanyahu issued a stark warning to the Hezbollah terror group and its Iranian backers, saying: “Don’t try us, you will be severely harmed.”
The premier also observed that Israel has started learning from the failures that led to Hamas’s deadly infiltration on October 7, saying that: “The reasons for the disaster that occurred will be investigated… and we have started drawing conclusions.”
Shortly after his comments, a massive rocket barrage from the Gaza Strip toward Jerusalem and other parts of the country forced MKs to leave the plenum to find shelter, causing a 40-minute delay in proceedings.
The premier, later echoed by President Isaac Herzog and Opposition Leader Yair Lapid, reaffirmed that “our goal is victory over Hamas, toppling it from its rule,” nine days after the terror group stormed Israel and killed over 1,300 people, injured close to 4,000, and kidnapped about 200 hostages to the Gaza Strip.
Israeli society has laser-focused itself on the war effort, with 300,000 reserve soldiers currently mobilized, in addition to Israel’s estimated 150,000- to 180,000-person standing army. As part of the war response, the Knesset is gearing up to delay nationwide municipal elections, which had originally been scheduled for October 31. The plenum advanced a bill Monday to push the election, occurring once every five years, to January 30, 2024. Two more votes will be needed on the matter before the end of the month.
The Knesset also advanced a first reading of a bill to let National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir alter security prisoners’ living conditions during hostilities. In line with an announcement from his office last week, Ben Gvir is seeking to rapidly increase prison capacity by housing inmates on mattresses, instead of beds.
Framing Israel’s ongoing war against Hamas and its Gaza-based allies as an existential battle against the forces of darkness, Netanyahu told the Knesset that, “Even with the passage of 75 years, the War of Independence hasn’t ended.”
Asserting that “we will win, because at stake is our existence here,” Netanyahu called the conflict “a war between light and dark forces, between humanity and animalism.”
He described Hamas as a new iteration of the Nazis. And in an echo of the Nazi period, said he had been taken to a home in a community attacked by Hamas and shown the first floor, where the parents were killed, and “a hidden attic,” where the children were hiding, were discovered by Hamas gunmen, and killed too.
Opposition Leader Lapid, who has said he would support Netanyahu’s wartime cabinet from the sidelines, pledged that Israel will “uproot Hamas” because “it’s impossible to live alongside a murderous terror organization.”
He also said that Israel will forge ahead even if it receives international criticism.
“It will take time, it will require the use of a lot of force. If the world doesn’t like it, let it not. It was not the children of the world who were murdered; our children were murdered,” Lapid told lawmakers.
Similarly, Herzog said that Israel’s current war against terror groups in the Gaza Strip is not morally “complex,” but part of an international struggle to maintain free societies.
“Everyone talks about complexity, but this moment is not a complex moment. There is absolute good here and there is absolute evil here. There is light here and there is darkness here,” Herzog said.
Thanking the United States for its public support and military aid, Herzog added: “We are not alone in this war. We are fighting the war as part of the family of nations – of all those who seek justice, peace and freedom – against an enemy that has proven that humanity and humanism are its enemy.”
For the past year, Lapid has warned about and fought against Netanyahu and his political allies’ plan to curtail judicial restraints on their own power, saying that such an overhaul of the judiciary threatens Israel’s liberal democratic values. Herzog, whose position is intended to be above the fray of domestic political squabbles, also criticized the coalition’s intentions as harming Israel’s democratic institutions.
While the judicial changes and the protests against them have been set aside since the outbreak of war, both leaders pointed to the need to heal painful social tears exacerbated by nine months of domestic infighting.
Netanyahu, for his part, praised Israel’s newfound “unity.”
Lapid, however, directly connected the failure of Israel’s security apparatus to prevent or rapidly counter Hamas’s deadly attack to forces within Israel that he said had weakened the country’s liberal democratic values.
“The Israeli system collapsed because it disconnected from its DNA. Its values,” Lapid said. “Israel has always told the world: ‘We are the only democracy in the Middle East, and we are the strongest country in the Middle East.’ We just forgot – these two things are not disconnected. They are cause and effect.”
Arguing for the need to strengthen Israel’s commitment to democratic values, Lapid said, “Our goal is not to end the war and go back, our goal is to win the war and be better than we were.”
By doing so, the opposition leader said that elected officials would restore public trust, eroded in the aftermath of Hamas’s crushing surprise attack against Israel on October 7.
“Our goal is to restore trust between this house,” the Knesset, “and the citizens of Israel,” Lapid said.
Herzog, without explicitly saying that democracy must be strengthened, said that the Israeli “state and its institutions must align themselves with the standards set by this amazing and wonderful nation in its difficult hour.”
Adding that Israel “must not leave this war as we entered it,” Herzog said that Israel must strengthen itself on three levels: politics, security, and domestic society.
“Our enemies yearn for any trace of polarization between us. It’s really part of their strategic plan,” he added.
