Resumed war solves Netanyahu’s problems. But what of Israel’s?
The coalition is restabilized, Ben Gvir is back, a troublesome security chief is on the way out, to be followed by the AG, and the judiciary is about to be remade. The nation, though, is roiling
David Horovitz is the founding editor of The Times of Israel. He is the author of "Still Life with Bombers" (2004) and "A Little Too Close to God" (2000), and co-author of "Shalom Friend: The Life and Legacy of Yitzhak Rabin" (1996). He previously edited The Jerusalem Post (2004-2011) and The Jerusalem Report (1998-2004).
This Editor’s Note was sent out earlier Wednesday in ToI’s weekly update email to members of the Times of Israel Community. To receive these Editor’s Notes as they’re released, join the ToI Community here.
At a stroke, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has solved his most pressing personal and political problems.
By ordering a resumption of the military campaign against Hamas in Gaza overnight Monday-Tuesday, he has cemented the Religious Zionism party’s membership in his coalition — after the far-right party’s leader Bezalel Smotrich repeatedly threatened to bolt if Israel consented to a second phase of a ceasefire-hostage release deal rather than a return to the war.
Better yet, the Knesset’s second far-right party, Otzma Yehudit, which quit the coalition two months ago because Netanyahu had agreed to phase one of the ceasefire deal — under which 33 hostages, 25 of them living, have been returned to Israel — is now coming back into his government. Ben-Gvir, the criminal recidivist, is set to retake the reins at the police ministry.
Far from facing a coalition crisis and the automatic fall of his government if it could not pass the 2025 state budget by March 31, his government will now command 68 of the 120 Knesset seats and will have no problem beating the budget deadline.
The ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism party, whose leader Yitzhak Goldknopf has been promising a revolt if Netanyahu does not pass a law enshrining ultra-Orthodox exemption from military service before the budget comes to a vote, no longer has the Knesset numbers to muster a credible threat.
The prime minister has also been sending vast amounts of funding to his community, along with innumerable promises that the draft-exemption law will get done eventually, to keep him on board. Meanwhile, the IDF is getting precisely nowhere in trying to recruit ultra-Orthodox draft dodgers, because it has no support from the government.
Netanyahu has also declared he is firing Ronen Bar, the head of the Shin Bet, an integral part of the nation’s security leadership for 17 months of multifront war but, as of this week, publicly denounced by the prime minister as someone he cannot trust.
Not coincidentally, Bar’s Shin Bet this month completed its probes into its failures before and on October 7, 2023, and its published summary cited the flow of money from Qatar to Gaza as one of the key factors that enabled Hamas to build up its forces for the invasion and slaughter — a monthly flow of $30 million in cash that was publicly advocated by Netanyahu.
An unpublished annex to the Shin Bet probe, entitled “The Path to October 7,” reportedly goes further, citing Hamas documentation found in Gaza tunnels and the interrogations of Hamas detainees as establishing that the Qatari money was used to strengthen Hamas, and that Netanyahu maintained the policy despite multiple warnings issued by the Shin Bet to the prime minister ahead of the Hamas invasion that Israel was facing a disaster.
Also not coincidentally, Bar’s Shin Bet, along with the Israel Police, has been investigating allegations that key aides to Netanyahu maintained a variety of relationships with Qatar — including one (Eli Feldstein) working via an international firm contracted by Doha to feed Israeli journalists pro-Qatar stories, and two (Jonatan Urich and Yisrael Einhorn) leading a public relations campaign to boost the global image of Qatar ahead of the Doha-hosted 2022 soccer World Cup.
Most Israelis, it should be noted, want Bar to resign for his agency’s October 7 failures, as he has said he will. But a plurality doesn’t want Netanyahu to fire him, and a majority believe the prime minister is doing so for personal rather than substantive reasons.
Netanyahu is also now openly challenging the integrity of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, claiming that she ordered the so-called “Qatar-gate” investigations not for substantive reasons of suspected illicit behavior, but out of a politically motivated desire to prevent him from firing Bar — by ostensibly creating a conflict of interest in which the prime minister could not legally dismiss a Shin Bet chief whose agency is investigating his own officials. This is both a chronologically inaccurate argument and a spurious one: The Shin Bet-police Qatar-gate probe will continue whoever heads the agency. However, a more supine successor to Bar might be less willing to doggedly pursue it when it so manifestly discomfits the prime minister.
Netanyahu has not yet publicly declared his intention to also fire Baharav-Miara, but his Justice Minister Yariv Levin has set those wheels in motion. And the former justice minister who appointed her, Gideon Sa’ar — the ex-Netanyahu ally, turned bitter critic, turned sycophant (and foreign minister) — personally cut her loose on Tuesday night, comparing her “conduct harming the government” to the actions of a Japanese kamikaze pilot.
Reports on Wednesday afternoon claimed ministers may vote to oust Bar on Thursday and Baharav-Miara on Sunday.
The coalition is also now rapidly advancing legislation that will demolish the independence of the judiciary, aiming to get its overhaul of the entire process of choosing judges passed into law within days.
Coalition restabilized? Check. Far-right ideologue Ben Gvir again helming the police force he had been busily brutalizing? Check. Independently-minded security service chief Bar, inconveniently insistent on documenting all the failures related to October 7, on the way out? Check. Independently-minded Attorney General Baharav-Miara, unwilling to let the government play fast and loose with the law, discredited ahead of dismissal? Check. Judiciary subjugated? In progress.
But what of the price?
Well, the nation is roiling.
Concerns extend widely — pertinently to those who are called to serve — regarding Netanyahu’s motivations in ordering the resumed campaign, now, in the context of everything else he is doing.
The return to high-intensity conflict in Gaza, and Netanyahu’s pledge on Tuesday night that any further hostage negotiations would only be held while the military campaign goes on, has left the families of the hostages, and the substantial bulk of the nation that stands with them, terrified that their fate is being sealed.
The fear is that their captors may kill those who are still alive, or the IDF may inadvertently do so; that the bodies of the dead may never be returned; that there is scant prospect of a future deal.
The prime minister’s gradual elimination of dissenters also means that the prospect of establishing an essential, overwhelmingly backed state commission of inquiry — to ascertain precisely what went wrong before and on October 7, to ensure it cannot recur, and recommend that those who are to blame take responsibility — has receded further.
And then there is the rather large question of whether this stage of the military campaign against Hamas will be more definitively effective than the war to date.
The Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee has been told that Hamas and Islamic Jihad have rebolstered their ranks to a total of 30,000 gunmen in recent weeks. Its recruits are busy tunneling, manufacturing weaponry and laying roadside bombs, and its coffers are swollen with the profits of commandeering aid and fuel supplies.
And for all US President Donald Trump’s talk of evacuating Gazans and building a postwar real estate “Riviera,” on the ground Hamas remains in control, unthreatened by any prospect of alternate governance.
Netanyahu argued for months that he could not agree to a permanent ceasefire for the return of all the hostages because the international community would never let Israel subsequently return to the fight. But now he has a Trump administration prepared to support almost anything he wants to do in order to destroy Hamas and get back the hostages. And yet he abrogated the deal that he had backed under which the remaining living hostages were to be freed, and restarted the war full force.
“United we will act, and united we will win,” he declared at the end of his brief TV statement on Tuesday night.
All true, if he’d been talking about his coalition. But what of Israel?
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