FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
JERUSALEM – The tents are back and what makes Benjamin Netanyahu tremble this time is not the economic grievances of the middle class, which pays taxes, sends children into military service and fathers into the reserves (with pay deductions). This is not about rising prices for flake cheese, the best-selling cheese and the symbolic peak in the cost of living. It is a matter of life, of those who risk it and of those who want their loved ones not to lose it.
The tents are back, this time on the white marble of the square in front of the Tel Aviv Museum, the largest space in which permanent pain can be set up – nicknamed the “Square of the Missing” – to show at a glance “How many.” We are” to the political leaders and soldiers gathered on the twelfth floor of the Kirya, not far away. To make it clear that it’s not just the families of the hostages who are here. In 2011, thousands of Israelis moved under the rosewood trees on Viale Rothschild because there was no longer enough money at home. Now it’s about accountability: from the Prime Minister, who has remained in power longer than anyone else in the country’s history, almost sixteen years in total, fourteen in a row since 2009, with a break of 563 days.
A week after he was forced to delete the message on social media in which he attributed all responsibility for the massacres carried out by Hamas terrorists on October 7 to the generals and intelligence, Netanyahu returned to the same tactics and made the Reservists and their refusal to show themselves are responsible for this in the barracks during the ten months of protests against the government’s anti-democratic justice plan. It was these announcements of “desertion” that convinced Yahia Sinwar, the fundamentalist leader in Gaza, of Israel’s weakness and pushed him to order the invasion.
Once again it was up to Benny Gantz, who had left the opposition to take part in the limited war council, to counter the prime minister’s attacks: “While we are fighting, the country is being harmed.” According to polls, half of Israelis already want him in Bibi’s place . Who sticks to the messianic ultras he brought to power for the first time. They guarantee him the stability of the coalition, he must accept their vetoes: Itamar Ben-Gvir, Minister of National Security, prevented him from expelling his party colleague Amichai Eliyahu after the atomic bomb attack in Gaza. Furthermore, the verdicts reported by Israeli newspapers and attributed to a “high-level source” – that is, Netanyahu or an adviser authorized by him – reflect the plans that Bezalel Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, the settler leaders, had already expressed: the conflict against Hamas cannot lead to a return of Abu Mazen’s authority in the Gaza Strip, to a political reunification of the Palestinian territories, to a resumption of peace negotiations towards a state. Completely contrary to the American goals and strategy for the post-Hamas era.
If Netanyahu remains the Bibi he always was, his opponents are preparing further protests. The founders of the group Brothers and Sisters in Arms, which coordinated the demonstrations until a month ago, are convinced that the movement’s new leaders must be the relatives of the 1,400 people killed in the villages and kibbutzim surrounding Gaza , the parents of the fallen soldiers, the families of the hostages. “They have the moral authority to demand that he go away,” they told Haaretz newspaper, and the masses will follow them.”
The slogan will no longer be: “You have to resign.” But: “Let him out now.”