FROM OUR CORRESPONDENT
JERUSALEM – The streets to the Tel Aviv Museum are deserted, as in the poster announcing Amos Gitai’s installation on the Yom Kippur War. Fifty years later, the city has become a technology metropolis, the pain is the same.
The avenue continues to the white cube of the Kirya, the Israeli “Pentagon,” where the military command is concentrated and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spends these hours. An attentive reader of Winston Churchill, he is aware that, like the British leader, he could not save the soldiers stranded on the beach at Dunkirk, but must revive the country sunk in the terror of Saturday morning. And take it into battle: for the first time in many years of clashes, the government immediately declared a state of war. Everything changes because everything has changed.
skyscraper
On the twelfth floor of the skyscraper, the defense minister’s office and that of the chief of staff are just a few doors apart. Herzi Halevi and Yoav Gallant – the minister who was fired but never actually kicked out for asking to stop the government’s justice project that drove Israelis into the streets to protest for 10 months – pose possible strategic moves for the prime minister before. To restore scattered deterrence like the hostages held in Gaza and to prevent the conflict from spreading to other fronts, the north, where Hezbollah is moving along the UN-drawn Blue Line between Lebanon and Israel.
Bibi – as he is called and as he titles his autobiography – proclaims “revenge” to the country for the darkest hour, certainly the most tragic day in the life of the politician who promised to protect the nation from existential threats. The American Time magazine, which had already crowned him King Bibi, put him back on the cover a few years ago, accompanied by the words: “Those who are strong survive.”
The father
The phrase not only reflects the pessimistic view of the world that he inherited from his father Ben-Zion, a historian who spent his long life studying the persecutions of the Spanish Inquisition against the Jews (he died at the age of 102). The threat of a return to the dark years was part of the young Netanyahu’s upbringing and fueled his resolve against the threat of Iran with a nuclear bomb.
The Abraham Accords
For this reason, he supported efforts to conclude Abrahamic agreements with some Arab countries in order to create the “New Middle East” and isolate Tehran. The devastating invasion began just meters from home and now his first challenge is to regain the Israelis’ trust.