The ‘shameless’ video that shows how much trouble Netanyahu is in ...Middle East

As Israel’s general election campaign got under way last month, Benjamin Netanyahu posted an attack ad video aimed at Gadi Eisenkot, the favourite to replace him as prime minister.

Eisenkot, a former commander of the Israeli military, is shown running through a sunlit wildflower meadow, a soppy grin on his face (the video is made by AI). His arms are open and he is about to hug a young man in a T-shirt reading “Israeli unity”, but then he turns away and embraces the leader of the Arab Ra’am party.

The advert caused outrage, because the young man appears to resemble Eisenkot’s son, killed fighting in Gaza at the age of 25.

Among those condemning the ad was David Horovitz, former editor of the Jerusalem Post and perhaps the best-known Israeli journalist writing in English. The country’s prime minister was, he wrote, “plumbing new depths” to besmirch a rival by depicting him “ignoring a beyond-the-grave Israel-unifying plea from his own fallen son”. Netanyahu was “desperate” and “shameless”, he said.

גדי, זה לא ישר pic.twitter.com/awy47dINmq

Netanyahu’s Likud party denied the AI-generated video was meant to look like Eisenkot’s son, though they did put out a new clip with a woman in the unity T-shirt. Whatever the facts of this particular controversy, Horovitz’s accusations demonstrate the central fact of this election. It is a referendum on one man: Netanyahu.

It is also a referendum on one day: October 7, 2023, the worst day in Israel’s history. More Jews died than on any single day since the Holocaust – including in the surprise attacks by Arab armies on Yom Kippur in 1973. More than 1,200 people were killed, mostly civilians, and 251 taken hostage. Netanyahu denied responsibility for the failures that led to this catastrophe. He accused the country’s defence and intelligence apparatus of letting him down.

Today, the Israeli army occupies 70 per cent of Gaza. Hamas – tired and hungry, like everyone else there – has announced the historic decision to disarm. But that comes with conditions: the Israeli army must first withdraw, and there must be a Palestinian state if heavy weapons are to be surrendered. Netanyahu has been silent about all this because it is a deal he cannot accept. Despite everything, Hamas survives. It could rebuild. Netanyahu has not fulfilled his promise to destroy it.

An opinion poll by Israel’s Channel 12 finds that October 7 is the biggest single issue for undecided voters. A raft of polls show that Israelis generally are unhappy about Netanyahu’s refusal over the past three years to allow a state commission of inquiry into what happened, as would be customary. Israel convened an independent commission to investigate the mistakes that led to the Yom Kippur war, its members chosen by the president of the Supreme Court. But Netanyahu complains that today’s Supreme Court is biased against him. His alternative is a complicated arrangement for the panel to be – essentially – appointed by the Knesset, where his governing coalition has a majority.

There were furious protests by the October 7 families when the Knesset voted on Netanyahu’s proposal in December. They stood in the public gallery and shouted, “Shame!” and then turned their backs to face away from the chamber. Among the bereaved speaking that day was Ruby Chen, whose 19-year-old son, Itay, was a soldier near the Gaza border; Hamas held his body for two years. He told Haaretz that members of the governing parties had been “afraid to come to my son’s funeral because they couldn’t look me in the eye”. He accused Netanyahu and his coalition of trying to “bury” the truth about October 7.

What would an independent commission of inquiry find? Surveillance video reportedly shows that Hamas had built a mock Israeli town and were practising assaulting it. The IDF’s spotters near the Gaza fence line are said to have told the chain of command that armed men were massing near the border. In other words, it’s claimed there was advance warning of the attack. If so, the intelligence was ignored – because it was believed Hamas wanted “quiet”, so it could continue to rule in Gaza.

Netanyahu wanted quiet, too. His attention was turned towards the occupied West Bank, the land west of the Jordan River captured by Israel in the 1967 war. His government was busy creating and supporting new illegal Jewish settlements there in order to redraw and expand the borders of Israel. The biggest danger to this “Greater Israel” project was an independent Palestinian state. The priority for Netanyahu was to weaken the Palestinian Authority and build up Hamas as a rival.

This was the “divide and rule” strategy followed by Israeli governments in the 70s and 80s, licensing and even funding Islamist rivals to the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Over the past decade, Netanyahu allowed Qatar to send hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to Gaza, money that sometimes bought guns. Concrete meant for aid projects built the tunnel network that hid weapons factories and, after October 7, Israeli hostages. The Israeli army spent three years bombing Gaza to destroy the tunnels and everything else controlled by Hamas. They killed an estimated 70,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians.

The Israeli army itself has so far lost 473 soldiers in the invasion and occupation of Gaza, a large number in a small country. Every family lost someone or knows someone who did. Every family could expect to send someone to serve in one of Israel’s – Netanyahu’s – forever wars. So, it is galling to many Israelis that Netanyahu has survived in office by cutting a deal with the religious parties for their supporters to avoid conscription. Last month, his governing coalition passed a law protecting ultra-orthodox men who refuse military service from arrest. It was immediately suspended by the high court. The army has issued 79,000 call-up orders to the ultra-orthodox since 2024, when the Supreme Court ruled they had to serve like everyone else. Only about 2,100 obeyed.

The ultra-orthodox are 14 per cent of the Israeli population but growing faster than any other group. The Sephardi Chief Rabbi, Yitzhak Yosef, once said that young Yeshiva students would leave Israel rather than serve in the army. In the meantime, they are subsidised by more secular or conventionally religious Israelis. The veteran commentator, Nehemia Shtrasler, accused the ultra-orthodox of belonging “to a cult that focuses on protecting the lives of its members and securing lavish funding for them”. They wanted to “live without working” – proof “that they aren’t exactly Jews”.

Such bitter rhetoric is evidence of how deeply divided Israeli society is becoming. The Israeli prime minister is seen by his critics as scheming and cynical for taking advantage of this. Netanyahu promised in another campaign video to establish “a broad national government… that will ensure our security and our future”. It was posted before Tisha B’Av, the day of fasting to mourn the destruction of the First and Second Temples, which Jewish tradition blames on hatred between Jews. After Gaza, Netanyahu said, “instead of a civil war, we became brothers fighting shoulder to shoulder … As prime minister of Israel, I intend to deepen the unity within us.”

That was also a reference to a speech by the Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, the day before, in which he called on all parties not to “cross red lines” in the election campaign. “Do not turn rivals into enemies … Remember that elections are not a civil war.”

Netanyahu has served as prime minister since 2009, with the exception of 18 months in 2021-22. If Israel is broken, he has a lot to do with it. Displaying the chutzpah that has marked his political career, Netanyahu now casts himself as the only man who can put it back together.

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