<
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/20/gaza-israel-netanyahu-opposition>
"In his successful quest to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister,
Benjamin Netanyahu has leveraged his most valuable asset: the country’s
ineffective opposition. He has been playing his opponents off against each
other, staying afloat while they are left powerless and irrelevant.
Netanyahu has survived multiple corruption cases, an ongoing criminal trial and
recurring elections. Even after Hamas invaded Israel by surprise, on 7 October,
2023, leading to the longest, deadliest and most ruinous war in the history of
the Arab-Israeli conflict, the opposition failed to pose a political threat to
Netanyahu. This week, Israel continues its expanded offensive across Gaza
alongside a deadly bombing campaign. Rather than bearing the responsibility for
the unparalleled tragedy and being kicked out of office in disgrace, the prime
minister has only grown more powerful, expanding his governing coalition,
shrugging off any responsibility for the disaster and firing the military and
intelligence leaders.
Israel’s political opposition suffers from an inherent contradiction. While
Netanyahu’s power base has been united around a common ideology that privileges
the rights of Jews and the establishment of a Greater Israel, the other side of
the aisle is divided among different and even rival aspirations. There are
rightwing opponents, who support Netanyahu’s nationalist policies but hate his
leadership. There are centrist and Zionist leftwingers who dream of a liberal,
secular and westernised country. And there are the representatives of Israel’s
Arab minority, calling for equal citizenship.
During the 2021 election, Netanyahu’s opponents from the Zionist right, centre
and left joined forces and added an Arab party to the mix, and were able to put
together a “change coalition” government under the leadership of Naftali
Bennett and Yair Lapid. Alas, their achievement was short-lived. To mask their
ideological differences, the change government partners agreed to avoid dealing
with the country’s deepest divides: the Palestinian issue and the role of
religion in public life. But glossing over the toughest national problems was a
temporary fix and the government collapsed, leading to an early election the
following year."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
