Zack Beauchamp on high Israeli support for war against Hamas, but "cratering" support for Netanyahu

There's zero rallying around Netanyahu.  There's a poll just a few days ago that found 72 percent of Israelis want him to resign.  The only real division between Israelis at the point is "Do you want him to resign now or only resign after the war when we deal with those things?"...  His party's cratering in polls, some of his political allies are also falling in polls significantly.  This does not mean a real move to the left among Israelis.  It's kind of a complicated picture, but what it does appear to be is a return to the center.  The leading party that is gaining support per polling right now is the center-right Natural Unity faction, which is currently in the government on an emergency basis to help manage the war, but one of the leading oppostion parties prior to the war.  That faction is the beneficiary of a sense among Israelis that "What we need right now is a kind of not crazy leadership, not ideological, not corrupt, that is willing to pursue this war" that there's really strong support for, at least among Jewish Israelis.  And the support for the war, as far as I can tell, remains intense...

~ Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent, Vox, "Behind Bibi Netanyahu's FAILED PLAN To BUY PEACE By Propping Up HAMAS," The Hill, 7:40 mark, December 11, 2023

Zack Beauchamp on how Netanyahu propped up Hamas

Q: Tell us more about these payments that it sounds like Netanyahu continued to be in support of.  Tell us about what this money ostensibly being used for and why from teh Netanyahu perspective it was a good idea.

A: The basic idea behind these payments, facilitated via Qatar, sometimes very directly with Israeli support, was to prop up the Hamas government.  Netanyahu has said as much, not in public - he doesn't openly admit this, he in fact denies it - but in reports of comments he's made privately, that the basic idea here was you need to keep the Palestinians divided... between the Palestinian Authority, which governs the West Bank, and Hamas, which has governed Gaza since 2007.  Now why do you do that?  In his mind it's very simple: because Hamas is - or thought to be prior to October 7th - more responsible than other militant Palestinian factions in Gaza and second, and more importantly, because when the Palestinians are divided, there's very little pressure on Israel to make any final two-state agreement... because there's no one to agree with.  There's no unified Palestinian political structure.  And so from the hard-line Israeli point of view, Netanyahu's point of view, "This is perfect.  This is ideal.  We can keep doing whatever we want and we don't have to worry about the pesky international community as long as there are these violent fanatics in charge of Gaza."  

So it was sort of a win-win from his point of view prior to October 7th, which changed everything because it joked this entire conversation that Israel could buy a certain kind of quiet from Hamas by quietly supporting them on the security front just was wrong, entirely wrong.

~ Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent, Vox, "Behind Bibi Netanyahu's FAILED PLAN To BUY PEACE By Propping Up HAMAS," The Hill, 1:00 mark, December 11, 2023

Zack Beauchamp on political divisiveness in Israel and Benjamin Netanyahu's precarious political standing

Israel was hugely polarized prior to the war.  This really all started with Netanyahu getting indicted on corruption charges, very very serious charges related to, among other things, tampering with the freedom of the Israeli press.  So Netanyahu, who is indicted - he's currently on trial right now, though I don't think the trial is proceeding during the war - and that basically led to a political crisis where the country was divided evenly between people who wanted Netanyahu to stay in office and his bitter opponents.  And so it led to something like four or five elections in a very number of years.  And eventually, after all of this political turmoil, he ends up losing power in 2021, he's out for a year and then he comes back in 2022 on this very very narrow coalition that represents basically the extreme right of Israeli society on the whole.  And it means his Likud Party, which is mostly a vehicle for his own ambitions, the radical right settler faction (religious Zionism) and two ultra-Orthodox parties, which primarily care about the interests of their own community.  But they were polarized against the center and the left of Israeli society who believes that Netanyahu is an existential threat to Israeli democracy.  

And matters got a lot worse when earlier in 2023 he tried to push through an overhaul to Israel's court system.  And this overhaul, basically what it brought the courts under political control really really really freaked out most Israelis.  It was widly unpopular.  It already led to him taking a major political hit.  I mean we're talking it spawning the largest political protest movement in Israel's history.  We went on for months and months and months of street protests, sometimes paralyzing major cities.  

This a huge deal and then you layer on top of that the worst security failure in Israel's history, the October 7 attack, and substantial evidence that he's personally responsible for it, and all of a sudden the polarized logjam almost breaks.  People are really angry at Netanyahu, including people who had voted for him in four or five elections.  There's not much room for him to improve his political situation from beforehand, because the people who hate him hate him even more.  Really it's [un]likely - unless the war goes super well and it looks really easy for Israel, which I seriously doubt... - that he'll be able to do much to improve his political standing.

[...]

What I will say about his rhetoric in general is he's trying to appeal, often in Hebrew, to a very very particular and extreme base and I think your label "authoritarian" is accurate.  Right now Netanyahu really really is, I think at this point, unquestionable an authoritarian figure.  The problem is that he's facing a society that's realized that.  And so he's trying to figure out, really desparately scrambling, to secure his own political position and to stay out of jail.  Those are his primary objectives.  And so a lot of the criticism inside Israel has oriented his confusion of the state with his own personal well-being and welfare, and it's hard to deny that claim if you look at what he's done and you look at the way he's talked...  I would read everything that Netanyahu does through the lens of what is he doing to secure his political future?  And I think that's very very dangerous - that's putting it mildly - in the context of a really bloody war.

~ Zack Beauchamp, senior correspondent, Vox, "Netanyahu's 'PSYCHOTIC' Tweet Deleted As GROWING COALITION of Israelis Push To DUMP PM," The Hill, 4:30 mark,