Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addresses a joint meeting of Congress in July.

Columnist Dan Perry August 20, 2024

On the surface, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stubborn approach to the ceasefire talks — which has put at risk a last-ditch chance to save scores of hostages held by Hamas — is not entirely indefensible. A normal leader might find it possible to persuade many people that he’s simply bargaining hard, in a version of good faith. 

But in the case of Netanyahu, a huge proportion of the people just don’t believe a word he says. 

And that’s a problem — especially amid what might otherwise be seen as a theoretically major breakthrough, as when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Monday announced that Netanyahu was prepared to accept the latest U.S. compromise on a ceasefire deal. 

The assumption of mendacity attached to Netanyahu would be bad for a political leader even at the best of times: Voters can be fooled by liars, but rarely appreciate being taken for fools. And these are much closer to the worst of times: The collapse of the talks could spark a regional war that would be destructive to all sides.

It’s conceivable that Blinken’s hail-mary mediation will succeed; if it does, Netanyahu may regain some legitimacy. But even in that best-case scenario, the crisis of confidence between Netanyahu and his public is hard to overstate, and its effects cannot be contained. 

That crisis built throughout Netanyahu’s long years at the helm, but reached new heights after the shock of Israel’s abject failures on Oct. 7.

A poll from November, early on in the war, showed that only 4% of Israeli Jews considered their prime minister a credible source of information on the war. And a survey last month showed that 54% believed the war was dragging on primarily due to Netanyahu’s political needs — compared to about a third who cited operational considerations, and 12% who couldn’t tell.

That July poll was particularly shocking. It showed that the idea that Netanyahu has been causing tremendous loss of life, destruction and dislocation mainly (or purely) to stay in power is accepted by far more Israelis than those who give him credit for behaving responsibly. Perhaps most notably, their number includes about a third of those who voted for him in 2022. 

Since Oct. 7, polls have consistently shown that some three-quarters of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign, blaming him both for policies that brought on the Oct. 7 Hamas attack and the myriad failures in responding to it. But rather than accept responsibility and acknowledge his massive loss of public support, Netanyahu immediately declared war on Hamas and started arguing that recriminations must await the end of that war. (One can presume his stance would change if the polls happened to turn around, which they have not.) 

Now he knows that the bet he made on the war keeping him in office has simply delayed his fate, not changed it. All polls suggest that Israelis’ overwhelming disapproval of him remains steady, even if the war indeed winds down.

I have met too many politicians and world leaders over the years to be totally naïve as to their motivations. But I genuinely believe that most of them would not have followed Netanyahu’s logic in this situation — not to this degree, and certainly not to the point that they would prolong a ruinous war merely to cling to power. 

In my years of engagement with Netanyahu, I have come to personally assess that he is capable of inflicting considerable harm on others in order to save himself. He seems to lack the empathy gene. And that means that no matter what his public pronouncements on the course of war and the ceasefire talks may be, it’s wise to stay wary of his intentions.

I first interviewed Netanyahu in 1988, when he presented a classic jumble of his now-familiar gaslighting in an eloquent baritone. He argued that the Jewish majority in Israel would be forever secure even if Israel fully absorbed the West Bank and Gaza. His statistical sleight of hand was transparent; even then, it was clear there would be more Palestinians across the West Bank, Gaza and Israel than Israeli Jews. Yet his self-confidence was epic. 

I next spoke to him in the run-up to the 1996 elections, when he told me that, if elected, he would successfully persuade the Palestinians to make do with autonomy, instead of full independence — presenting as evidence the acquiescence (at the time) of the Catalans of Spain. When I noted that Catalans can also vote in national elections, which Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza cannot — if they could, it would likely end the Zionist project — he scowled and stormed off. 

Now, Netanyahu appears to be trying to pull off the same little trick: getting something he wants — a continued hold on power — through rhetorical manipulations, regardless of facts on the ground or of messy consequences. But after all these years, much and possibly most of the public has caught on to his tricks.

Israelis overwhelmingly support the hostages-for-ceasefire deal U.S. President Joe Biden laid out in late May: A July 10 poll by the respected Israel Democracy Institute showed a whopping 85.5% of Israelis want a ceasefire, and 56% would accept a full end to the war. 

The vast difference between this clear public mandate and Netanyahu’s approach has made his disingenuousness impossible to ignore. Netanyahu has delayed any agreement to that deal, which supposedly originated from Israel, by adding demands at key junctures. It was only after the framework had been presented that he began insisting that Israel should keep control of the Philadelphi corridor, a road along the Gaza border with Egypt, saying it is needed to prevent Hamas from rearming through cross-border smuggling. 

As is generally the case with Netanyahu, his argument might sound logical. But, in fact, the border is fortified and the tunnels used for smuggling went beneath this area, not through it. Israeli control of the surface won’t make it any easier to control what’s happening beneath. The military prefers sensors and massive barriers, among other measures. 

This is the knot Blinken hopes to somehow untie. The U.S. would appear to have leverage. Israel depends on the U.S.-led Western (and Arab) coalition to help repel the attack that Iran has been threatening for weeks as revenge for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Indeed, Biden has told Iran that he expected it to hold off on an attack if the hostage deal is reached — a strange formulation that not only legitimizes the linkage, but even seems to suggest that the attack is otherwise understandable.

Meir Shitreet, a former justice and finance minister from Netanyahu’s own Likud party, said this weekend that he expected the negotiating team, which includes a prominent retired general and the heads of the Mossad spy agency and the Shin Bet security agency, to “go public and tell the people the truth” if they believed that Netanyahu was scuttling the deal. (I also appeared on the televised panel where Shitreet made the comments.) The message: Even people who once served under Netanyahu are getting fed up with the constant game of distract and delay.

As the respected defense analyst Amir Oren wrote in Haaretz on Sunday, “Never has Israel been ruled by a person whose private interest is so opposed to that of the country’s.”

Whatever happens, such toxic levels of distrust are contributing to the broader despair from all the death and destruction that Israel has absorbed — and has caused. Whenever the war does end, and even if this happens soon, such trauma, I fear, will be very hard to heal.

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