How Netanyahu won re-election despite Israel's costly 2014 ground offensive in Gaza.
HAARETZ.COM
This article is part of a series:The fighting in the Gaza Strip had barely subsided, the cease-fire was only 24 hours old, and already Benjamin Netanyahu’s popularity was in free fall. Haaretz’s poll showed only 50 percent of Israelis satisfied with his handling of the 2014 conflict, down from 77 percent three weeks earlier. Channel 2’s pollsters, who had registered an 82-percent approval rating for Netanyahu during the early stages of Operation Protective Edge, before Israel's ground offensive, had him down to 32 percent as soon as it ended. That’s a 50-percent loss in the space of a month.
The disastrous campaign that cost the lives of 73 people on the Israeli side and over 2,200 Palestinians, with no strategic gains … should have been Netanyahu's political downfall.Netanyahu was in trouble on all fronts: The center-left were attacking him for the inefficient way he had responded to the crisis and his challengers on the right, Naftali Bennett of Habayit Hayehudi, and Avigdor Lieberman of Yisrael Beiteinu, were pillorying him for failing to hit Hamas hard and decisively. The disastrous campaign that cost the lives of 73 people on the Israeli side and over 2,200 Palestinians - mainly civilians, according to the UN - with no strategic gains, and Netanyahu’s hesitant, jerky and aimless management of the conflict which was allowed to drag on for 50 days, should have been his political downfall.Netanyahu's victory speech on election night, March 2015.Video by ReutersWhat was astonishing was the total absence of Gaza from the election campaign, as if the preceding summer had been a period of total calm.That wouldn’t have been surprising: In the course of four decades Israel’s leaders were mortally wounded in the aftermath of war. Prime Minister Golda Meir and Defense Minister Moshe Dayan were both forced to resign follow the Yom Kippur War, which also spelled the beginning of the end of the Labor Party’s hegemony. The first Lebanon War pushed Prime Minister Menachem Begin into depression, resignation and seclusion, and nearly finished Defense Minister’s Ariel Sharon’s political career. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was ultimately brought down by corruption but his premiership was fatally tainted by the Second Lebanon War, which also put an end the tenure of Defense Minister Amir Peretz’s brief leadership of Labor.
Likud supporters at an election rally in Tel Aviv in March 2015. Photo by Moti MilrodBut not Netanyahu. By the beginning of December, he was confident enough to call an election two and a half years earlier than scheduled, and went on to win yet another term. Bennett and Lieberman both saw their parties’ share of the vote decimated, and none of the premier’s centrist rivals – Zionist Union’s Isaac Herzog, Yesh Atid’s Yair Lapid and Moshe Kahlon of Kulanu – succeeded in convincing a substantial proportion of the Israeli public that they were credible alternatives to Netanyahu. What was astonishing, though, was the total absence of Gaza from the election campaign, as if the preceding summer had been a period of total calm. It wasn’t used against Netanyahu or mentioned in his favor; it just didn’t exist.
A peace rally in Tel Aviv during Operation Protective Edge in July 2014.Photo by Tomer AppelbaumThe politicians know what they’re doing: Gaza is a liability, not a vote-winner.There are of course multiple reasons for Netanyahu’s victory – and as many reasons for the failure of his challengers – but last summer’s operation in Gaza is not one of them.Thousands attend a peace rally in Tel Aviv, July 2014.Video by AP
The disappearance of Gaza from political discourse is a collective failure of Israel’s ruling class. In the decade since its disengagement from the Strip, the country has fought four major military operations there, interspersed by countless mini-escalations, exchanges of fire and related incidents. The latter include the botched 2010 raid on the Mavi Marmara flotilla, when nine rights activists were killed in a confrontation with Israeli naval commandos, on boats departing from Turkey to protest Israel’s siege of the Strip.
An opposition election rally in Tel Aviv's Rabin Square in March 2015.Photo by Moti MilrodBut not one political leader has seen that it is in his or her interest to try and come up with even a proposal for a solution to the crisis in the Strip – although the Israel Defense Forces, the Shin Bet security service, National Security Council and other elements in the defense establishment have put such proposals before them.The politicians know what they’re doing: Gaza is a liability, not a vote-winner. It’s much easier to keep the Strip under closure and blame Hamas, who certainly shoulder a large portion of the blame. As do the Egyptian, the Palestinian Authority and the international community.But national leadership can’t be just about looking for votes and for someone else to blame: This short-sighted and morally bankrupt lack of policy in Israel will one day blow up in its face.
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