In his more than three decades in politics, Benjamin Netanyahu has accrued almost as many nicknames as he has election wins.
There’s “The Magician” for his uncanny ability to grab victory from the jaws of defeat. “King Bibi” for staying atop Israeli politics longer than anyone else. And, universally, though not necessarily affectionately: plain old “Bibi”. But there is another one he revelled in, and which now appears in tatters: “Mr Security.” How did it all go so wrong?
It remains unclear as to how more than 1,000 Hamas militants managed to take Israel by such devastatingly deadly surprise, murdering – as President Isaac Herzog wrote – more Jews in one day than at any time since the Holocaust.
This take seems really counterintuitive to me, but I’m no expert in Israeli politics I guess. Seems like you could use 9/11 as an analog though. In that case, the people bent over backwards to make sure that the bush administration had all the support they could ever want. Huge wins for the GOP in the 02 elections, fairly straight path to reelection in 04. It was fully five years later in 06 when voters finally started to sour on Bush and the Neoconservative project.
Do things really work that differently in Israel or is this article pandering click bait bullshit?
You don’t have to be an expert in Israeli politics, the article lays it out for you
Israeli history has taught us that each and every surprise and crisis led to the collapse of the government. That was the case in 1973 [after the Yom Kippur War] with Golda Meir, in 1982 with Menachem Begin in the first Lebanon war, and in 2006, with Ehud Olmert, in the second Lebanon War.
Seems like 9/11 is not a good analogue because Israelis are less tolerant of government security failures than Americans are.
It probably depends on his enemies’ abilities to control the narratice. Bush was very effective at pushing the propaganda machine in the US, but in Israel it seems that the government had been moving troops away from the Gaza border before the attacks, meaning a succinct and persuasive politician could make him out to look like an incompetent clown with Israeli blood on his hands.
