Stories like this are why I think Netanyahu's government was deliberately looking the other way so they could have an excuse to go to war and distract from the other problems the government has caused.
If that was the thought by Netanyahu and his government, they are in for a rude awakening, once the dust settles. Thomas Friedman penned an Op-Ed in the New York Times this morning, that included the following,
“But what makes this war different for me from any war before is Israel’s internal politics. In the past nine months, a group of Israeli far-right and ultra-Orthodox politicians led by Netanyahu tried to kidnap Israeli democracy in plain sight. The religious-nationalist-settler right, led by the prime minister, tried to take over Israel’s judiciary and other key institutions by eliminating the power of Israel’s Supreme Court to exercise judicial review. That attempt opened multiple fractures across Israeli society. Israel was recklessly being taken by its leadership to the brink of a civil war for an ideological flight of fancy. These fractures were seen by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah and may have stirred their boldness.
If you want to get just a little feel for those fractures — and the volcanic anger at Netanyahu for the way he divided the country before this war — watch the video that went viral in Israel two days ago when Idit Silman, a minister in Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, was tossed out of the Assaf Harofeh Hospital in Tzrifin when she went to visit some wounded.
“You’ve ruined this country. Get out of here,” an Israeli doctor yelled at her. “How are you not ashamed to wage another war?” another person told her. “Now it’s our turn,” the doctor can be heard screaming in a
video published on X, formerly known as Twitter, and reported by
The Forward. “We are in charge. We will govern here — right, left, a nation united — without you. You’ve ruined everything!”
There were a number of other good points in his article. I will note a few here as well as link it. I know sometimes the NYT’s artcles are paywalled:
- He believes the goal of Hamas is to disrupt the peace process which was showing progress
- He refers to the way that Hamas acts and how Israel and other Middle Eastern countries have acted in return is to “out crazy each other.” This bears striking resemblance to the Russian strategy of “escalate to deescalate”
- He cites the example of what happened in Syria in 1982, when “Hamas’s political forefathers, the Muslim Brotherhood of Syria, tried to topple Assad’s secular regime by starting a rebellion in the city of Hama.” He goes on to say, “Assad pounded the Brotherhood’s neighborhoods in Hama relentlessly for days, letting no one out, and brought in bulldozers and leveled it as flat as a parking lot, killing some 20,000 of his own people in the process. I walked on that rubble weeks later. An Arab leader I know told me privately how, afterward, Assad laconically shrugged when he was asked about it: “People live. People die.”
It isn’t just Israel who has struggled with solving the Palestinian problem. Other Arab nations have also, and it has typically resulted in societal disruptions leading to government instability. This is why any solution must involve other Arab states, and they can’t pretend that it is an “Israeli” problem.
If you are able to view it, I recommend reading it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/14/...ytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
