Exactly two weeks ago, a period that now feels like an eternity, Jews everywhere gathered in synagogues to celebrate Shabbat and Sukkot and read those most memorable words from the Book of Ecclesiastes: “Everything has its season, there is a time for every experience under heaven.... A time to love and a time to hate; A time for war and a time for peace.”
National Unity Party head Benny Gantz quoted those words in his remarks to the country Wednesday night, declaring that he was joining an emergency government.
“There is a time for war, and a time for peace,” he said. “Now is the time for war.”
He made it clear that during this time of war, the nation’s focus needs to be on the war, winning the war and destroying the enemy. Everything else can wait, needs to wait.
“At this time, we are all soldiers of the State of Israel,” he said. “This is the time to come together and win. This is not the time for difficult questions; it is the time for crushing responses on the battlefield.”
There will be a time of reckoning for the Simchat Torah massacre, a time for an accounting, a time for apportioning blame, a time for difficult questions. But not just yet.
The Yom Kippur war and now
NEVERTHELESS, THE brutal attack last Saturday was eerily reminiscent – at least in the degree to which the country was caught off guard and surprised – of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War a half-century ago. As such, it is possible to look at what happened after that war to get an idea of what to expect the day after this war ends and those difficult questions are asked.
What happened after the Yom Kippur War was nothing less than a profound societal transformation, including a political earthquake that altered the country for generations.
Knesset elections, originally slated for October 30, 1973, had to be postponed until December 31 due to the war.
Somewhat astonishingly, considering the seething anger at the time, prime minister Golda Meir’s Alignment – which had dominated the country’s politics until then – won yet again, losing only five seats compared to the previous elections.
A month after the coalition was formed in 1974, however, the Agranat Commission investigating the war issued preliminary damning findings, leading to Meir’s resignation and her replacement as Labor leader by Yitzhak Rabin. The next election in 1977 saw Menachem Begin’s Likud Party come to power, capitalizing on the ongoing anger and dissatisfaction over Labor’s handling of the Yom Kippur War.
The 1977 election marked the initial step in a political realignment toward the Likud that has persisted with some intermittent periods to this day.
Israel should brace for something similar, as the anger, hurt, fear, and pain the country is feeling today are identical to what was felt then, and will inevitably overflow and change the political landscape, sweeping aside features on the landscape that once seemed immutable.
One such feature is likely to be Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“The heavy shadow of this failure will follow Netanyahu until his final day,” wrote Nadav Eyal in a blistering op-ed in Yediot Aharonot on Wednesday. “Netanyahu does not yet understand that his political career has ended. No prime minister who has led Israel for so long can absolve himself from the consequences of this collapse and horrifying failure.”
Since Netanyahu has served as prime minister all told for over 16 years, much has been written about what his legacy will ultimately be.
Will it be forging relations with Arab countries in the region or being indicted on bribery charges? Will it be sending the economy into a different stratosphere or unleashing a judicial overhaul plan that splits the country? Will it be raising the alarm against Iran or failing to heed warnings of destructive domestic upheaval he helped unleash?
Following last Saturday’s atrocities, his legacy will be tainted by what happened. Since Netanyahu has been the leader of the country for about 13 of the previous 14 years, in control of the country’s policies toward Hamas since 2009; since he is the person who, more than anyone, is the architect of Israel’s policy toward Gaza since Israel’s withdrawal from there in 2005, what happened on Saturday rests at his feet. Netanyahu will never be able to escape that, and it will cast a perpetual shadow over his legacy.
Just as Golda Meir’s legacy is inseparable from the failures of the Yom Kippur War, Netanyahu’s name will be linked to the Simchat Torah massacre.
THE COUNTRY is seething, and much of the anger is directed at Netanyahu.
One soldier serving in the South said that in his unit of reserve combat soldiers, many of them right-wing, the anger toward Netanyahu is as intense as the morale is high.
“You don’t understand,” he said. “The feeling here is that everyone has to go: that there has to be a clean sweep, starting with Netanyahu, and including everyone: [Defense Minister Yoav] Gallant, [Shin Bet head Rotem] Bar, and [Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen Herzi] Halevi. Everyone.”
That sentiment was heard around the country, and played itself out in scenes captured on video at hospitals where government ministers – who mostly kept a very low profile this week out of an apparent concern about how they would be received – paid a visit.
“Go home,’ one man was seen in a Channel 12 clip shouting at Economy and Industry Minister Nir Barkat when he visited a hospital. Referring to the government, the man said: “You should all go quit.”
“It’s this simple,” another man angrily spat at Barkat. “You dealt so much with things that are unimportant, so much with backroom deals and which friend of [Minister David] Amsalem will get what job in the postal authority. When they told you what is happening in the army, what was happening in the South, you shut the mouths of the chief of staff and security officials and said they were dividing the nation.”
Another incident caught on camera occurred when Environmental Protection Minister Idit Silman was on a hospital visit, and a woman she was trying to comfort said, “You [the government] are responsible; you prevented this nation from moving forward.”
Another man exploded, screaming at Silman to leave the hospital: “You have ruined this country. We are the ones who will stay here. We will help, the Right and the Left, without you. Now it is our turn. You have destroyed the country.”When the fighting ends, these are the sentiments that Netanyahu and his government will face, and those sentiments will undoubtedly reshape the political landscape.
Throughout the years, Netanyahu has openly expressed his admiration for Winston Churchill, even displaying a portrait of the “British Bulldog” in his Jerusalem office.
Not only does Netanyahu admire Churchill, but some argue that he fashions himself as the British wartime leader’s modern-day Israeli incarnation. Churchill sounded the alarm against Adolf Hitler at a time when the rest of the world was trying to appease him; Netanyahu likes to think he took a similar path regarding the Iranian ayatollahs. Churchill stood alone against the Nazis; Netanyahu has said he would do the same against the Iranians.
Churchill or Chamberlain
Following Saturday’s pogrom, however, some were comparing Netanyahu not to Churchill but to the man Churchill replaced because of his abjectly failed policy toward the Nazis: Neville Chamberlain.
Former senior US Defense Department official Dov Zakheim, in an article in The Jerusalem Strategic Tribune, a journal presenting Israeli and American views on international issues, wrote that in May 1940, Leo Amery, “a middle-aged former minister and Conservative Party backbencher, rose in his seat to address the House of Commons in the aftermath of Britain’s disastrous Norway campaign.
“His party leader, prime minister Neville Chamberlain, had offered a weak defense of the Norway debacle, and several others had already criticized the prime minister,” Zakheim recalled. “Amery then tore into the Chamberlain government, and concluded with Oliver Cromwell’s memorable words: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.’”
Three days later, Chamberlain resigned and Churchill succeeded him.
Netanyahu will not resign in the face of Saturday’s debacle; establishing an emergency government to manage the war is proof enough, and no one in the Likud is either in a position or is willing to push him out.
Yet Netanyahu, an astute politician, is certainly aware of the public mood. According to a Dialog Center poll taken on Wednesday among 620 Jewish Israelis, 56% of the public, including 28% of those who voted for one of the coalition parties, believes Netanyahu should resign at the end of the fighting.
While the public is now focused on winning this war, destroying Hamas, and regaining Israel’s deterrence, there will be a day after the war. And on that day after, all the pain, frustration, and anger being felt right now will be released, reshaping the political terrain.
Exactly how it will happen is unclear, but it will happen.
Yet, as Gantz said on Wednesday night, that is all for another day. Today, the focus is on defeating Hamas and winning this war.