AP (“Netanyahu dissolved his war Cabinet. How will that affect cease-fire efforts?“):
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu disbanded his war Cabinet Monday, a move that consolidates his influence over the Israel-Hamas war and likely diminishes the odds of a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip anytime soon.
Netanyahu announced the step days after his chief political rival, Benny Gantz, withdrew from the three-member war Cabinet. Gantz, a retired general and member of parliament, was widely seen as a more moderate voice.
Major war policies will now be solely approved by Netanyahu’s security Cabinet — a larger body that is dominated by hard-liners who oppose the U.S.-backed cease-fire proposal and want to press ahead with the war.
Netanyahu is expected to consult on some decisions with close allies in ad-hoc meetings, said an Israeli official who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.
These closed-door meetings could blunt some of the influence of the hard-liners. But Netanyahu himself has shown little enthusiasm for the cease-fire plan and his reliance on the full security Cabinet could give him cover to prolong a decision.
NYT (“Israeli Protesters Mass in Jerusalem to Call for Elections“):
Thousands of Israelis took to the streets of Jerusalem on Monday to call for elections and the immediate return of hostages held in Gaza in a demonstration that followed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent decision to dissolve his war cabinet.
The protest outside the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, highlighted the competing pressures the Israeli prime minister is under from conflicting elements of Israeli society.
[…]
In the crowd in front of the Knesset on Monday was Yair Lapid, the opposition leader in Parliament, video posted on social media showed. Some of the marchers carried a banner stating that they were “leading the nation to the day after,” a reference to the end of the war in Gaza.
An Israeli police statement said that the police had helped facilitate the rally near the Knesset, and no arrests were immediately reported there.
However, confrontations appear to have been more intense when some protesters broke off to march to Mr. Netanyahu’s home in Jerusalem, breaching a police roadblock. Anti-government activists have regularly gathered there throughout the war.
The activists chanted, “You are the chief, you are to blame” in front of the prime minister’s residence. Photographs showed some of them gathered around an open fire. Water cannons were fired, and at least nine people were arrested. The Israeli police said in a statement that some of the protesters had attacked officers, slightly injuring some of them.
Former Israeli consul general Alon Pinkas takes to The Guardian to proclaim, “Netanyahu’s ‘war cabinet’ had little power – but its demise does him real damage.”
There is very little drama in Netanyahu’s decision, or rather bland and laconic statement that he is dissolving the “war cabinet” that he himself formed on 11 October 2023. Constitutionally and in terms of affecting policy, the decision is a Seinfeld decision: it’s about nothing. The constitutionally authoritative body – the one with real power – is the security cabinet. The war cabinet was a convenient and circumstantial political invention. But Netanyahu rival Benny Gantz’s recent withdrawal from the government made the forum redundant in terms of policymaking, and politically explosive, since the extreme rightwing ministers now demanded to join.
[…]
Ostensibly, Netanyahu formed the war cabinet for the same reason that Chamberlain, and particularly Churchill, did: to streamline the decision-making process, to make policy debates more effective, briefings more constructive, and to avoid the useless and time-consuming cacophony of pontifications by tens of ministers speaking for what they believe is the historical record, and catering to an enthusiastic audience of themselves only.
In Israel’s case there was also an overriding political reason. The inexperienced, inept, incendiary extremist rightwing government that Netanyahu ceremoniously formed in December 2022 was ill-equipped to deal with wartime strategic thinking, planning and decision processes. Netanyahu needed to shield himself from criticism, surround himself with experience and – since “responsibility” and “accountability” are alien terms to him – shift the onus on to others.
He needed a forum he could conveniently castigate and blame when things went wrong, and criticise members for preventing him from making what he would later call triumphant decisions. Blaming faulty intelligence, the military and the General Security Service (Shabak), and then implicitly – the explicit will come later – attacking US President Biden for depriving him of a historic victory wasn’t enough. He needed the informal forum he could later attack for impeding him.
[…]
But this doesn’t mean it has no political implications. It does, in abundance. First, what the war cabinet failed to do. The presence of two former chiefs of staff of the IDF-turned-politicians, former generals Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, was supposed to add balance, seriousness and purpose. Instead, they failed to secure from Netanyahu a coherent vision for postwar Gaza, a definition of the war’s attainable political goals and plans for different tactical and operational management of the war. For example, once the IDF identified southern Gaza as Hamas’s centre of gravity, the war cabinet failed to effectively question the decision to invade the north instead.
It also abjectly failed to enforce a different force and munitions employment to avoid the indiscriminate deaths of civilians in Gaza. Most glaringly, the war cabinet abjectly failed to respond to Biden’s framework for postwar Gaza, a political process with the Palestinians and a reconfigured security structure for the Middle East. What it did succeed in doing is influence a premature, arguably reckless, attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon in mid-October, and a callous invasion of Rafah as recently as May.
At the same time, the dissolution of the war cabinet forum deprives Netanyahu of his legitimacy and constricts his manoeuvring room. Now the US has no political allies nor a forum to engage with.
The dissolution may not affect policy, but it weakens Netanyahu politically even more than he already is. He owns not only the 7 October debacle, not only the management of the war, but also the weeks ahead – and now he faces them alone.
Netanyahu is not legally required to call for new elections for another two years and change—so long as he can keep a governing coalition together. It’s unclear how much longer he’ll be able to do that.
While the existence of mass protests is never a good sign, I never know how to read them. Are they representative of a major change in the public mood? Or just a particularly motivated niche?
There has been some shift in recent months of Israeli public sentiment toward ending the war and gaining the release of the hostages. How that translates to the large political dynamic, I haven’t the foggiest.
Netanyahu himself is certainly wildly unpopular. But his party still won the largest vote, by a considerable margin, in the 2022 elections despite all manner of criminal charges hanging over his head. He’s been a remarkably resilient figure for a quarter century now.
What he’s tended to do—and I strongly suspect he’ll do now—is double down rather than compromise. With his political career hanging by a thread, he’ll go harder in Rafah.
Interestingly, while he’s increasingly isolated at home, he continues to get bipartisan support here. Congressional Democrats who had been blocking the sale of more F-15s to Israel for months relented yeterday.
