By Guardian - Alon Pinkas - Tue 3 Sep 2024 09.00 BST

Israelis have kept their contempt for the prime minister in check for the sake of the war effort. Is his time finally up?

Despondent and livid Israelis, exuding deep anger and fury, have taken to the streets. Once it became known on Saturday that Hamas had executed six hostages, Israelis staged the largest demonstration against the government since the war in Gaza began. Those hostages could have been saved had Benjamin Netanyahu assented to a hostage deal. But he didn’t. In fact, he actively undermined the possibility for months, evading and reneging constantly.

The 350,000 who protested in Tel Aviv were the equivalent of about 2.4 million Britons or 12 million Americans gathering in the same place for the same cause. Immediately, the question of whether this was a political inflection point for Netanyahu was raised.

The answer is possibly – but that depends on how sustainable these demonstrations are. Do they reflect a critical mass of disgust that would translate into political turmoil? Will the defence minister, Yoav Gallant, the Israel Defense Forces top brass and the intelligence community’s frustrations with Netanyahu fuel more demonstrations? We can’t know for sure yet, but if so, Netanyahu will face a major political predicament, one that he has somehow managed to avoid for months.

However angry Israelis felt, the murder of the hostages was tragically predictable. Gallant warned that this would happen, as did the head of the Mossad and the head of the General Security Service, the Shabak. Yet Netanyahu never wanted a hostage deal that included a ceasefire. He does not want any deal that he cannot label “total victory” – a bogus and unattainable goal he set to make sure the war lingers on.

Furthermore, his flirtations with escalation, combined with prolonging the war in Gaza, are glaring indications that his broader interests prevent such a deal. He wants to promote the narrative that this is not a war limited to Gaza, but a broad conflict with Iran and its proxies. This puts the 7 October debacle in a wider context and, in his mind, ameliorates his responsibility.

The 7 October terror attack by Hamas was the worst day in Israel’s history, a calamity of historic proportions in every respect: policy, deterrence, security, intelligence, reputation and national pride.

Netanyahu, who vainly branded himself as “Mr Security”, a world leader in counter-terrorism and a self-ordained saviour of western civilisation against “Islamofascism”, was revealed to be anything but. He refused to take responsibility, defied critics who questioned his lax and flawed policies and evaded accountability. Instead, he blamed the military, the intelligence organs, the “liberal elites” and anyone else he could think of for his failure.

Given that in the nine months before 7 October, Israel was engulfed in mass demonstrations against Netanyahu’s anti-democratic constitutional coup, there was an expectation that the war and Netanyahu’s ineptness would precipitate large-scale protests.

That didn’t happen. First, because the devastation, agony and humiliation of 7 October had paralysed a dejected public. Second, in the Israeli patriotic mindset, when the country is at war, you do not demonstrate. Third, the Israeli public justified the war, desperately wanting to exact vengeance and gullibly assuming that Netanyahu would willingly resign at some point. Fourth, an opposition alliance, led by Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, temporarily joined a “war cabinet” to lend their experience and balance the extreme right wing.

But this reasoning has proven to be hollow. The devastation has lasted 11 months, when it should have been clear after three or four that the war was being intentionally prolonged. The fact of Netanyahu’s incompetent leadership should have overridden the noble practice of “not protesting when the guns are firing”.

Gantz’s gracious willingness to contribute his experience resulted in him conveniently staying in the cabinet for eight months, during which he did nothing, added no value and rarely challenged Netanyahu. Instead, he provided Netanyahu with ample and enduring political cover and, by extension, convinced many Israelis that if he was in the cabinet and the war was going on, there was no point in demonstrating.

That’s exactly what Netanyahu banked on. His plethora of foreign policy failures, such as Iran, Gaza and relations with the US, and domestic inadequacies – a failed constitutional coup, the high cost of living, social strife – should not conceal the fact that he is a far savvier and more cunning politician than any of his rivals, individually or combined. Forming a coalition glued together by populism and demagoguery and managing to survive are the only things he is good at.

However, there is evidence that he has reached a political dead-end. A consistent 70% of Israelis in recent polling want his resignation. So, it seems clear, does the US administration. Netanyahu’s mismanagement of the hostages’ fate may have been one manipulation too far – even for him.

• Alon Pinkas served as Israel’s consul general in New York from 2000 to 2004. He is now a columnist for Haaretz
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