Writing for Haaretz in Israel today, Anshel Pfeffer’s analysis of Benjamin Netanyahu’s press conference yesterday says that the Israeli public’s trust in the prime minister has been “fundamentally broken”.
Pfeffer writes:
Netanyahu did not need to hold a press conference. A laconic statement rejecting Hamas’ maximalist demands would have sufficed. The press conference wasn’t about the Hamas proposal, though. It wasn’t about the hostages in Gaza either. It was about Netanyahu.
For the last couple of weeks, it’s been his empty promise of “total victory,” repeated over and over again.
- When asked by a reporter to explain what “total victory” meant, he launched into a bizarre allegory about breaking a glass “into small pieces, and then you continue to smash it into even smaller pieces and you continue hitting them”, leaving no one any the wiser.
Netanyahu, like many other leaders before him, is living in a Churchillian fantasy.
He still believes he can emulate Britain’s wartime prime minister and lead Israel “forward into broad, sunlit uplands”. What he can’t accept is that in his second world war cosplaying, he isn’t Winston Churchill but Neville Chamberlain – the dismal appeaser whom Churchill replaced eight months after war began.
Everyone but the most diehard Bibi-ists already know the unavoidable truth: that Netanyahu will for ever be remembered in history as Israel’s worst prime minister, who led it into the greatest tragedy to ever befall the state. But he is incapable of understanding that and will continue fighting to change that narrative, even after the war ends.
Source: The Guardian