Benjamin Netanyahu v Douglas Murray

Worst Savagery Against Jews Since Holocaust’

January 30, 2024 | 7 Comments »

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  1. @Sebastien
    I totally agree. I should have made that point as Ben Gvir has played a pivotal role in providing a Right wing balance for Bibi’s govt. Thank you for making note of it.

  2. @Peloni Well said! Still, I’m glad Ben-Gvir is there to push him from his right flank. Nothing Ben-Gvir has said so far has been wrong.

  3. @Sebastien
    There was indeed no support for doing what was needed, even as the need never went away. Do recall for instance that Bibi tried to get the consensus to attack Iran and he was blocked by nearly everyone but the chief of staff who said the attack on Iran was feasible. The consequence of this is that over the years, Israel became complacent, dropped their troops levels, reduced their combat readiness, and focused on facing small incursions instead of facing a military threat. Bibi was just the PM, and had limited authority, and without the consensus needed to take back Gaza, he could only proceed with a best course til something changed. Well, everything changed on October 7, unfortunately.

    Still, four Israeli bases were overrun by the terrorists. It remains inconceivable to me to believe that the terrorists could be so successful by chance, but this will be judged following the conclusion of an investigation which will provide some clarity, hopefully sooner rather than later. As PM, some will suggest that he was responsible, but the reality is that if there was something more than normal circumstances which stayed Israel’s forces from responding for hours, this suggestion will be wrong.

    As to the next election, the next election will not likely be about the failed conception which everyone in the govt supported, and many supported pursuing an even worse conception than was pursued under Bibi’s leadership. Instead the next election, I would suggest, will be about Israel’s future, and pursuing the new conception in which safety and security is assured. The path which Bibi is now pursuing will likely bring him another victory, as it will achieve victory, safety and security. If he is forced to alter the current course, however, he might as well resign because no one will forgive him for pursuing a failed policy again, no matter the reason why.

  4. @Rondo Bibi addresses accusation that he abetted the Concepzia (24′:00″”)

    DM: …“It seems to me that the Israeli public had suffered such a shock and still going through a trauma about what happened on Oct. 7th because they never believed that this was possible, they believed that rockets would come in, they had that for years, but they never thought it was possible that Hamas would break through and come right into Israel.

    Some people who write speeches in Israeli politics and the security establishment said that you had the conception wrong, that the conception was that Hamas wanted to be corrupt and get rich and that the government, security services and others didn’t believe that they wanted to do what they wanted to do on the 7th.

    BB: It may be true of some people but it certainly wasn’t true of me. Because I believed that we can’t cut deals with Hamas; I called them ISIS many years ago. When they took over, I said this is Hamastan These people will work to attack us. I warned they would rocket us. This was dismissed at the time that we left Gaza; I left the government before that happened.

    I resigned from the government. I said, this is what will happen. We’ll have a terrorist state. This is a Muslim Brotherhood branch that will seek to destroy Israel. The question was, what do you do about it? And my conclusion was that we have to continuously cut these wild weeds. We didn’t get the agreement to actually yank out the weeds because, as I once said in a government meeting, this would require sacrificing hundreds of our soldiers and will probably having quite a few casualties on the Palestinian population, given Hamas’ tactic of hiding behind civilians while attacking our civilians and it will create other problems.

    We couldn’t get the domestic consensus to make such a definitive solution to the problem of Hamas. That is no one would agree across the Israeli public to go in and basically destroy Hamas, go throughout Gaza and destroy Hamas

    We didn’t have the international consensus either. Nobody would understand, why are we doing this?

    Both conditions were created because of the Hamas savage attack on Israel on October 7th. But, look how difficult it is for us to sustain this effort, which we are and which we are committed to, to achieve total victory, that after the worst, these horrific, horrific, acts of barbarism, we now, three, four months into the battle, have this critique of Israel. So my view was, we basically degrade their millitary capacities again and again and again but I think that has changed now with broad consensus of the Israeli public that we have to go in there and achieve total victory. There is no substitute for total victory.

    DM: Two final questions. Firstly, this happened on your watch, Prime Minister: October 7th. A number of people, senior military and intelligence apparatus have taken some responsibility for it. Do you?

    BB: Well, I think there is a responsibility in omission of a government to protect its people and clearly we failed in that and all of us will have to answer questions and at the end of the war there will be investigations, there will be a systemic examination of what went wrong and responsibilities will be assigned and that’s fine. I’m not concentrating on that. I’m concentrating on responsibility that I have and that’s to achieve total victory and that’s what we should be all concentrating on…”

  5. “Look, you know this statement, ‘A man’s got to do, what a man’s gotta do?’ Re…‘A nation has to do what it has to do to survive’.

    “And if we have to take action both in the South and in the North, that is understood by many to be a just action… but [if] they cannot stand the heat of public opinion, then we’ll just have to do it alone. We will do what we need to do.”

    Bibi is taking his battle with the US leadership, who are committed to the protection and preservation of Iran and Iran’s proxies, directly to the people of America. Also, this interview should be seen as nothing less than a full acknowledgement of the crisis existing between the govt of Israel and the govt of the US as the US was recently reported to threaten Israel’s supply of arms as a means of curbing the goals of this war. Notably, Eisenkot described how he and his political general allies would deal with the demands of the US, notably by surrendering to once again accept those demands. Such supplication to American interests is specifically what brought Israel to suffer the tragedy of October 7.

    Bibi however has no intention of surrendering to the American demands, as was made clear in this interview, which should be seen as personifying the stalwart resolve of the Israeli people to win this war. Bibi knows precisely how to connect with the American people, and in the current election environment in the US, he knows that the palpable support of Israel will prove to be an important point of pressure to apply against the Iran allied leadership in the US. Hence, this interview was a mild but certain shot across the bow, making Bibi’s commitment to withstand the demands of the US to prematurely end this war.

    Hence, the political lines are being drawn in Israel as the pursuit of victory vs the acceptance of defeat, and in the same moment, Bibi is challenging the leadership in the US to fulfill the role of a faithful ally, not to Iran, but to Israel, even as the US remains wholly committed to its policy of realignment towards Iran.