Israel wins nothing from another Gaza assault – but Netanyahu might
A house being hit by an Israeli air strike in Gaza city on 13 May 2023
Lily Galili reports in Middle East Eye:
Those saying Israel’s latest assault in Gaza was just a bleeding exercise in futility fail to understand the real purpose behind it.
Polls released by major Israeli channels after the ceasefire, which was signed on Saturday night, prove beyond doubt the operation achieved its main goal from the government’s perspective: the popularity of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition was on the rise.
Netanyahu was trailing in polls to his opposition rivals days before the bombing campaign, dubbed “Operation Shield and Arrow”, was launched on 9 May with a series of overnight assassinations.
Five days of Gaza bleeding – in which 33 Palestinians, including six children, were killed – and the ongoing bleeding of Netanyahu’s coalition was miraculously cured. Mission accomplished. Netanyahu has restored his image as “Mr Security” – not the ailing prime minister accused of leading his country into a dictatorship with his government’s controversial judicial overhaul plan.
“The only achievement of this military operation is the security of Netanyahu’s coalition,” Zehava Gal-On, former head of the leftist Meretz party, told Middle East Eye.
Strangely enough, this miraculous recovery has nothing to do with how Israelis feel about the outcome of the five-day assault. A poll conducted by Channel 12 a day after the ceasefire showed that 42 percent of respondents believed the operation strengthened Israeli deterrence. Around 44 percent believed it made no difference and five percent thought it made it worse. This indifference is echoed by politicians on both sides of the spectrum.
Members of the coalition, both from Netayhu’s Likud party and his allies in the far-right Religious Zionism party, sound unhappy with how the operation ended. They wanted more. The same goes for Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the opposition right-wing Yisrael Beytenu party, who blamed Netanyahu for creating a “Hezbollah in the south” by not attacking Hamas, the Palestinian group which rules over Gaza.
On the left, politicians repeated the same knee-jerk reaction of non-judgmental support for the attacks. Labor MP Efrat Rayten, for example, was more worried about how it was going to be “difficult to explain” the images of children killed in Israel’s air strikes, rather than questioning the purpose behind the bloodshed.