How Biden and Abbas are handing Netanyahu his next election victory
The polls look bad for Bibi, but Biden and Abbas are inadvertently doing their best to prop up the Israeli leader they most want to see fall.
Election polls look dire for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And no one would be happier to see him fall and be replaced by a more “pragmatic” Israeli leader than US President Joe Biden and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas. Ironically, those two might be handing Bibi his next ballot box victory.
A Channel 12 News poll conducted this week showed that if elections were held today, Netanyahu’s Likud would drop to 18 seats, while the National Camp headed by War Cabinet minister Benny Gantz would skyrocket to 37 seats.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid’s party (Yesh Atid) would drop to 14 seats, while the rest of the Knesset would look more or less as it does today, with the notable absence of the once-mighty Labor Party, which would fail to pass the electoral threshold.
The outcome is seen as punishment for Netanyahu’s failures that led to the October 7 terrorist invasion, though Gantz shares the blame, having served as Minister of Defense as recently as 16 months ago, when Hamas was planning its unprecedented assault. But Bibi won’t be able to effectively focus on that, since no one’s hands are clean.
Gantz is the initial beneficiary of public anger, but if the next election outcome is as Channel 12 predicts, he’d find it all but impossible to form a stable government coalition without Netanyahu’s Likud.
American-approved
While Gantz has been relatively firm with the Biden administration regarding the need to fight on until a clear victory is achieved in Gaza, he remains the White House’s preferred electoral winner when the dust finally settles in Israel.
No one in Washington is saying as much publicly, but it is the widespread conclusion in the Israeli media.
The tension between Netanyahu and Biden is no secret, while every time Gantz meets with the president, the media, both in Israel and the US, highlights their “close working relationship.”
No Palestinian state
Now to the other side of the coin. Prior to October 7, 2023, a slim majority of Israelis still supported the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even if less than half trusted the Palestinians.
Since that terrible day, polls consistently show that an overwhelming majority of Israelis now reject a Palestinian state and see it as a clear threat to the survival of the Jewish state. [One notable exception is a recent poll that shows 51 percent of Israelis would back a US scheme that leads to a Palestinian state. But it is rather manipulative in that it plays on the emotions of the day, by linking that outcome to the release of remaining Israeli hostages.]
Even among center-left Israeli voters, over 60 percent now hold what were once considered the “right-wing” views of opposing a Palestinian state and advocating for the voluntary emigration of Palestinians.
Before the current war, too, a Pew Research Center survey found that Israelis were cooling on the two-state solution, with just 35 percent saying Israel and a Palestinian state could peacefully coexist.
And that number is now certainly much lower.
White House versus the Israeli public
Undeterred by the will of the Israeli people, the Biden administration has been pushing harder than ever for the establishment of a Palestinian state. As have the United Nations and European powers.
“You cannot say there’s no Palestinian state at all in the future,” Biden told a fundraising event in mid-December, even as he promised the US would protect Israel from any threat emanating from that Palestinian state.
The thing is, Israelis no longer believe such promises. President George W. Bush and his administration said much the same when it pressed Israel to surrender the Gaza Strip in 2005, as did Bill Clinton a decade earlier when he oversaw the signing of the “Oslo Accords.”
Writing Bibi’s election script
At this point, the script for Netanyahu’s next election campaign is being written for him.
While the campaign hasn’t yet begun, when it does, Bibi has all the ammunition he needs, courtesy of the Palestinian Authority and the Biden administration.
- Hamas has demonstrated that it really does want to annihilate Israel and the Jews.
- The Palestinians say they support Hamas in this mission (see polls here, here and here).
- The Palestinian Authority says it wants to partner with Hamas, and will hand over power if Hamas wins the next election.
- Biden wants a Palestinian state.
- Biden wants Benny Gantz as prime minister.
While Gantz has never publicly committed to the two-state solution, the fact that Biden prefers him and that Biden is pushing hard for a Palestinian state, will make it easy for Netanyahu to portray Gantz as a threat to Israel in this regard.
By implicitly championing Gantz while pushing for a Palestinian state, at this of all times, the Biden White House is painting the National Camp head as the leader who will give Israelis precisely what they do not want.
Israelis aren’t looking at it that way yet, which is why Gantz remains high in the polls. But once the election campaign really begins, Netanyahu will eagerly help them to see the connection, and position himself as the only candidate willing to stand up to the world and protect Israel from the danger of a Palestinian state.
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