Victor Davis Hanson on the Political Survival of Benjamin Netanyahu

Victor Davis Hanson on the Political Survival of Benjamin Netanyahu

Hanson points out that after October 7th, many people thought Netanyahu was finished. They were all wrong, too.

From his site:

The Ordeal and Triumph of Mr. Netanyahu

After the October 7 massacres, the obituaries of the long political career of Benjamin Netanyahu, published both in Israel and in the West, became orthodox. He was considered as politically inert as Donald Trump once was after January 6, 2021.

The conventional wisdom speculated not if, but only when he would be forced out of office.

Western leaders and the Israeli left, and indeed even the Israeli non-left, as well as American and European pundits, claimed that the laxity of the Netanyahu government was entirely to blame for the grotesque massacre of October 7.

Indeed, last fall, there arose almost a competition of critics to assert all the ways in which Netanyahu was played by Hamas.

Accordingly, Netanyahu’s sweeping Supreme Court reforms had supposedly needlessly split the country, demoralizing the military and eroding Israeli deterrence in the eyes of Palestinian terrorists. Or his purported strategy of playing off the more lethal and toxic Hamas against the Palestinian Authority was supposedly proof of his reckless naivete.

Still, other opponents argued that his 16 years as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister and his age of 75 made him a Joe Biden-like relic of the past, simply too old and too familiar to be any longer effective. He was told it was well past time to step down and let a new generation break out of the old toxic Middle East mindsets.

And indeed, after October 7, Netanyahu faced a bleak regional and global landscape—analogous to what a 65-year-old Churchill faced in June 1940 when all of Western Europe was in the hands of the Nazis and a lonely Britain was without a single wartime ally—with a sympathetic America still hesitant to commit to ensuring its existence.

Massive immigration from the Middle East into Europe and the United States—spiked by hundreds of thousands of oil-subsidized foreign students in Western universities, coupled with the post-George Floyd woke/DEI hysterias—had made European and American political parties unapologetically not just anti-Israel but now increasingly anti-Semitic as well.

Read the whole thing.

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