Can Netanyahu prolong the Gaza conflict for his political survival?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s refusal to take responsibility for the October 7 attack and his attempt to pass the buck for the security lapse on to his subordinates indicates that the hardline leader has dug his feet to gain maximum political mileage from the ongoing Gaza conflict, analysts say.

Even before the Hamas attack, Netanyahu, the leader of the Likud Party, was facing mass protests for alleged corruption charges and his plan to strip the country’s supreme court from its powers.

“He is in the peculiar position of either being in power, or being in jail, so he would do everything in his power to remain as the PM,” said Omri Brinner, an Israeli researcher and lecturer at International Team for the Study of Security (ITSS), an Italian think-tank based in Verona.

Netanyahu has built his political career on the promise that he was protecting Israelis from the Palestinian attack - he even earned the moniker “‘Mr. Security’ for that reason.

But the ease with which Palestinian resistance groups were able to overcome multiple Israeli checkpoints and enter various settlements on October 7, has raised a big question mark about his ability to protect the country.

During the incursion, Palestinian fighters killed around 1,400 Israelis.

The Israeli military has launched one of the deadliest air bombardments on the impoverished Palestinian enclave the world has seen in years, killing more than 10,000 people, majority of them women and children.

Hamas also took at least 240 Israeli hostages. The relatives of the hostages have been protesting for days, piling pressure on Tel Aviv to secure their release.

Last month, Likud’s Tel Aviv headquarters was defaced with fake blood and protestors splashed red paint on Netanyahu’s posters.

Based on recent opinion polling, “it seems unlikely that Prime Minister Netanyahu will survive the Hamas-Israel war politically,” says Matthew Bryza, a former American diplomat.

The war, in which Israel mobilised a record number of 300,000 reservists, has hit the Israeli economy hard with the stock market going down and consumer spending sliding.

Analysts say whatever the outcome of the war, Netanyahu’s days in office are numbered.

“He was blaming his defence minister, intelligence chief for not informing him. But he is the leader and he is not taking any responsibility. I believe the voters of Israel then feel that they had enough of him,” Bryza tells TRT World,

Many Israelis have already been fed up by the Likud leader’s ceaseless efforts to undermine the country’s crucial political institutions like the Supreme Court.

For now, Netanyahu could still stay in power as the Israelis are “rallying around the flag”, according to Bryza.

Analysts say the Israeli leader is bent upon using the war to further his political survival, making him prone to taking up extremist and violent stances on the Palestinians. A glimpse of that came when Netanyahu fell back on religious rhetoric to shore up support for the military attack on Palestine's Gaza.

Slobodan Milosevic 2.0

A politically cornered Netanyahu might take the route that Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic went down during the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Milosevic was one of the leaders of former Yugoslavia when the communist federation was disintegrating.

“Netanyahu likes to be compared to Churchill. But a comparison to early Slobodan Milosevic is more appropriate,” said Ethan Nechin, an Israeli writer, on X.

Nechin likens Netanyahu’s politics to Milosevic, who “gave free reign” to extreme Serbian nationalist movements for “his own cynical reasons”.

In the 1990s, Milosevic, who was in political trouble, played a critical role in fanning a bloody civil war between Serbs, Croats and Bosniaks. Like Milosevic, Netanyahu today faces an unprecedented domestic political crisis and many accusations ranging from corruption to security lapses.

Like Milosevic’s political campaign against the Bosniaks and other opponents, Netanyahu has also overseen rising illegal settler violence against Palestinians in East Jerusalem and other occupied territories.

Hamas cites attacks on Palestinians in occupied territories and settler violation of Al Aqsa Mosque as few of the key reasons for launching an operation against Israel.

Netanyahu quoted verses from the Old Testament to justify Israel’s war on Palestinians.

Milosevic, a Serbian nationalist with Islamophoic views, also used ethnic violence and religious fanaticism against Muslim Bosniaks to keep his leadership intact in the name of creating a greater Serbia.

While Bryza finds it not unusual to see Netanyahu’s extreme religious partners to quote the Old Testament, he says, “it’s unusual to hear Netanyahu citing the Bible to justify military operations.”

Both Milosevic and Netanyahu have also been accused of committing genocides against the two Muslim nations.

In 2006, Milosevic, charged with genocide, died under the detention of UN war crimes tribunal.