Israeli minister vows to quit war cabinet if PM fails to agree new Gaza plan
Israeli minister vows to quit war cabinet if PM fails to agree new Gaza plan
Benny Gantz’s threat to withdraw his opposition party from coalition calls into question future of government
The Israeli war cabinet minister Benny Gantz has threatened to resign if Benjamin Netanyahu fails to adopt an agreed plan for Gaza, calling into question the future of the Israeli government.
During a press conference on Saturday, Gantz announced that if a plan for postwar governance of the territory is not consolidated and approved by 8 June, his opposition National Unity party will withdraw from the coalition government.
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On Thursday, defence minister, Yoav Gallant, challenged Netanyahu over the same issue, saying he would not permit any solution where Israeli military or civil governance were in the territory. Gallant’s comments were immediately backed by his fellow minister Gantz, Netanyahu’s main political rival in the emergency coalition, plunging Israel’s leadership into a highly public row.
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Is this good...? Do they have enough influence to make a difference.
It's complicated. They don't have the ability to bring down the government but both Gantz and Gallant are much more popular than Netanyahu. Netanyahu's choice (again) comes down to placating the far-right to keep his government in power in the short-term at the expense of further alienating the Israeli public. If he bows to this pressure, the far-right might topple his government immediately. All paths probably lead to electoral (then legal) doom for Netanyahu at some point.
I wonder if he's the kind of maniacal leader that puts maintaining power and control first because he genuinely believes he has a plan to better his people, or...
is he's the maniacal leader that puts maintaining power and control first because... power and control are simply all that matters...
I wonder which is more dangerous.
I wonder if it matters at this point.
He’s looking at jail time in some corruption cases IIRC
This is the thing. Netanyahu is a sociopath who needs a forever war or else he eventually has to face the music. Without outside military intervention, this only ends in one of two ways:
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either Bibi drags it out long enough to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza, claim he defeated Hamas, and memory-hole the intelligence failures that allowed the October 7 attacks to succeed in the first place, or
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he loses control of his political coalition, elections are called, and he's quickly removed from his PM position, put on trial for corruption and then thrown in prison for what will probably be the rest of his life.
Prolonging the war doesn't guarantee he won't end up in scenario 2 anyway, but from his perspective at the very least he's running out the clock. Dead Gazans (and to a lesser extent dead Israelis) don't matter to him.
I mean there's a reason he's been propping up a Hamas for so long. Also a reason why he failed act on intelligence warning him of October 7th.
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Yup. There was a trial a a year or two ago (maybe three now) before he got into power again. I don't remember it concluding because he was elected while it was taking place.
It's still ongoing.