Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been accused of breaking with convention by campaigning while his country is at war after a series of controversial statements in recent days.
A number of senior Israeli political figures have been making moves before what are seen as inevitable elections when the war is over, but Netanyahu’s efforts to improve his dire ratings with the Israeli electorate – many of whom blame him for catastrophic intelligence failures in the run-up to the Hamas attack on 7 October – are regarded as the most blatant.
Netanyahu sparked anger from the left and right on Monday when he said the Hamas attack had led to the same number of Israeli deaths as the Oslo accords, the peace agreement signed between Israel and the Palestinians in 1993. The comments, made in a leaked statement to the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defence committee, were widely seen as being politically oriented.
The opposition leader, Yair Lapid, said in response that it was “impossible to understand the level of detachment and cynicism of a prime minister who is running an evil political campaign at a time like this, the whole purpose of which is to remove responsibility from him, to blame others, to create hatred.”
A senior official in Netanyahu’s own Likud party told the rightwing Israel Hayom newspaper, formerly regarded as a mouthpiece for the PM but increasingly critical of him in recent weeks: “We need to be careful not to sow divisions now. Despite the pervasive view in the Likud that Oslo was a disaster, there are some things that are best not said while half a million troops are inside Gaza and thousands of others are grieving, mourning and worried about their loved ones’ fate in Hamas captivity.”
Another Likud official told the paper: “Netanyahu is in full campaign mode. While the external political threats are gradually increasing, Netanyahu knows that over time the attacks and the calls to remove him will also increase. He has been acting first to win back his base. You can’t in a time of war revert to divisive and inciting talk against a large segment of the public, part of which is in uniform in Gaza, part of which is licking its wounds from the massacre.”
Netanyahu, who doubled down on the same comments in a short video released on Tuesday, has also attempted to bolster his image by suggesting he will not buckle to pressure from the US, after Joe Biden said Israel was losing international support for the war in Gaza and that Netanyahu and his government “need to change”.
Political analysts in Israel anticipate elections next year, and many have expressed the view that Netanyahu’s position will only be threatened further when the most intense stage of the military’s ground offensive in Gaza winds down.
Speculation over whether he can maintain his wartime coalition has been rife. Parties could walk away, potentially collapsing the government.
Dahlia Schiendlin, a political analyst, is among those who see the potential for a crisis being triggered by splits or defections from within Likud or by ultranationalist parties of the far right.
“It is hard to predict in Israel how coalitions end and the specific triggers of coalition collapse,” Schiendlin told the Guardian. “But I would say either it either comes from splits within Likud or from the ultra-nationalist parties.
“What you see in survey research is that 70-75% of Israelis want Netanyahu to resign, with almost twice as many wanting him to go after war than while it is ongoing. With how the war will end and when becoming a more open question … my guess is the number who want him to go sooner will go up.”
That view was echoed by the Netanyahu biographer Anshel Pfeffer. “He knows once Israel scales down its ground offensive in Gaza – almost certainly in a few weeks – he won’t be able to hold back the political flood,” Pfeffer wrote in Haaretz.
“In the not-too-distant future his governing coalition will lose its parliamentary majority and the Knesset will be dissolved. He will try to delay that moment, but his political instincts tell him he will have to fight an election soon – and all the polls are saying he will lose, by a wide margin. So he’s trying to draw up the battle lines of the campaign.”
