Israel’s prime minister and its army are damagingly divided

ISRAELI SOLDIERS near the border with Gaza were surprised on October 24th to see a familiar figure visiting the kibbutzim devastated by Hamas’s attack. Arye Deri, the leader of Shas, an ultra-Orthodox party which is one of the largest in the coalition of Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, also visited military units preparing for war in Gaza. A day earlier, Mr Deri had angered Israel’s military chiefs when he leaked the details of a meeting with his party members in which he had said the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) were “not ready”.

Mr Deri has no official role in government, nor does he have any significant military experience. Yet the prime minister has invited him in an unofficial capacity to some of the meetings of the war cabinet. His qualification is that he is an important political ally of Mr Netanyahu.

War is politics by other means, and this war is increasingly politicised. While the polls show broad backing among Israelis for the ground offensive in Gaza, they also show support for Mr Netanyahu has plummeted. Some 40% of voters who supported his Likud party less than a year ago now say they would vote for someone else. Calls are growing for a national commission of enquiry to be held once the conflict has ended.

On October 25th Israeli officials said they had agreed to delay the invasion of Gaza to allow America to shore up its air defences in the region. But Mr Netanyahu is under increasing pressure from his hard-right base to prove his readiness to destroy Hamas. The prime minister’s proxies have been briefing journalists that the IDF is not fully prepared for the ground campaign and that, instead of jeopardising the lives of Israeli soldiers with a rapid invasion, as Israel’s generals suggest, even more devastating air-strikes are needed to destroy Hamas’s network of tunnels. This has led to angry responses from the IDF that it is, in fact, ready. It has also prompted ugly—and accurate—headlines in the Israeli media about the discord in the war cabinet between Mr Netanyahu and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.

Divisions within this government are not new. In March Mr Netanyahu tried to fire Mr Gallant after he publicly criticised the government’s plan to weaken the powers of the Supreme Court. The prime minister was forced to retreat in the face of massive public protests. But the growing distrust between the two since then is now hampering Israel’s war-planning. The establishment of a “unity government” with leaders of one of the opposition parties, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot—both of whom are former IDF chiefs of staff and also part of the war cabinet—has failed to bring about any actual unity.

Mr Netanyahu’s relationship with Israel’s generals has long been tense. That tension has been heightened by their responses to Hamas’s attack on October 7th. “The IDF and the intelligence community were severely hit by their failure to detect and prevent the Hamas attack,” says a senior defence official. “But they’ve got back on their feet and are now just waiting for a clear idea from the government [about] what to do.” By contrast Israel’s politicians, and its prime minister in particular, still seem to be floundering.

The army’s chief of staff, Lieutenant-General Herzi Halevi, has already publicly acknowledged the failure of October 7th, as have Ronen Bar, the director of Shin Bet, Israel’s security service, and the chief of the military intelligence branch, Major General Aharon Haliva. All are expected to resign once the war is over. The prime minister, though, has not accepted any such responsibility, beyond saying vaguely on October 25th that “only after the war” would questions be asked “of me as well”.

“There are many who shoulder the blame for thinking that Hamas wouldn’t dare do something like this,” says one Knesset member from Mr Netanyahu’s coalition. “Obviously Bibi is more to blame than all the others but don’t wait for him to say so.” Instead, when he has not been in meetings with his war cabinet or welcoming foreign leaders, Mr Netanyahu has spent most of his time in recent days huddled with his political advisers and briefing journalists. He has also assembled a shadow cabinet of former generals and security officials to second-guess Mr Gallant and the IDF’s generals.

The prime minister is not the only one focused on politicking. The coalition of far-right and ultra-religious parties that backs Mr Netanyahu knows it may not last long: public anger and another election could sweep them away. But they are anxious to cling on for as long as possible—and to make the most of their power. Itamar Ben-Gvir, the national security minister and leader of Jewish Power, a far-right party, has made a show of handing weapons to civilians, ostensibly to prevent further terrorist attacks. But he has been trying to stoke tensions between Israeli Jews and Arab-Israelis. For now, at least, he has had no success. (He was pointedly not included in the war cabinet.) Other coalition partners have blocked efforts to get cash to help the thousands of Israeli families uprooted by the war, because they worry the money will be diverted from funding the special interests of their own communities.

All the talk is of the next stage of the fighting in Gaza, not what follows it. Israel’s security establishment would prefer to see the Palestinian Authority, which was ousted from Gaza by Hamas in a bloody coup in 2007, return and take control of the area. But one senior official admits that no planning is being done on that front. For over a decade Mr Netanyahu has isolated and neglected Gaza, believing it could safely be left to fester. The attack on October 7th demonstrated how tragically that policy has failed. His politicising of the war now, and his reluctance to plan for the future, could cost Israel even more. ■