Bibi was embroiled in a huge corruption scandal! Perhaps going to prison. His popularity waning. Then Oct 7th happened. Now he's a national hero.
And Gantz who has the audacity to worry about the 2 million innocent poor bastards their terrorizing? His message isn't going over well. Being "human" means you're toast.
Netanyahu’s Main Challenger Loses His Edge
Benny Gantz has seen his poll numbers fall while Benjamin Netanyahu’s support stabilizes as the Israel-Hamas war drags on
By Carrie Keller-Lynn, WSJ
May 21, 2024 10:41 am ET
TEL AVIV—Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s main challenger has positioned himself as a leader who can unite the country, but Benny Gantz’s lack of decisiveness is alienating voters and costing him support in opinion polls.
Support for the leader of the National Unity Party soared after the Oct. 7 attack, when public anger with Netanyahu was at its height. Previously a member of the opposition, Gantz joined Netanyahu’s coalition as part of an emergency government, a move that gave him a seat on the powerful three-member war cabinet.
But as the war drags on, support for Gantz has slid while Netanyahu’s has stabilized. Many voters think Gantz has stayed in the emergency government for too long and he is now perceived as being part of the failures of the war instead of someone who can change its course.
Gantz was trying to stake out a space to criticize Netanyahu but not take any clear positions himself, said Uriel Abulof, a political scientist at Tel Aviv University. “There’s no vision.”
Spokespeople for Gantz didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Over the weekend, Gantz issued his sharpest rebuke yet of Netanyahu’s handling of the war and threatened to quit the government within weeks if the prime minister didn’t present a plan for ending the conflict and securing Gaza. His comments, made in a prime-time press conference, followed a midweek public call from Defense Minister Yoav Gallant to declare a successor authority in Gaza. Both blamed Netanyahu for holding up critical decision-making.
In the weeks after the Hamas-led Oct. 7 attack, public anger over security failures saw support for Gantz grow. Polling by Channel 12, Israel’s leading television news channel, showed his party would have won around 36 seats in the 120-seat Israeli Parliament, the Knesset, up from the 12 it held at the start of the war. Netanyahu’s party would have won 17 seats, down from the 32 it currently holds.
But recent polling shows support for Gantz is slipping. A May 16 poll by Channel 12 found Gantz’s party would win only 29 seats while Netanyahu’s would take 19. Analysts say Gantz is concerned about losing an opportunity to gain power if elections remain far off.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz at a military base shortly after the Oct. 7 attack.
“People in Israel admire that you put aside your narrow political interests and you fight for your country, and that’s exactly what Gantz did,” said Ayelet Frish, a former senior adviser to former Israeli President Shimon Peres. With his numbers now slipping, “he thinks that quitting will light the fire for elections,” she said.
Gantz called for early elections in the fall, two years ahead of schedule. Although Netanyahu has declined to hold them, he could be forced to if he loses his parliamentary majority, a possibility that requires both Gantz and a handful of other lawmakers to leave his coalition.
Shortly after joining the emergency cabinet, cracks began to show. Netanyahu has increasingly consolidated decision-making and Gantz and Gallant were unable to push him into charting a plan for Gaza’s post-Hamas governance. Officials and experts say this failure is creating a power vacuum in the enclave that is requiring the Israeli military to repeatedly return to fight militants in previously cleared areas. Palestinian health officials say the war has killed over 35,000 in Gaza, a figure that doesn’t distinguish between civilians and combatants.
Gantz has staked his political career as a centrist committed to national cohesion and has put forward policies that have straddled both camps. He has drawn voters from Netanyahu’s right-wing base and Israel’s center-left opposition, and last year he pushed back against Netanyahu’s plan to weaken the Supreme Court. He has emerged as the government’s loudest voice pushing for a cease-fire deal in Gaza to release Israeli hostages but said he wouldn’t accept a deal that had ending the war as a condition, a key Hamas demand.
Now, he is criticizing the war cabinet for not overcoming Netanyahu’s reluctance to set a long-term vision for the war, but he isn’t immediately quitting it.
Analysts say Gantz is losing support due to his role as one of the war’s managers. A 63% majority of Israelis rated Netanyahu’s performance as poor while 53% thought Gantz’s was also bad, according to a poll released Friday by Channel 12.
Public faith is also being tested regarding Israel’s ability to meet its twin war goals of dismantling Hamas and returning the 124 hostages Israel says have been held in Gaza since Oct. 7. For the first time since the start of the war, a plurality of Israelis polled this month by the Jewish People Policy Institute said they weren’t confident about Israel’s victory.
“Clearly people are unhappy with anybody leading a war that they increasingly think cannot be won, according to the way the government has defined that,” said Israeli pollster Dahlia Scheindlin.
“If you superimpose that onto the public narrative,” she added, “that this government has refused to set clear aims, plan for a day after, then people are blaming the government with that in mind and Gantz is part of that.”
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