Opposed to Netanyahu, two-thirds of Israelis want to negotiate with Hamas

Israeli public opinion is changing. After having turned away from Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu, ineffective during the October 7 attack, some Israelis rallied behind him again after the Iranian retaliation on April 11. About a third of them now support him. They are both settlers, illegally implanted in the West Bank, and citizens who perceive Arabs, Turks and Persians as enemies.

The remaining two-thirds are slowly opening their eyes. The execution of six hostages by Hamas on August 31, just as the “Defense Forces” (IDF) were about to free them, showed them that, far from allowing their release, the presence of soldiers in Gaza condemns them to death. They now see the Prime Minister’s obstinacy in invading not only Gaza, but also the West Bank, to the detriment of the hostages’ lives, as proof that he serves the interests of the settlers alone, and not those of all Israeli Jews. Yet they fail to see the suffering of Israeli Arabs, the pogroms in the West Bank and the ethnic cleansing in Gaza.

It was against this backdrop that Israel’s historic trade union, the Histadrut, which was the main Yichuv organization between the wars, called a general strike. Like all Western unions, this organization is much smaller than in the past, when it was an offshoot of the kibbutzim movement. It now has just 400,000 members, but still has moral authority. At a rally, its Secretary General, Arnon Bar-David, declared: “I’m here to fight, so that no one is left behind. Jews don’t abandon Jews, who doesn’t know that? It’s not possible for our children to die in the tunnels because of political considerations”. Considering that the Central was itself playing politics instead of defending workers, the government got the National Labor Court to declare the general strike illegal. As for Treasury Minister Bezalel Smotrich, he instructed his departments not to pay the striking civil servants. Be that as it may, the strike was well attended. It inscribed in the minds of Israelis that Benyamin Netanyahu did not defend Jews, that he had never defended them.

At the same time, one of the government’s 32 members, Defense Minister General Yoav Gallant, declared in cabinet that the Prime Minister’s new objective of occupying the Philadelphia Corridor (i.e., the small Egyptian-Gazawi border strip) violates the Camp David Accords without bringing the slightest strategic advantage. When the cabinet discussion turned to invective, General Gallant took the matter public.

According to the Internet portal Ynet (part of Yediot Aharonot), reputed to be centrist and close to the administration, if in May an agreement was about to be reached with Hamas, everything was turned upside down by the Israeli side’s Clarification Document on July 27. This text suddenly laid down new demands to make any agreement impossible. For the first time, it demanded an IDF presence in the Philadelphia corridor.

Only those who follow Israeli politics will understand the simultaneity of the general strike and Gallant’s slavage. At last, it makes it possible to understand what happened last year.

In the spring of 2023, the democratic parties put pressure on the Histadrut to organize a general strike against the proposed reform of the Basic Laws (equivalent to a constitution), i.e. against the coup d’état that the revisionist Zionists were carrying out. However, instead of confining itself to defending democracy, the left-wing center also supported the right-wing general Yoav Gallant, whom Benyamin Netanyahu had just suddenly dismissed from his post as Defense Minister. His pressure had been so strong that the Prime Minister had reinstated him to the government.

At the time, no one understood the connection between the unionists and the general. However, we later learned that he had been dismissed for having exploded in the Council of Ministers and demanded an explanation for the Prime Minister’s lack of reaction to reports from the Shin Bet (counter-intelligence) and the IDF. Four months before the October 7 attack, all Israeli intelligence services were drafting report after report announcing the “Perfect Storm” (code name for the October 7 “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation) that the Palestinian Resistance was preparing. The Prime Minister refused to listen. He remained deaf to General Gallant’s outburst. He did not defend his country during the October 7 attack, but used it to ethnically cleanse Gaza and allowed anti-Arab pogroms to multiply in the West Bank.

As a result, the question we’ve been asking since mid-November [1] is also starting to resonate with Israelis: what if Benyamin Netanyahu wasn’t incompetent, but an accomplice in the attack?

This question is on the minds of many Israelis, who have called for a state commission of inquiry into all aspects of the October 7 attack, its preparation and response. Israel’s Attorney General, Gali Baharav Miara, who considers the issue relevant, has also called for this. However, Benjamin Netanyahu and his accomplices opposed it.

This question has been on everyone’s lips ever since the Israeli press revealed that the counter-espionage Shin Bet/Shabak had warned the Prime Minister of the imminent attack 10 weeks earlier [2]. This time, we’re no longer talking about foreign sources, but about one of Israel’s security agencies.

Gradually, the story of the current coalition government resurfaces. Jewish supremacists (the Kahanists) are not just another Jewish sect. Certainly, they militate for the destruction of the Al-Aqsa mosque and the rebuilding in its place of Solomon’s temple, whereas the Haredi rabbis, both Ashkenazi and Sephardic, in addition to the leading Israeli rabbis, consider such acts impure and forbid all Jews to enter the courtyards of the Al-Aqsa mosque. They thus seem to distinguish themselves from the revisionist Zionists of Volodymyr Jabotinski and Benzion Netanhayou, who campaigned for a Jewish state from the Nile to the Euphrates. In reality, Rabbi Meïr Kahane was an agent of Yitzhak Shamir (Jabotinky’s successor) in the United States, who financed him through Mossad, of which he was then one of the leaders. In fact, during his first term as Prime Minister, in 1996, Benjamin Netanyahu had a tunnel dug under the Al-Aqsa mosque.

No one in Israel would fail to recall that Volodymyr Jabotinsky and Benzion Netanhayou (the Prime Minister’s father) were allies of Benito Mussolini, who hosted their militia, the Betar, in Rome [3]. A fortiori, no Israeli dares question the links between these historic fascists and Nazism. It’s true that Jabotinsky died at the start of the war, on August 4, 1940, in New York, without having to comment on the latter’s racial ideology. But during the inter-war period, as a director of the (World) Zionist Organization, he had allied himself with the Ukrainian integral nationalists of Symon Petlioura and Dmytro Dontsov against the Soviets. Their men massacred Jews without eliciting the slightest reaction from him. When the Zionist Organization demanded an explanation, he resigned without reply.

David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Allied Prime Minister, said that Jabotinsky was surely a fascist and possibly a Nazi, which is why he opposed the transfer of his ashes to Jerusalem.

The question arises for two reasons: firstly, revisionist Zionists conducted negotiations with the Nazis throughout the Second World War against the Allies. It was the Germans who refused to go any further in their collaboration, whereas the Jewish followers of Jabotinsky were for continuing.

Then, last May, historian Nadav Kaplan revealed [4] that Jabotinsky’s followers were following in detail the negotiations of Hungarian Rezső Kasztner (known as “Rudolf Ysrael Kastner”) with the Nazis throughout the World War, including with Adolf Eichmann, in charge of transferring Jews to the extermination camps. He has speculated (for the moment insufficiently substantiated) that Ben Gurion ordered his assassination during his trial, so as not to reopen the wound. If Kaplan’s work were to be developed further, there would be continuity between the massacre of the Jews by the Nazis and that of the Palestinians by the revisionist Zionists.

We have to admit that the Israelis are not the victims of Hamas, but, like the Palestinians, of revisionist Zionists.