‘This helps Netanyahu’: Israelis rally around Netanyahu over warrant, for now

JERUSALEM — The more Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel is cast as an international pariah, the more many Israelis appear to embrace him.

The arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court on Thursday for Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on accusations of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza Strip spurred a wave of outrage and condemnation across Israel’s political spectrum.

“It is embarrassing to see Netanyahu and Gallant in the same place as Moammar Gaddafi, Slobodan Milosevic, Ratko Mladic and several African dictators,” wrote Sima Kadmon, a political columnist and longtime Netanyahu critic, in the Friday editions of the popular Yediot Ahronot newspaper. Still, she added, “the allegations of anti-Israel-ism are understandable. Perhaps even antisemitism.”

Despite deep domestic polarization, analysts said, most Israelis were likely to rally around Netanyahu’s repudiation of the court’s decision, which he denounced as “antisemitic” for “falsely accusing” the democratically elected prime minister of Israel.

“This helps Netanyahu,” said Mitchell Barak, an Israeli pollster who worked as an aide to Netanyahu in the 1990s, portraying him as “the lonely man standing against all the evil in the world.”

“It turns him into the victim he likes to be, the person fighting for Israel’s rights,” Barak said, adding that Israelis have been largely unified in their support for the war.

The warrants came as Netanyahu’s domestic image has eroded in recent months and as international censure has grown over the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, where more than 44,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to local health officials who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Public trust in Netanyahu’s leadership plummeted after the surprise Hamas-led assault in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killed about 1,200 people, making it the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust and plunging the region into a long war.

Many Israelis have accused him of prolonging the war in Gaza for political reasons: to keep his right-wing governing coalition together and to remain in power even as he battles corruption charges in an Israeli court.

Yet, most were likely to reject the international court’s decision.

Netanyahu is also probably not losing any sleep over the warrants, according to a recently retired Israeli government official who worked on issues related to Israel’s international affairs for years and requested anonymity to be able to speak frankly.

For one thing, the United States, Israel’s most important ally, has rejected the court case against Israeli leaders. For another, Israel is not a member of the international court and does not recognize its jurisdiction in Israel or Gaza.

“Do I have some issues with how this war has been conducted? Absolutely,” said Thomas R. Nides, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel in the Biden administration. “That said,” he added, “I think the ICC decision is outrageous.”

The reaction to the warrants has underscored the gulf between widespread Israeli perceptions of the war in Gaza and the way it is viewed from the outside.

Few Israelis have publicly expressed empathy for Gaza’s civilians, blaming Hamas for their suffering. And with most of the country’s 18-year-olds drafted for mandatory military service in the so-called people’s army and with many serving in the reserves into middle age, most Israelis find it hard to imagine the soldiers as war criminals.

Israelis are aware that international warrants could yet be served against officers and soldiers, adding to their animus toward the court. But at the same time, they are largely insulated from the antipathy toward Israel abroad.

“Internally, we are in a bubble,” said Mazal Mualem, an Israeli political commentator for the Middle East news site Al-Monitor and the author of a biography of the Israeli leader, “Cracking the Netanyahu Code.”

For Netanyahu, Mualem said, this is “another war to fight.” She added, “This won’t harm Netanyahu; it will strengthen him with his own base on the right.”

Even his political opponents are saying what most of the Israeli public appears to be thinking.

“Israel is defending its life against terrorist organizations that attacked, murdered and raped our citizens,” Yair Lapid, the centrist leader of Israel’s parliamentary opposition, wrote on social media Thursday, adding, “These arrest warrants are a reward for terrorism.”

The warrants come at a turbulent time for Netanyahu and Israel. The country is on the brink of a potential cease-fire deal over the conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon, while about 100 hostages, at least a third of whom are assumed to be dead, remain in Gaza.

Netanyahu recently fired Gallant as defense minister because of differences over the continuation of the war in Gaza and domestic policies, further undermining trust in the government.

Netanyahu’s office has also been increasingly scrutinized over a series of investigations focused on the mishandling of intelligence material. On Thursday, Israeli prosecutors charged one of his aides with leaking classified information on Hamas in a way that prosecutors say was likely to harm national security and put people in life-threatening danger at a time of war.

Next month, Netanyahu is expected to take the stand in his own corruption trial. He has been charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three separate but interrelated cases being heard in parallel. He has denied any wrongdoing in the cases, which center on accusations that he arranged favors for tycoons in exchange for gifts and sympathetic news coverage for himself and his family.

Some Israeli critics say Netanyahu contributed to the international court’s decision to issue arrest warrants by preventing the establishment of an independent Israeli commission of inquiry, with a panel headed by a judge, to examine the government’s failures on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s conduct in the war.

Instead, eager to stave off any personal blame toward Netanyahu for those failures, and with the time approaching for him to testify in his corruption cases, Netanyahu’s supporters have doubled down on their attacks against Israel’s judicial system. Perhaps emboldened by the Trump victory, they’ve fed into the notion that Netanyahu is being persecuted by liberal forces at home and abroad.

“Since the election of Trump, the gloves have come off,” said Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Israelis expect the new Trump administration to be more accommodating toward the Israeli government, the most right-wing and religiously conservative in the country’s history.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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