Echoes of Churchill as Bibi heads for D.C.

Photo: AP Images

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IN two weeks, Binyamin Netanyahu will be arriving in Washington on what he described this week as his most important visit as prime minister. Not just because he’ll be breaking Churchill’s record for the most Congressional addresses by a foreign leader, but because of the circumstances under which he’ll be doing so.

A fervent admirer of Britain’s cigar-smoking wartime leader, Bibi has never identified with his hero more than he does now. It’s no longer the future threat of a nuclear Iran he’ll be warning about, but an ongoing seven-front war against Iran and its proxies. And like Churchill, he needs American arms shipments.

This isn’t how Netanyahu envisioned his next visit to Washington, and this isn’t the background Joe Biden hoped to welcome him against. Nine months back, both Netanyahu and Biden looked forward to meeting on the White House lawn to sign a formal peace treaty with Saudi Arabia, the largest and most powerful of the Arab states, months before the presidential election.

Not even in his worst nightmares did Netanyahu imagine coming after the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, with Israel locked in a bloody war that has left tens of thousands of Israelis refugees in their own country.

On the other hand, things looked even worse two weeks ago. Netanyahu found himself humiliatingly scrambling to get ahold of Biden, hoping against hope for the arms shipments to be approved and still unsure whether the president would meet him during his anticipated visit to the American capital. Now, just one shaky debate performance later, it’s White House spokespeople touting Biden’s staunch relationship with Bibi as proof of his leadership skills, with a meeting between the two leaders now as much in the interest of the White House as in that of the Israeli prime minister.

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IF Biden has his druthers, Bibi will have already agreed to a deal ending the war in the south in exchange for the release of the hostages, which would almost certainly lead to a cease-fire in the north as well.

Netanyahu, for his part, stands to lose his position if he goes for a deal to end the war and relinquish the IDF’s gains in Gaza, especially the crucial Philadelphi Route and IDF positions in the center of the strip.

Otzma Yehudit chair Itamar Ben Gvir, whose party Netanyahu needs to stay in government, has stated explicitly that he’ll withdraw from the coalition if Israel announces an end to the war.

“This is my red line,” Ben Gvir told me. “Because that would mean that Hamas won, and the message Israel would send to the world is that you can carry out a horrific massacre like October 7 and stay on your feet.”

When I asked a senior Otzma Yehudit source whether they would topple the government even at the cost of letting in a left-wing government, the response was a comparison to the chareidi red line: the draft.

When I pointed out that the chareidim haven’t left the government despite Netanyahu’s inability to advance a new draft bill, the source replied: “Wholesale release of terrorists and an end to the war would be our equivalent of the military police descending on yeshivos, something no chareidi could accept.”

When I asked Ben Gvir whether he doesn’t trust Netanyahu to pirouette out of a deal while adroitly shifting the blame to Hamas for its failure, his answer was that there’s no certainty that Hamas will be able to withstand pressure from Qatar and the US to accept it. With Hamas dropping one of its key demands over the weekend, it seems Ben Gvir was the first to sense the change in the wind.

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Netanyahu isn’t just trapped between Biden and Ben Gvir. He also has to handle defense establishment sources leaking their view that a deal that includes painful concessions is in Israel’s interests.

In an unprecedented move, Netanyahu informed the defense minister that from now on, discussions will be held not in the defense minister’s office on the 14th floor of the Kiryah, but only in the prime minister’s office.

“You formulate decisions with the Mossad and Shin Bet and come to me with everything already decided,” Netanyahu said, seeking to remind Yoav Gallant who’s the boss.

Defense establishment heads’ interest in a deal to end the war is hardly surprising; supplies of armaments are depleted, the reserve system is stretched to the limit, and a full-scale war against Hezbollah in Lebanon could make the fighting in the south over the past nine months look like a mere warm-up act.

But as always, personal considerations are involved as well. Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi and Shin Bet head Ronen Bar have found themselves under attack from the right, singled out as those chiefly responsible for the massacre of October 7.

The campaign against them on the part of right-wing journalists over the past few months has begun to make its mark in the polls, with Netanyahu’s numbers rebounding somewhat. In some, he’s even reestablished himself as the public’s top choice for prime minister.

Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi is well aware that he won’t keep his uniform for long. A sustained pause in the war will almost certainly force him to resign from his position. Even the center-left Gadi Eizenkot, Benny Gantz’s ally, said last week that the chief of staff and the head of the Shin Bet should resign at the first opportunity of a lull in the fighting.

Herzi Halevi recently came under scrutiny for promoting Shlomi Binder as head of the military intelligence directorate, replacing retiring Major General Aharon Haliva, who became the epitome of the general staff’s willful blindness.

What’s wrong with that? Well, Binder commanded the Operations Division on the morning of October 7, and his appointment triggered protests from parents of the front-line soldiers taken captive. The chief of staff initially doubled down on the appointment, but Binder’s name came up once too often in the IDF’s internal investigation regarding October 7 over the past few weeks, forcing the chief of staff to freeze the appointment and leave Haliva himself, the father of the fiasco, in place for now.

With all this baggage, it’s hard to see how Israel’s leadership can make a disinterested decision regarding the hostage deal. Netanyahu himself, who polishes and rehearses his speeches obsessively, will have to prepare two drafts for his Congressional address. In one, he’ll justify a painful but necessary deal in muted tones; in the other, he’ll perorate with Churchillian grandiosity about how no terror group will ever bring Israel to its knees.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1019)