Aluf Benn with Larry Mantle | Israel Heads to the Polls: The Stakes Couldn't be Higher

But I want to talk about the protests that you mentioned where people were coming out against the Supreme Court changes and making it more difficult for the court to be independent.

We have the October 7th attack, and there is a kind of rallying effect, as often happens when people rally around leaders when there's a lack of security and traumatic events occur.

So to what extent has that diminished, that rallying around the Netanyahu administration? To what extent are people now starting to...

blame Netanyahu for lack of preparedness for the attack or failing the heat warnings that might have come from intelligence sources elsewhere before? How much of that is accruing to Netanyahu now?

Well, Netanyahu made the decision right at the first hours of October 7th to stick with his political base rather than reach out to the center and say, OK, let's put aside the judicial overhaul.

Let's put aside all regime changes and just focus on fighting Hamas and other enemies with Palah Iran.

You name it.

He didn't.

He stuck to his coalition, dug his heels, and launched a campaign to put the entire blame on the military and intelligence services that indeed did a very lousy job in both preparing and anticipating the Hamas attack and also responding in kind, allowing for the massacre of 1,200 Israelis and the abduction of 250 hostages to Gaza on a single day.

Netanyahu refused to take any responsibility whatsoever to this failure, regardless of his position atop the entire government and security system in Israel, and also his ignorance of warnings that were not pinpointed on this attack in Gaza, but still he should have put more emphasis on making sure that the borders were protected.

You know, the guy was in power for years, longest serving Israeli prime minister, missed the security in his own words about himself, but he simply brushed it out.

He believed that all these warnings were just political ploys to derail his government changes rather than real warnings.

And he refused to take responsibility.

Since the beginning of the war, even before that, during the protest, his coalition failed to win a majority in almost all public opinion polls in Israel.

And regardless of what happened during the war, the Hamas attack, the Israeli counterattack into Gaza, the fight with Hezbollah in Lebanon, the two rounds of fighting with Iran did not really change the Israeli political challenge.

Both sides more or less are terminated where the decisive vote is the Arab vote in Israel.

Now, what Netanyahu does, and going back to the beginning, why did I emphasize all this talk about the Protestant judicial overhaul? Because to Israelis, the vote is mostly about domestic affairs.

It's not about Gaza.

The war in Gaza, the war in Lebanon, the occupation of part of Syria by Israel, the attacks on Iran, by and large, have been extremely popular.

Even today, many opposition leaders who run against Netanyahu argued that they would have won the war because he fought so hard, but he failed to defeat Hamas, he failed to defeat Hezbollah, he failed to defeat Iran or to topple the regime there.

But they would have done a better job.

So there is no, unlike the criticism that you hear about Israel on the outside, that is mostly focused on what it did in Gaza.

And in a different way, but more prominently now, Jewish terrorism against Palestinians in the West Bank with the tacit or sometimes less than tacit support of the government.

In Israel, the main issue is identity, is the ability to fight over a liberal way of life on one side, and to protect the achievement of the cultural war for the right thing on the other side.