The government of Benjamin Netanyahu has three games open at the same time: all are very difficult and in front of all of them he appears weakened by fourteen weeks of internal protests, which have created rifts in the executive and also within Likud, the prime minister’s party, the one in which for years every voice of dissent was nipped in the bud.
The refugee camp of Jenin, a city in the West Bank closer to Israel than to Ramallah, once the capital of those who believed in dialogue between the two sides (one for all: the actor Juliano Mer-Khamis, killed in 2011 by unnamed killers) is where the clash turned into battle several times in recent months: several times the Israeli special forces entered the camp in search of suspects and were greeted by armed men. But the clash went much further: at least 84 Palestinians died between the beginning of the year and mid-March according to the Red Crescent, a figure that makes 2023 one of the bloodiest years. On the Israeli side, there is nowhere to go: yesterday morning two women were killed in an attack in the West Bank.
Precisely those images would be the cause that inflamed the second front that Netanyahu finds himself facing: that of the northern (Lebanon) and southern (Gaza) border. Rocket launches were launched from Gaza towards southern Israel on Wednesday: the air force’s response was immediate, with two twin raids. The same thing happened from Lebanon on Thursday: 34 rockets, the most violent attack since the 2006 war, led to the night reaction of the Israeli air force, which hit Palestinian targets in the country of cedars, accepting – at least on paper – the words of the archenemy Hezbollah which had distanced itself from those launches.
The third front is apparently furthest from what happened yesterday in Tel Aviv: for 14 weeks, hundreds of thousands of Israelis have taken to the streets to say no to the justice reform wanted by the Netanyahu government. The turning point of the crisis was Netanyahu’s decision to fire Defense Minister Yoav Gallant who had called for a halt to the reform after realizing that thousands of reservists – the backbone of the Israeli defense – threatened not to answer the call of the Armed forces in an emergency. It was there that a large part of this country said “no” to the man who has governed it for twenty years. It was there that the three crises intersected. Today, untangling them seems really complex.