Wednesday briefing: Israel turns on Netanyahu – but is it enough to end his premiership?
Good morning. Almost three-quarters of the Israeli public want Benjamin Netanyahu to resign as prime minister. More than two-thirds say he is handling the war in Gaza badly. And more than half think his government is not doing enough to bring the Israeli hostages held by Hamas home.
Now the ultranationalists he relies on to prop up his fragile coalition are warning that they will bring the government down if he does not go ahead with a major assault on Rafah – and the opposition leaders who joined his war cabinet, Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, are coming under increasing pressure to step down. With tens of thousands of people joining renewed protests calling for Netanyahu’s removal, his political prospects would appear to be dire.
But this is Netanyahu – and there are still vast obstacles to the end of his era of political dominance. For today’s newsletter, I spoke to Peter Beaumont, the Guardian’s senior international reporter and former Jerusalem correspondent, about why the Israeli prime minister is in dire straits – and how he’s still hanging on. Here are the headlines.
Five big stories
Gender identity | Thousands of vulnerable children questioning their gender identity have been let down by the NHS providing unproven treatments and by the “toxicity” of the trans debate, a landmark report has found. Read the key findings, an interview with author Dr Hilary Cass, and views from young trans people and their families.
Israel-Gaza latest | David Cameron has confirmed the UK government will not suspend arms exports to Israel after the killing of seven aid workers in an airstrike on Gaza last week. The foreign secretary said that he had reviewed the most recent legal advice about the situation on the ground, but this left the UK’s position on export licences “unchanged”.
Politics | William Wragg has resigned the Conservative party whip days after admitting to giving out colleagues’ personal phone numbers to someone he had met on a dating app. Wragg, who represents Hazel Grove, will now sit as an independent MP.
Museums | A staff member who put his own art on display at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne has been fired. The 51-year-old man had smuggled his work “in the hope of achieving his artistic breakthrough”.
Peter Higgs | Nobel prize-winning physicist, Peter Higgs, who proposed a new particle known as the Higgs boson, has died. Higgs was awarded the Nobel prize for physics in 2013 for his work in 1964 showing how the boson helped bind the universe together by giving particles their mass.
In depth: ‘Nobody wants to be the one to bring the government down’
In one sense, Netanyahu’s unpopularity is exactly what is making him hard to dislodge: the polls in Israel are so bad for the prime minister and his Likud party that even with a difficult coalition, there is no appetite to go to the voters any time soon.
“There is a degree of truth to the idea that he would like to prolong the war for as long as possible in the hope that something will turn up to save him,” Peter Beaumont said. “If the IDF could find and kill [Hamas leaders] Mohammed Deif and Yahya Sinwar, I don’t know if that would be enough, but it is the kind of thing he is hoping for.”
There is no requirement for an election to be held before October 2026. An earlier vote would require the support of a majority of members of the 120-member Knesset, where Likud holds 32 seats and leads a 72-seat governing coalition – so a key question is whether Netanyahu’s partners will decide to abandon him.
That is certainly a strong possibility – “but there’s an unwritten rule about not challenging government during wartime,” Peter said. “Even though they are all politicking, nobody wants to be the one to bring the government down. Everyone wants someone else to jump so that they can benefit, and that’s why things are stuck.”
Despite these caveats, there are very real risks for Netanyahu.
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Will the far right abandon him?
Netanyahu’s coalition relies in part on a 14-seat far-right faction to govern. The leading lights of that group, finance minister Bezalel Smotrich and national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, have opposed any hostage-for-prisoner deal with Hamas – Smotrich recently said the hostages were “not the most important thing” – and argue that Jewish settlers should return to Gaza, with Ben-Gvir saying there is a need to “encourage emigration” by Palestinians living there.
After some Israeli troops were withdrawn from Gaza on Sunday, Ben-Gvir said that “if the prime minister decides to end the war without a large-scale offensive in Rafah to defeat Hamas, he will not have a mandate to continue”.
“It is possible that they could walk away,” Peter said, pointing to their hopes of gaining votes from rightwing Likud supporters in any new election. “But they will never get a seat at the table like they have at the moment. So that militates against collapsing the government.” Smotrich and Ben-Gvir represent different parties, with Smotrich’s currently polling below the minimum threshold for seats at the Knesset: “Israeli politics is notoriously transactional,” Peter said. “Just because they appear to have similar world views, they might not jump the same way in a pinch.”
Netanyahu’s response to Ben-Gvir’s warning over Rafah – to make a swift statement promising that “there is a date” for the offensive, which is such a problem for Israel’s wavering allies in the west – is evidence that “his decision horizon is day to day,” Peter added. “His calculations at the moment are almost always: ‘What do I need to do to keep the coalition going for a little bit longer?’”
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Can he resolve the ultra-orthodox conscription crisis?
Two ultra-orthodox, or Haredi, parties hold 18 seats as part of Netanyahu’s coalition. The vast majority of those of serving age in the community they represent are exempt from mandatory military service, a longstanding source of contention in Israeli politics that has been given new urgency by the invasion of Gaza. The supreme court ruled in March that because the government had failed to agree an extension of the exemption before it lapsed, subsidies to ultraorthodox seminaries should be suspended.
This is a major problem for Netanyahu because it divides his coalition: some secular members could withdraw if he tries to restore the status quo, while the Haredi parties are also threatening to collapse the government.
“It should be a dealbreaker for them in theory,” Peter said. “But the reality is that they still obtain huge financial benefit from their role in the coalition, and there is some scepticism over whether this will ever finally force ultraorthodox conscription – this has been an issue that hasn’t been resolved for years. So it isn’t necessarily in their interests to throw their toys out of the pram.”
The respected Haaretz columnist Anshel Pfeffer wrote earlier this month that “enlistment of young Haredi men may yet be the issue that brings down the government, but probably not before the Knesset session ends in late July”.
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Will Netanyahu lose support in the war cabinet or his own party?
Benny Gantz and Gadi Eisenkot, both centre-right opposition figures in the National Unity party, joined Netanyahu’s war cabinet after 7 October and bolstered the government’s stability. But they have both been highly critical of Netanyahu’s military strategy – Eisenkot has blamed Netanyahu for the 7 October attacks and said that the idea of “absolute victory” is unrealistic, while Gantz recently said that there should be an election in September.
Gantz is now the most popular politician in Israel, and a frontrunner to become prime minister when an election finally comes. But, Peter points out, “if Gantz and his party leave, Netanyahu will still have 64 seats in his coalition, which is a majority.”
Meanwhile, there are those within Likud who no longer have faith in Netanyahu to lead them into the next election. “He is clearly a political liability for Likud,” Peter said. “People will be thinking about what the scale of the loss could be if he leads them again.” But at least until the war ends, few are willing to cross a leader with a reputation for machiavellian acts of vengeance, and no single candidate to succeed him has emerged.
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Will the protests grow?
Last year, vast crowds were turning out for weekly protests against the Netanyahu government – a movement that swiftly dissipated in the aftermath of the 7 October attacks. Recently, though, there have been signs that the movement could reignite – and while the protests are not as large as those seen in 2023, “there does seem to be a growing heat around it,” Peter said.
“The difficulty at the moment is that there isn’t a single unifying idea that all of these protesters are aligning behind that can be enough to force elections. And Netanyahu has always told his voter base that there is a liberal lefty elite working against their interests – he will seek to present the protesters in the same way.”
But that strategy seems unlikely to expand his base of support from its current anaemic levels. “There are a lot of people looking at him now and saying, ‘he doesn’t have a clear direction, he seems erratic, and his time is over’. But people have endlessly written Netanyahu off, including myself, and he has defied them. The lesson of the Netanyahu era is: never say never.”
What else we’ve been reading
Sirin Kale continues her series looking at how floods have affected Europe, this time focusing on the Ahr valley in Germany – an area used to high waters but unprepared for the extremes the climate crisis has caused. Toby Moses, head of newsletters
I just finished watching the excellent Ripley on Netflix, and I thought Rebecca Nicholson put her finger on what’s so good about it in her What’s On newsletter this week: it goes slowly. In an era where “series are top-loaded with twists and grabby openers”, she writes, Patricia Highsmith’s story thrives not “on shocking twists and turns, but rather an unfurling of tension and menace.” Sign up for What’s On here. Archie
Michael Palin tells Simon Hattenstone about the death of his wife of 57 years, Helen, and how grief has affected him: “Every now and then, the house seems empty and you feel you’ll never have a friend as close as that; you’ll never have someone who knows as much about you as Helen did about me.” Toby
After a group of former diplomats called for the abolition and replacement of the Foreign Office, Sathnam Sanghera writes persuasively for the New Statesman about why its headquarters at King Charles Street amount to “a celebration of the British empire at its most powerful and racist” – and reflects on what it means to make policy surrounded by the remnants of colonialism. Archie
Could green onions determine the outcome of the South Korean election? Raphael Rashid and Justin McCurry explain all. Toby
Sport
Champions League | Arsenal waited seven years to prove they could meet Bayern Munich as equals and, after a riveting night’s work that leaves this quarter-final tantalisingly poised, they ended their match at Emirates tied at 2-2. At the Bernabéu, a thrilling encounter between Real Madrid and Manchester City (above) ended 3-3 after the visitors came back from 2-1 down to lead 3-2 before Federico Valverde’s 79th minute equaliser.
Paris Olympics | The president of the Paris 2024 Olympics has admitted that the triathlon competition could be delayed, or the swimming leg cancelled, if adverse weather conditions impact on water quality in the River Seine. Tony Estanguet conceded that the prospect of heavy rain raising E coli levels was one of his “biggest challenges” for the Games, which start in just over 100 days.
Football | Leah Williamson, the England captain, has joked that the best way to stop her Arsenal teammate Katie McCabe would be to make sure she doesn’t get the ball, but starving the Republic of Ireland of possession was exactly what the Lionesses did on the way to a 2-0 win to kickstart their Euro 2025 qualifying campaign.
The front pages
The national health service’s gender identity review appears across a number of front pages on Wednesday, with the Guardian’s headline reading “Thousands of children unsure of gender identity ‘let down by NHS’”. The Times says “NHS review rejects use of puberty blockers”, while the Telegraph reports “NHS to review all trans treatment”. The Mail’s headline says “At last, a voice of sanity on children and trans dogma”.
The Mirror looks at the Horizon IT inquiry, under the headline “Mr Bates vs the ‘thugs in suits’”. The i reports “Public finance ‘mess’ prevents spending spree after election, Labour warns”. And finally, the Financial Times says “OpenAI and Meta poised for artificial intelligence leap with bots that reason”.
Today in Focus
Profits over pipes: who should own our water?
Thames Water owes hundreds of millions of pounds in debt, and the UK government is concerned about its potential collapse. Helena Horton reports
Cartoon of the day | Martin Rowson
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad
In Lyari, a crowded neighbourhood in Karachi, children gather around a man with an ice-cream cart – but he’s serving up stories instead of sweets. Mohammad Noman is one of two storytellers with the Kahaani Sawaari (Stories on Wheels) programme, run by GoRead.pk, which aims to boost literacy in less privileged communities in Pakistan’s largest city.
Though education is free in Pakistan, books and uniforms can be prohibitively pricey for many families, and as many as 77% of 10-year-olds are unable to understand simple text.
The ice-cream cart library can be pedalled to the smallest of alleyways in neighbourhoods where literacy rates are especially low. Since the project started in 2021, roughly 15,000 children have attended more than 700 storytelling sessions, and Noman says some of the children he’s read to have gone on to enrol in school.
The project hasn’t only benefited children, though. Noman has also learned a lot, he says. “It has brought a change in me as well. I’ve become more tolerant of people and developed patience. I think I have a certain rapport with children and they listen.”
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s puzzles are here to keep you entertained throughout the day. Until tomorrow.
