The backdrop could not be more symbolic: 18 bullet-pocked bodies, including a mother and her three children, strewn between Kiryat Shmona’s faceless apartment blocks.
That happened on the morning of 11 April, the fourth day of Passover 1974. At noon Golda Meir emerged from a cabinet meeting, drove to President Ephraim Katzir’s residence, and tendered her resignation.
The terrorist atrocity in Galilee was proverbial, but it was not the reason for the dramatic decision that ended a 56-year public career.
The reason was the previous fall’s Yom Kippur War and the public mayhem it uncorked. “I was following and listening to what’s been happening in the public,” she told the Knesset in the afternoon. “There is an upheaval I cannot ignore.”
Netanyahu is faced with only two options
Half a century on, Benjamin Netanyahu faces the same combination of public wrath and political dead end that Meir faced when Passover 1974 approached. And like Meir, Netanyahu has only two alternatives: resign gracefully or depart in disgrace.
THE SIMILARITIES between Meir’s situation and Netanyahu’s are clear, and the differences only make his case even worse than hers.
Like Meir, Netanyahu was at the helm when an enemy invasion caught Israel by total surprise. Like Meir, Netanyahu is out to shift the blame to the security establishment. And like Meir, Netanyahu faces a livid public that refuses to listen to his excuses.
And Golda’s excuses, though ineffective, were better than Netanyahu’s.
As a veteran student of polls, Netanyahu knows that when their results are inconclusive, inconsistent, or sensational they are meaningless, but when their statements are sharp, consistent, and durable – as they have been for half a year in his case – they really tell what the public feels. And the public overwhelmingly feels that Netanyahu’s time is up.
Meir’s political position was better because despite losing one-tenth of her original voters, she won the postwar election, and retained much of the mainstream electorate. Netanyahu has lost the mainstream electorate. Half a year after the war, and one month before her departure, Meir won 51 Knesset seats. Netanyahu is polling hardly 20.
Golda also had a military argument that Netanyahu cannot make.
Golda inherited her predecessor’s defense minister – Moshe Dayan – and never replaced him. Dayan was militarily dominant throughout her premiership.
While there was no arguing Meir’s job was to supervise Dayan and when necessary also overrule him, the public still saw the army’s performance as a reflection of Dayan’s leadership more than hers.
In fact, the main political crisis on the eve of Meir’s resignation was a rebellion within the ruling Labor Party by large sections joining the public demand that she fire Dayan.
Netanyahu, by contrast, had no Moshe Dayan. Having paraded a succession of seven odd defense ministers between 2007 and 2023, including one year (2018-19) when he held that portfolio himself, Netanyahu’s chances of successfully shifting the blame to the military are smaller than Meir’s.
Moreover, when it came to Hamas, the IDF and the Shin Bet did not formulate policy. Netanyahu did, and his formula was that the jihadist militia could and should be contained, meaning bribed, as a counterweight to the Palestinian Authority (PA). This is what a vast majority believe Netanyahu did, and this is what the same majority now think was reckless.
Lastly, hovering above all this record of administrative responsibility and political misjudgment is a moral dimension that in Golda’s situation was absent.
GOLDA did not personify the Israeli age of machismo that began with 1967’s victory and ended with 1973’s humbling. Dayan did, and in fact was that era’s emblem, an arrogant man with hardly any friends who habitually put off people and seldom consulted on anything with anyone.
Netanyahu has played the same role in the era that preceded the current war, and doubly so. Sporting Dayan’s kind of charisma and eloquence, but with no Golda above him, Netanyahu chased away a succession of strong-willed people who could debate him and swamped the government with weak, obsequious non-entities, so he would be neither challenged nor helped by anyone as he steers the wheel alone.
That is how the era of bravado, swagger, conceit, bickering, and empty rhetoric that preceded the October 7 catastrophe was born and shaped, and that is why this era and its eventual trauma have Bibi Netanyahu’s name written all over them.
Worst of all, Netanyahu did all this while consciously dividing the people, hammering at the judiciary, and nurturing ultra-Orthodoxy as a strategic partner, personally oiling the draft-dodging machine that now depletes the supreme military effort with which the Netanyahu era reaches its end.
That Netanyahu thinks he can trick, deceit, and sweet-talk his way through all this to yet more time at our teetering ship’s helm is mind-boggling, but will not change the fact that his time is up.
With thousands displaced, killed, maimed, or bereaved while skirmishing persists on multiple fronts from Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria to Iran, Europe, the White House, and the economy – his choice is whether to stage an orderly retreat or face monumental defeat, whether through electoral trouncing or a parliamentary plot.
Netanyahu can preempt his approaching disgrace by announcing, now, a date on which he will retire – say six months from now – and thus launch an orderly succession contest within Likud.
Netanyahu’s retirement announcement has yet to be written, but its concluding sentence is already written, penned by Golda Meir.
“I want to end my statement,” she told the Knesset on 11 April 1974, “with a call on the people to live and act not like a defeated multitude, but like a nation and a state secure of their future. We face struggles and challenges, and we can overcome them all.”
That’s what Golda did 50 years ago this week, and that’s what Bibi Netanyahu should do today.
www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is the author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.