Fear, said Canadian writer Margaret Atwood, is like love: it has a smell.
Now that smell is here. The smell of fear – fear of truth, fear of justice, and fear of the people’s wrath – is spreading from the prime minister’s chambers to every corner of the Jewish state. No nostril can avoid its odor, and no mind can ignore its writ.
And the writ is as simple as it is scathing. Benjamin Netanyahu has lost the ability to lead. Not because of the piling doubts concerning his morality, judgment, and vision, but because he is a coward.
Netanyahu was not born a coward. Cowards don’t go to fight as commandos in the IDF. Cowards also don’t slash social spending to the bone, as Netanyahu did when he was finance minister. But that was in 2003. Two decades later a different Netanyahu emerged.
Netanyahu’s cowardice emerged in all its ugliness immediately after October 7, when he failed to visit the Hamas massacre’s biggest victims, the communities of Be’eri, Kfar Aza, and Nir Oz – which respectively lost 100; 64; and 38 of their members.
They, and another 19 kibbutzim and moshavim where an additional 127 people were massacred, have yet to see the face of the man who was their leader while their children, siblings, parents, and neighbors were machine-gunned, decapitated and/or burned alive.
Winston Churchill, during the blitz on London, regularly emerged in its bombarded streets immediately after the German pilots’ raids, and made a point of surveying the shattered buildings surrounded by their bombers’ victims.
“He did it often,” wrote The Smithsonian’s David Kindy (“How Winston Churchill Endured the Blitz and Taught the People of England to Do the Same,” 24 February 2020), and the impact was profound. “The people would flock to him… this was leadership by demonstration. He showed the world that he cared and he was fearless.”
Netanyahu’s conduct would have appalled his hero. It runs against Churchill’s idea of leading a people under attack, and is the inversion of the fearlessness he displayed. It’s cowardice. Fear of the people. The same fear Netanyahu displayed in his failure since the war’s outbreak to sit for one interview with an Israeli journalist.
These shows of cowardice are about compassion, but Netanyahu’s new cowardice spread further, to the realm of justice.
With millions of citizens sharing an unending war’s burden – as mourners, as refugees, as fighters, as wounded fighters, as fighters’ parents, children and spouses, and as owners of shuttered businesses – most Israelis lost patience for ultra-Orthodoxy’s draft evasion.
A brave leader in Netanyahu’s place would have gone to his ultra-Orthodox allies, and told them squarely: our deal was good for its time, but now it has become impossible to defend. The army needs you – the country needs you – and the people’s resentment is ready to boil over. Enlist.
But the younger Netanyahu’s political bravery had vanished. In its place, a cowardly Netanyahu heard frustrated Zionist rabbis’ admonitions of their ultra-Orthodox peers, and took the anti-Zionists’ side. Not only did he fail to make the anti-patriots enlist, he ladled yet more of the patriots’ money and placed it in the anti-patriots’ chests.
Now, the same cowardice that made him ignore frontline Israelis’ bereavement, and the same cowardice that made him ignore other Israelis’ non-service, is making Netanyahu flee history’s judgment of his role in the worst leadership fiasco in the history of the Jewish state.
THE EVENTS of October 7 had multiple culprits – generals, spooks, diplomats, a whole generation of them. Had Netanyahu not emerged from this war as the coward we now face, he would have been the one to say of this list: you forgot the main culprit – the statesman.
No longer brave
But Netanyahu is no longer brave. Judging by his maneuvers, he will do anything to prevent the establishment of an independent commission of inquiry about what led to the war that has his name written all over it.
It’s a chanceless escape. No one can escape history’s judgment, for every failed leader ultimately faces “a divine being coming up from the earth,” as the Witch of Endor told a terrified King Saul before he confessed: “I am in great trouble: The Philistines are attacking me and God has turned away from me.” (I Samuel 28:14-16).
Even so, Netanyahu’s choice is escape, because escape is the coward’s only choice.
Bravery would have meant unveiling the truth, facing its facts, assuming responsibility and accepting blame, the way the heads of the IDF, the Southern Command, Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet have done, even before a commission of inquiry’s probe.
Netanyahu has made no similar move, and if anyone needed proof of his cowardice on this front, he supplied it this week in his response to President Isaac Herzog’s compromise proposal concerning a commission of inquiry’s formula.
Configuring the libelous rejection of Supreme Court President Yitzhak Amit as prejudiced against Netanyahu, Herzog suggested that the commission be appointed jointly by Amit and Justice Noam Solberg, a West Bank resident who was appointed by Netanyahu himself.
Netanyahu rejected this formula flatly. Solberg, he knows, would do what Amit would do: he would expose the truth. And the truth is that Netanyahu masterminded Hamas’s cultivation, deluding himself he would ride the tiger and use it to divide the Palestinians.
Worse, the judges might discover that the Shin Bet warned against sending money to Hamas in general, and through Qatar in particular. And worst of all, they might show that the spooks recommended killing Hamas’s leaders well ahead of the war, only to be overruled by the man who thought he could tame the fundamentalist beast.
Bravery would demand airing such a harsh truth, hearing it silently, and accepting it humbly, but cowardice has different demands: libel the judge, fire the witness, and bury the truth.
The writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of The Jewish March Folly (Yediot Sefarim, 2019) and Ha’Sfar Ha’Yehudi Ha’Aharon (The Last Jewish Frontier, 2025), a sequel to Theodor Herzl’s The Old New Land.