Former Otzma Yehudit MK Michael Ben-Ari, who was barred from running for the Knesset in 2019, has accused Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of misreading the situation within Israel and of delaying making the decisions the country needs to restore security to Israeli citizens.
“There seems to be a certain conception that Hamas is the best of a bad bunch of options,” Ben-Ari told Israel National News. “People think that the chaos that would erupt if they were crushed would be even worse than the current situation. I see this as a completely false assessment, as well as one which is fanning the flames of terrorism. In the language of Arab Islam, there’s a very simple pattern of behavior for when they, or their opponents, are weak. When they’re being beaten, they stop attacking and the situation can resemble a cease-fire of sorts. But when the enemy (and that’s us) shows weakness, they return to the attack.”
Ben-Ari’s comments come just a day after the Israeli government, meeting with representatives from the United States, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority, confirmed certain agreements made a month ago in order to “calm tensions in advance of Ramadan.” Among the Israeli commitments are promises to freeze the approval process for new housing projects in Judea and Samaria for four months, and to refrain from normalizing the status of any additional outpost communities for at least six months. Other unspecified “confidence-building measures” were also agreed upon.

Ben-Ari has no hesitation in blaming Prime Minister Netanyahu for failing to comprehend the Arab mind. “This way of seeing things, of misunderstanding the Arabs, completely characterizes Netanyahu,” he says. “This is a pattern of behavior we’ve seen in him for years, ever since the aftermath of the Western Wall Tunnels Riots [in 1996]. Netanyahu is simply procrastinating, postponing taking hard decisions. In his way of thinking, ‘If there’s a fire burning, I don’t try to extinguish it just in case I end up fanning the flames instead.'”
Despite his criticism of the prime minister in handling terrorism, Ben-Ari is unstinting in his praise for the current government when it comes to Iran. “On the Iranian-Syrian front we see the government continually in action. And although as civilians we know very little of the details of what the government is doing there, we do know that a great many preventative measures [such as aerial strikes on convoys of Iranian materiel] are being taken on a constant basis. I don’t know what the underlying strategy is, or how great the damage inflicted has been, but one has to admit that they seem to be doing what’s required there.”
On the other hand, within Israel, Ben-Ari sees the situation as swiftly deteriorating. “The State of Israel is gripped by fear,” he says bluntly. “We’re just a step away from a second Operation Guardian of the Walls. Anyone who saw what happened last Shabbat in Kafr Qasim, with parades full of marchers openly identifying with Hamas, should realize this. There were masses of people there, and incitement that fans the flames of Islam. The calls of Allahu Akhbar [G-d is great] are nothing like what we Jews mean when we praise Hashem [G-d.] They are battle cries.”