Opinion | Netanyahu Led Us to Catastrophe. He Must Go.

Mr. Netanyahu’s latest government came to power just over nine months ago. It’s the most extreme he has led, because only extreme parties were willing to join a coalition with a prime minister on trial for corruption. His own Likud has become a party of lackeys; experienced politicians critical of him abandoned it.

The government’s agenda — what appears to be virtually its only concern — has been funneling money to ultra-Orthodox schools, supporting West Bank settlement and, most of all, pushing through radical changes to the judicial system that would protect Mr. Netanyahu and the right’s hold on power. The attention of the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, a far-right politician known for his openly racist views, is divided between two jobs: While he occupies one of the most demanding roles in government, he also oversees settlement in the Defense Ministry.

The security cabinet, responsible for directing the military, has met only sporadically. In July the military chief of staff, Gen. Herzi Halevi, was reportedly unable to get a meeting with Mr. Netanyahu. Instead the general wrote the prime minister a letter, with a warning of danger to the army’s internal cohesion — apparently owing to the government’s judicial program. But whether he was distracted by his trial and immense public opposition to his plans or was overconfident in Israel’s advantage over its enemies, Mr. Netanyahu clearly wasn’t paying close attention to security this year.

Blindness to the danger from Gaza has a longer history, though, and is rooted in a strategic choice that has guided Mr. Netanyahu since his return to power in 2009. (He first held office from 1996 to 1999.) Nearly two years before, Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip, splitting the nascent Palestinian polity in two. The president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, and his Fatah movement retained their limited power in autonomous areas of the West Bank. Though Mr. Abbas has never reached a two-state agreement with Israel, he has consistently favored that outcome.

Mr. Netanyahu clearly chose to see the split as positive, as a way to foster Gaza’s independence from the West Bank and to weaken the Palestinian Authority. In 2019, for instance, he explained why he allowed the Hamas regime in Gaza to be propped up with cash from Qatar rather than have it depend on a financial umbilical cord to the West Bank. He told Likud lawmakers that “whoever is against a Palestinian state should be for” the Qatari funding, as paraphrased by a source who was present. Given Hamas’s rejection of Israel’s existence and the lack of a single Palestinian voice, a two-state agreement seemed impossible — allowing Israel to go on ruling the West Bank, as Mr. Netanyahu clearly prefers.