Fateful Days -- ‘Netanyahu's Kahanisation & the Smotrichization of the entire government is accelerating’

Conflicts Forum’s compilation tracking strategic developments in Israel, 31 May 2025

Israel’s leading security Think-Tank asks: Are Red Lines Being Crossed in Gaza? Might they constitute War Crimes, Crimes Against Humanity & Genocide? /

Netanyahu has missed the opportunity to attack Iran /

Newly-appointed Shin Bet Chief is a “conceptual off-shoot” of Smotrich – ‘Religious, Mizrahi, right-wing’ /

“Israel will not tolerate another political assassination” /

There is an epidemic of suicides in the IDF /

First move to impeach Netanyahu officially begins /

IDF: No definite confirmation Muhammad Sinwar killed in IDF attack

[These compilations are drawn from analysis & commentary by leading Israeli political and security commentators, predominantly published in Hebrew — as reports published in Hebrew often provide a different window on Israeli internal discourse].

FATEFUL DAYS — ‘Netanyahu's Kahanisation and the Smotrichization of the entire government is accelerating’ (Ben Caspit, Ma’ariv):

These days are fateful … But there seems to be something in the situation we have found ourselves in that makes it doubly fateful. A kind of perfect storm in which all the necessary conditions are gathered from the ends of the earth to create a tornado the likes of which has never been seen before. Because the ongoing war in Gaza, which has long since crossed the line of international legitimacy and has become a political, cynical and uninhibited move, is connected to the internal crisis within Israel, which is connected to the continued mass evasion of the ultra-Orthodox, which is occurring in parallel with the increase in their looting and that of the other sectors of the state coffers. At the same time, Netanyahu continues to gallop toward a constitutional crisis, and this time, it seems, he is striving for it. He wants a crisis, he wants a confrontation, it is no longer obvious that the aforementioned savage will obey the High Court ruling. It is not impossible that he decided to appoint Major General Zini as head of the Shin Bet only so that this appointment would also be rejected and poisoned even more on the way to an explosion. All this time, the Bibi poison machine continues to crush and dismantle the state's institutions, its individuals and servants, on the way to the complete destruction of value.

The process of Netanyahu's Kahanisation is accelerating, just like the Ben-Giverization of the police and the Smotrichization of the entire government. All this is happening while the public he serves is increasingly eroding, increasingly being crushed under the burden. And all around, the storm is raging. The Middle East is changing its face, regimes are passing and rising, the map is being redrawn, old alliances are fading and new ones are taking shape, everyone is gathering around the new tribal campfire, and organizing to jump on the new economic, geopolitical and technological train, led by the Emirates and the Saudis. A train that only we insist on not getting on. The main thing is still ahead of us: Iran.