Israel SHUTS DOWN to OUST Netanyahu!

Right, so Israel shuts down to oust Netanyahu, is this fanciful thinking or is this genuinely what is about to happen? Well Israeli commentators are saying right now in light of this move that either a ceasefire is agreed by the end of this week, or Netanyahu’s government falls or possibly even both.
Israel has today begun a General Strike, the people of Israel who are sick and tired of Benjamin Netanyahu and his government putting their own plans before rescuing their hostages and it is only in those terms that the people of Israel have gone on strike, following the killing by IDF forces as many believe, still to be definitively proven, of 6 Hamas held Israeli hostages in Rafah. For 11 months Israeli people along with the rest of the world, have watched Benjamin Netanyahu pretty much obsess far more over his desire to commit war crimes against the Palestinian people than try and rescue those hostages Hamas took on the night of October 7th. Time after time Netanyahu has scuppered peace talks, has changed the remit of negotiators so that the talks that would see their loved ones returned to them fail, for no more reason than keeping Netanyahu in power, reliant on far right coalition to remain there who will not accept any cessation of hostilities. It’s a government that has been running in the sole interests of Netanyahu for too long, this conflict goes on and on for exactly that reason and now enough Israeli have wised up to it, the country has just shut down saying enough is enough. Is this finally the end therefore of Benjamin Netanyahu?
Right, so General Strike time. Either Benjamin Netanyahu agrees to a ceasefire deal to the release of all hostages held by Hamas and end the war, or the country remains shut down. The power all workers have to take on a despotic government that doesn’t work in their interests.
Last night over 300,000 people gathered in Tel Aviv, one of the largest anti-government demonstrations held since October 7th – and there have been several - to once again, as they have done on numerous occasions before, to demand a ceasefire and a hostage deal. They know it is Netanyahu blocking the deal, we all know it is Netanyahu blocking the deal, Israeli media itself has been so fed up with it, even they have published the details of how Netanyahu has been stymying negotiations, changing the remit, demanding more in exchange for less, even as Hamas have agreed to ceasefire proposals themselves, in one instance giving Netanyahu everything he wanted, just to prove he would screw up the deal himself and still not agree to it, which of course he did. He cannot agree to a ceasefire if he doesn’t want his government to fall and himself be dumped out of power. His far right coalition partners won’t allow it, they’ll pull the plug on him if he does. All of this has made Israeli allies look all the wetter when they’ve stood there at a podium bleating about a deal on the table and making demands of Hamas to accept terms, when they have previously and they won’t waste their time agreeing to matters they know Israel enters into each time on bad faith.
On the matter of Netanyahu’s trustworthiness and acting in good faith, Hamas and the people of Israel are for once on the same page, though it certainly isn’t any concern for Palestinians that has brought us to this point, as this excerpt from France 24’s coverage, quoting the chair of Israel’s largest trade union Histadrut, Arnon Bar-David who makes the reasoning for this strike abundantly clear:
‘The head of Israel's powerful Histadrut trade union ordered a "complete strike" in support of Gaza hostages on Monday and urged a deal to secure their release after six more were announced dead.
"We must stop the abandonment of the hostages... I have come to the conclusion that only our intervention can shake those who need to be shaken," Histadrut chairman Arnon Bar-David said in a statement on Sunday.
"Starting tomorrow at six in the morning, the entire Israeli economy will go on complete strike."
As part of the strike "all take-offs and landings at Ben Gurion airport will stop from 8:00 am (0500 GMT)," Bar-David said.
"We need to reach a deal, a deal that is more important than anything else," he said.
"A deal is not progressing due to political considerations and this is unacceptable."
Earlier on Sunday, the Israeli military announced it had recovered the bodies of six hostages from a tunnel in Gaza, sparking anger and grief among families of hostages.’
Enough of their hostages have been killed fundamentally, mainly because of there being no real political will to rescue them, Netanyahu’s aims quite different and to be honest I don’t know why Israeli’s actually are so surprised by all of this. You literally have military rules called Hannibal Directives, which allow your most moral army, to turn their fire on you, to avoid you being captured and held hostage. What kind of government does that? Why should you be surprised the lives of your loved ones are worth so little now that Hamas has them?
Come on guys, 6 more of your countrymen have died because Netanyahu refuses to reach a ceasefire deal, because it would put him out of a job, that’s just two fewer than all the hostages you’ve actually rescued. 251 people were taken hostage on October 7th and although 100 were released during the weeklong ceasefire back in November of last year, just 8 have actually been rescued since by Israel. That isn’t a government trying to rescue hostages. 35 of those who were still held are now believed to be dead and few if I’m being completely frank and honest, believe Hamas killed them, given all who have been released, including one young woman sick of being propagandised by her government, one of those rescued have said Hamas treated them well, protected them and looked after them. Israel meanwhile has laid waste to Gaza indiscriminately end to end and given these latest 6 died in Rafah, the end of the Gaza road for Israel, well no amount of propaganda by Netanyahu and those still loyal to him will wash anymore. There are something like 65-70 hostages still alive in Gaza and their families want them back.
So what does this strike look like today then, now that it is underway? Ben Gurion Airport has been closed down and as Israel’s main transport hub, that has a significant knock on effect for other industries, banking, healthcare and more besides. Roads have been blocked, the main manufacturers in Israel have sided with the unions, have you ever heard of such a thing? Bosses, standing with workers and their unions, but in this they have common cause. They all operate under a government that cares nothing for their own people, their own families and this includes the tech sector, the big economic powerhouse in Israel these days, so this is looking insanely bad for Netanyahu if as has been said, this strike action, this General Strike, continues for as long as it takes and Netanyahu starts listening to someone else because who he’s listening to, obvious as that seems to be, has been echoed by Haaretz newspaper columnist Gideon Levy to Al Jazeera here:
‘Gideon Levy, a columnist with Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, told Al Jazeera that Netanyahu has been defending the right-wing parties in his government that are against any concessions to Hamas.
“They [the parties] could not care less about the hostages,” he said.
Levy stressed that within Netanyahu’s Likud Party, the largest group in the government, Netanyahu wields a lot of power and the party supports him.
“Therefore the challenges from within the government are very limited,” he said. “The real, only possible, challenge would be the streets, but it is too early to judge.”’
Of course Netanyahu is taking his orders from the likes of Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir, because they’ll walk if he doesn’t listen to them, do their bidding and should the government fall, which it now could anyway, the courts await him.
Levy is right though. Netanyahu will do anything to stay in power, he has powerful nation state allies like the US to back him up all the time and stop Israel from coming under the sanction and censure it absolutely should be for the genocide it is committing, so the only way for this to change, is for the people of Israel to do it for themselves. That this has a knock-on effect for Gaza and the West Bank is notwithstanding, these protesters, Histadrut, they care nothing for them, it is self interest driving them, we’re talking about 6 dead Israeli hostages having triggered this move yet in the last 24 hours another 52 Palestinians were killed, no mention of them of course. And yet the result of this strike action,we can hope, will benefit both sides. A new Israeli government without a self serving despot at it’s head, beholden to far right maniacs, would we can hope follow but we also need to see that Palestinian state made real too now. We can’t allow things to go backwards again if things finally come to a head this week and internal strike action bringing Israel’s economy to it's knees finally ends the genocide of the Palestinian people and sees those hostages returned, ideally the 10,000 Palestinian hostages Israel hold as well, seems only fair, but I won’t hold my breath on that one.
Meanwhile the UN Security Council have this last week voted against Israeli interests and did so unanimously, in a way that, given the increasing tensions between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, you can imagine will have incensed them no end. Get the details of that story in this video recommendation here and I’ll hopefully catch you on the next vid. Cheers folks.