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Is Netanyahu’s election campaign on the way to war?

Benjamin Netanyahu claimed in 2008 that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had no moral authority to launch peace talks in Palestinians, so he should now implement the same rule on himself and avoid generating a war.
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Let us imagine that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu decides to deploy troops tomorrow for a ground operation in the heart of the Gaza Strip, and some of them are killed in action. Let us say the operation is a reasonable, even completely justified response to rockets fired from Gaza into Israeli border communities. Regardless, the parents of the dead soldiers will harbor the terrible suspicion to their dying day that their loved ones were the victims of an election campaign. They will be haunted by the sense that their sons were sent into battle to best Netanyahu’s main rival, the new Blue and White alliance, which is led by three generals, and to silence critics competing with the Likud for the right-wing vote on April 9.

Yet this ostensibly libelous claim, according to which the prime minister of Israel would place his personal interests ahead of the public good, is not a scenario cooked up by the political left and the media. Netanyahu himself wrote the book.

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