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.

As head of the opposition in 2008, Netanyahu warned against overtures Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was making to the Palestinians while under suspicion of corruption. “There is concern I have to say, real and not unfounded, that [such a prime minister] will make decisions based on the personal interest of his political survival and not on the basis of national interest,” Netanyahu said in an interview with Channel 2 television. Addressing reports that Olmert had offered to cede land for peace, Netanyahu added, “A prime minister sunk up to his neck in investigations has no moral and public mandate to determine fateful issues for the State of Israel.” 

If a prime minister “up to his neck” in police probes does not have a mandate to make peace, does a prime minister dogged by serious criminal suspicions have a mandate to determine fateful issues such as war?