Bibi-sitter’s record on protecting children not bright

As the Israeli legislative election that will take place on March 17 approaches, candidates are increasing the momentum of their campaigns. In a recent creative and quite amusing political advertisement, Israel's current Prime Minister and right-wing Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu is portrayed as a babysitter.

Using his well-known nickname 'Bibi' for a play on words, Netanyahu urges Israeli voters to choose his security oriented politics. He also criticizes his main electoral rivals, Labor leader Isaac Herzog and Hatnuah leader Tzipi Lvini, who will participate in the elections as a coalition, on their oscillating political backgrounds. Netanyahu presents himself as a stable alternative, but the role he has chosen to depict this alternative raises several questions.

Netanyahu, one of the most successful leaders of Israeli politics since the late 1980's, is known as a moderate figure of Israeli right wing politics on the Israel-Palestine conflict. This fact is one of the most important reasons why he has been distinguished by Israeli voters among right wing leaders, along with his politically stable position in extremely fragmented Israeli party politics. However, his security oriented politics and stance is usually interpreted as being extreme by non-Israelis, as is the case for most Israeli politics.

Netanyahu's first premiership between 1996 and 1999 saw the slow decline of hope for peace that was achieved in the Oslo Accords, although he and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat initiated the Wye River Memorandum for a new momentum in peace process.

After losing the elections to Labor's Ehud Barak in 1999, Netanyahu made a brief retreat from politics and his own party Likud. This vacuum was soon filled with a more hawkish figure, Ariel Sharon, also infamously known as "the butcher of Beirut." Sharon's visit to Muslims' Haram al-Sharif, known as Temple Mount by the Jews, sparked the Second Intifada in September 2000.

After evaluating Netanyahu's initial stance, one should check the statistics, which are largely available from 2000 onwards, to make a judgment of whether Netanyahu has been successful in his election promise of protecting children throughout his political career.

According to The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, or BT'selem, within the period between 29 September 2000 and 26 December 2008, 4,906 Palestinians were killed. Among those who were killed, 955 were minors and 147 were women. 2,192 of those had not even taken part in any hostilities, protests or clashes. During the same period, the Israeli governments failed to protect 731 Israeli civilians and 332 Israeli security personnel. 123 women and 231 children were among those who were killed.

Netanyahu served as Foreign Minister and later as Finance Minister in Sharon's cabinets between 2002 and 2005.

As Likud chairman and opposition leader starting from 2005, Netanyahu was one of the opponents of the 2008 ceasefire between Hamas and Israel. Hostilities after the ceasefire eventually led to Gaza War of 2008-09, also known as Operation Cast Lead. He supported a tough stance during the operation, which led to 1,398 deaths according to BT'selem. Similarly, 345 of those killed were minors and 110 were women, while 764 were those who had not taken part in the clashes.

Netanyahu started his second prime ministerial period in March 31, 2009 and has held this office up to this date. Between January 2009 and 30 November 2014, which covers almost Netanyahu's entire second and third term of premiership, BT'selem recorded the deaths of 621 Palestinians, including 93 children and 19 women. 181 of those were not involved in hostilities. 52 Israelis, including 12 Israeli security personnel, were also killed in the same period. 10 of those who died were minors and 7 were women.

Netanyahu's biggest "achievement" in protecting the children came on July 8, 2014 with Operation Protective Edge, in which more than 2,200 Palestinians were killed. The lowest estimate of deaths comes from Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), which claims 2,127 deaths, while the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and Hamas sources cited 2,191, 2,192 and 2,310 deaths respectively. Almost 70 percent of all deaths were civilians, and RememberTheseChildren.org (referred as RTC) website lists 129 children's deaths during the course of this operation.

On its first day, the operation took the lives of five innocent siblings of the Karawe family in Khan Younis, Gaza. In the attacks 48 children were killed on July 20, including 19 children from Ahmad Abu Jame' family who were killed along with five others from their family in a single airstrike in Khan Younis.

Between 2000 and 2014, the period in which Netanyahu was very active in Israeli politics, RTC lists 1,656 Palestinian and 131 Israeli children deaths. From March 31, 2009, Netanyahu failed to protect 224 Palestinian and 8 Israeli children as Prime Minister of Israel. RTC's records prove that most Israeli minors were murdered through suicide bomb attacks that took place on Israeli soil and under the protection of Israel's security forces, although Israeli politicians seem to have failed to understand this fact and seek for the security of their citizens through bombing innocent children.

These figures are insufficient to determine all deaths caused by the conflict since there are also many unrecorded, unknown deaths, and thousands of injuries. But they are sufficient enough to indicate that all Israeli and Palestinian politicians, especially Netanyahu, failed to end the bloodshed and protect their citizens.

Netanyahu has proved throughout his career that he favors conflict instead of peace, stubbornness instead of compromise. He even favors isolating Israel in international politics by continuing to build settlements deep inside Palestinian territory, leaving people homeless and driven out from their homelands. What Netanyahu fails to see is that he will only succeed in protecting his citizens once he is not forced to protect them with concrete walls, a constant state of martial law or by continuously battering 1.8 million people who are deprived of all of their rights.