Source: Zman Yisrael (Israel Time)

By Pinhas Inbari

The president of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald Lauder, used to say that the world is divided into two: those Benjamin Netanyahu has already betrayed, and those he is yet to betray. If you pay attention, many of those who were once close to Netanyahu and helped him now find themselves in the camp of his opponents—among the loudest of them.

Why did I need this reminder? Because of the warning Netanyahu received from the president of the United Arab Emirates—a warning he chose to ignore.

When the public storm broke, the unbelievable happened: Netanyahu turned his smear machine against the man who, according to Arab press reports, stood behind the warning—senior Palestinian official Mohammed Dahlan—because of his role in passing the warning to Israel about the disaster building against it. Note this: the man to whom the smear machine attributes the warning, instead of being invited to the beacon-lighting ceremony, instead of being thanked, was forced to absorb mud slung by government mouthpieces.

The broader Arab press, led by panels of commentators on Al-Hadath and leading bloggers, kept following the revelations. According to reports there: the exposure—that Mohammed Dahlan stood behind the warning—not only did not hurt him for supposedly "collaborating" with Israel, but one commentator on a leading television channel said that if Dahlan indeed helped bring down Netanyahu, he should be blessed for it.

According to reports in the Arab world, information about Yahya Sinwar's plans reached Dahlan's people through their mediation with Hamas on the exchange of hostages and bodies between the organization and Israel—mediation in which, for the first time, Sinwar did not insist on the release of a large number of prisoners from Israeli jails, but instead demanded the establishment of employment zones for Gazans along the border with Israel and Egypt.

According to the same reports, once Sinwar saw that Prime Minister Netanyahu was not responding to him—being consumed with advancing the judicial overhaul in Israel—Sinwar himself told Dahlan's people that he was preparing an unprecedented "earthquake" against Israel.

The Egyptians passed these messages on to Israel, and when Dahlan's people saw that the Shin Bet was failing to shake Netanyahu out of his indifference to the information, they brought the president of the UAE himself into the picture. Netanyahu heard—and went off with his wife for a vacation in the Golan, wearing rose-colored glasses.

Regarding the conversation with the UAE president, it was reported that Netanyahu told him Israel's problem was in Judea and Samaria, not Gaza. Does this explain the redeployment of forces from the Gaza periphery to Judea and Samaria, to guard the Huwara celebrations and protect the outposts?

Dahlan did everything he could to wake Israel up, and that is precisely his failure: now he is the one required to take the fall.

And in general, this government's mantra—that all the Arabs, and the whole world, are against us—does not hold up against the test of the Iran crisis: when Iran attacked Israel, parts of the Arab world actually helped, and together with the air force and armies of the United States, Britain (yes, "antisemitic" Britain) and France (whose president took an insult from Yair Netanyahu), the Iranian attack was repelled.

There are also important revelations about Qatar, according to Arab press reports. The prevailing view in Israel is that Qatar funded Hamas, and that's true—but at the moments that mattered, when the war broke out and immediately after, Qatar actually played a positive role: it pressured Hamas to release all the hostages, threatening to expel it from Doha.

After Hamas agreed, so the Arab press reports, the head of the Mossad arrived in Doha and rejected the Qatari proposal—on Netanyahu's orders. After leaving the room, the Emir of Qatar told those present at the meeting: "This is not the Israel we knew."

The mood in Arab television studios is one of undisguised longing for the Netanyahu era to finally end, and for Israel to come back to its senses.

If part of the credit for removing Netanyahu ends up going to Dahlan, it will only benefit him the day after. And already, following the meeting between Dahlan's people and Hussein al-Sheikh in Egypt, there are reports, according to our sources, of senior figures in the Dahlan camp returning to Ramallah—for now quietly, but preparing to surface openly.

Based on the picture emerging from Arab discourse, it turns out the entire Middle East knew about Hamas's planned attack, Netanyahu included. And Israel, instead of preparing for the real danger, prepared for the tension it itself had created in Judea and Samaria—and continues to escalate it to this day.

But that is not where Netanyahu's great failure stops; it continues to unfold right now, as Saudi Arabia comes under attack from the Houthis, who are carrying out significant operations in the war in Yemen.

The tripartite agreement Saudi Arabia forged with Turkey and Pakistan is now exposed in all its nakedness: no one is coming to defend Saudi Arabia. According to reports, Israel wants to and could help Saudi Arabia—and that is indeed its genuine interest—but Saudi Arabia refuses.

It is not willing to draw close to Israel, not only because of senior cabinet ministers Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, but also because of Netanyahu himself. Saudi Arabia, too, is well aware of the entire saga of the warnings Netanyahu received via Dahlan, and it too understands that "Israel is no longer what we knew."

It's not only in Israel that people are impatiently longing for elections—the Arab world, and indeed the whole world, feels the same.

Pinhas Inbari is a senior Middle East researcher, journalist, author, screenwriter and poet. He wrote the entries on the Palestinians for the New Hebrew Encyclopedia. He served for many years as a researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He has written nonfiction books on the Palestinian issue, and a linguistics book on the roots of the Hebrew language, "Story of a Root." The novels he wrote together with his wife Aviva are: "On the Back of a Storm," about the challenges facing Christian communities in the Western Galilee during the British Mandate era in the face of radical Islam and the status of women, and "Guardian of Sheol," which deals with corruption in Israel.