Israel's history suggests the clock is ticking for Netanyahu after Hamas attack failures

In his more than three decades in politics, Benjamin Netanyahu has accrued almost as many nicknames as he has election wins.

There's "The Magician" for his uncanny ability to grab victory from the jaws of defeat. "King Bibi" for staying atop Israeli politics longer than anyone else. And, universally, though not necessarily affectionately: plain old "Bibi". But there is another one he revelled in, and which now appears in tatters: "Mr Security." How did it all go so wrong?

It remains unclear as to how more than 1,000 Hamas militants managed to take Israel by such devastatingly deadly surprise, murdering - as President Isaac Herzog wrote - more Jews in one day than at any time since the Holocaust.

And for now, Netanyahu's opponents are not calling for Netanyahu to step down. "I'm not dealing now with who is to blame or why we were surprised," said former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, now leader of the opposition. "It's not the time, it's not the place."

But that time and place will come. Indeed, according to Amit Segal, chief political commentator for Israel's Channel 12, the surprise would be if Bibi's prime ministership survives this war. "It would set a national precedent," he told CNN. "Israeli history has taught us that each and every surprise and crisis led to the collapse of the government. That was the case in 1973 [after the Yom Kippur War] with Golda Meir, in 1982 with Menachem Begin in the first Lebanon war, and in 2006, with Ehud Olmert, in the second Lebanon War. The clock is ticking."

History certainly provides a useful comparison: the last time Israeli intelligence failed to anything like this degree - and with so many casualties - was almost 50 years ago to the day, when Egypt and Syria invaded Israel on Yom Kippur.

That, though, was a war "that followed some kind of logic of norms and rules", said Yohanan Plesner, president of the Israel Democracy Institute. "We negotiated peace with [Egyptian] President Sadat a few years later, with majority support of the Knesset. We're not going to negotiate any peace with Hamas. It's a different ballgame altogether."