Benjamin Netanyahu’s a great leader in times of war and peace
Over the past 10 years, Israel’s per capita GDP has grown an astonishing 73 per cent and today its per capita GDP is similar to the UK, France and Germany. Netanyahu was in power for all but 18 months of those 10 years. Our Prime Minister might like to think about this data, given that on his watch Australia’s per capita GDP has been declining. But it seems improbable the two prime ministers will meet in person, let alone discuss economics.
Australia’s relationship with Israel has collapsed. As the Israeli Prime Minister has pointed out, if a liberal democratic country’s policies are lauded by an Islamic terrorist organisation bent on destroying a liberal democratic state, something has gone terribly wrong.
The truth is, Benjamin Netanyahu is a remarkable and unusual politician. Not only has he managed to stay in office to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, but he has grasped the country’s existential security challenges and gone a long way towards solving them.
Since the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the subsequent Camp David and Oslo accords, the threat to Israel’s existence has not come from neighbouring Arab states. It has come from Iran. Iran gradually built up Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, as well as developing ballistic missiles and a nuclear weapons program.
The leadership of Iran made it clear they wanted to destroy Israel. So too did the leadership of Hezbollah and Hamas. They said it over and again.
Still, Netanyahu went out to build relations with the Arab world. He negotiated the Abraham Accords which consolidated Israel’s relationship with Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Morocco. He inherited a working relationship with Egypt, which goes back to Jimmy Carter’s time in the White House.
But after October 7, 2023, Netanyahu decided that Israel had to take on its enemies and defeat them. Obviously, Israel had been planning carefully to do this for a long time. To make the decisions that Netanyahu made, while at the same time managing a fragile coalition government in a fractious Israeli political system, required huge political courage. Netanyahu used October 7 as the time to retaliate and deal with Israel’s sworn enemies once and for all.
The attack on Hezbollah, which had been consistently firing missiles into Israel over many years, and more recently had caused the evacuation of the north of Israel, was masterful. The detonation of the pagers, the military action across the border into Lebanon and the decapitation of Hezbollah leaders destroyed the effectiveness of the organisation.
Then there was Iran. It took immense courage to launch military strikes against a huge country such as Iran, with around nine times the population of Israel and a substantial military. Not only did the Israelis destroy Iran’s air defences but, with the help of President Donald Trump, destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities.
I know critics say they could rebuild them. But those critics are obviously not economists. It would cost billions for an impoverished country such as Iran, suffering as its economy has from sanctions over many years. I don’t think it will happen.
So to have destroyed the threat of Hezbollah to the north of Israel and neutralised Iran is an extraordinary achievement that two years ago few analysts would have thought possible. Indeed, feckless governments only interested in opinion polling, such as our own, were demanding that Netanyahu stop his attacks on Hezbollah, and not attack Iran’s air defences and nuclear facilities. The Australian government wasn’t the only leftist Western government with a large Muslim population that did the same thing for the same reason: politics.
As for Gaza, urban warfare is perilously difficult against a terrorist organisation, as the Americans know from Afghanistan and Iraq.
But in Gaza, the Israelis have been comprehensively defeated in the propaganda war. It is just astonishing how the media barely report explanations from the Israeli government and Israeli military, and constantly give credence to claims of genocide and famine, claims that come from a terrorist organisation. But as Netanyahu said the other day when asked why Israel was not winning the propaganda war: “We Jews have been losing the propaganda war for 2500 years!”
What’s interesting about Netanyahu is that he doesn’t waver in the face of this hugely negative propaganda. It doesn’t change his mind that he needs to incapacitate Hamas’s military capability to strike again at Israel. And of course he wants the hostages released. It must be tempting for him to give in to the endless abuse and denigration of Israel and his government.
But Netanyahu is strong. He knows that to leave Hamas in control in Gaza will only lead to the recurrence of violence against Israel. After all, Hamas’s objective is the destruction of Israel. Unless the hostages are released and Hamas is disarmed, the war will just go on. Maybe it might make a bit more sense to demand that happens, rather than abusing liberal democratic Israel.
I worked for the United Nations for six years and also visited the United Nations in Gaza while I was foreign minister. I was always astonished by how deeply hostile UN officials were to Israel. It didn’t come as a great surprise to me that some UN employees were involved in the Hamas attack on Jews.
In time, Benjamin Netanyahu will be judged to have been one of the few truly effective leaders of his time. He will have made his country more prosperous and he will have made it more secure. By contrast, people such as UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres and our own Prime Minister will be seen as ephemeral populists with the moral compass of a wasp in a wind tunnel.
A Hamas rival falls in Gaza
If Anthony Albanese ever met Benjamin Netanyahu, he might begin by asking him about economic management. Under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel has achieved notable economic milestones: unemployment hit historic lows – though its crept up a little in the past two years – and the hi-tech sector has driven exceptional productivity growth, exports and tax revenue. Fiscal discipline reduced debt-to-GDP from more than 100 per cent to about 60 per cent, culminating in OECD membership.