It’s simple: if you hate Bibi, and hate Israel, you probably hate Jews
The apparent end of Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year reign is a grand historical moment. So, sadly, is the recrudescence of one of the most putrid hatreds in history.
The apparent end of Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year reign as Prime Minister of Israel is a grand historical moment. So, sadly, is the recrudescence of one of the most putrid hatreds in history, the renewed rise of anti-Semitism.
Are these two connected?
Yes they are. Let me be absolutely clear. “Bibi” Netanyahu did not cause, and does not bear responsibility for, any speck of anti-Semitism. But the prolonged demonisation of Netanyahu is itself an element, and an enabler, of the new, foul, racist hatred of Jews, especially evident in the West.
Netanyahu had an earlier term as PM, from 1996 to 1999, so in total he was Israel’s leader for 15 years. This is longer than anyone else, even the legendary David Ben-Gurion. And it means Netanyahu has been Israel’s leader for more than 20 per cent of its history, since its modern independence in 1948.
He is to be replaced by an astonishing coalition to be led, initially, by Naftali Bennett.
Israel’s eccentric electoral system has required four elections in the past two years. This is because Israel operates one of the most pure proportional-representation systems in the democratic world. A party only needs 3.25 per cent to get into the Israeli parliament, the Knessett.
Every charismatic leader, and every identifiable interest group, is thus tempted to form its own political party and negotiate over its core issues, rather than being part of one of the big parties, of which Netanyahu’s Likud is the biggest.
This interacts with a central feature of Israeli demography. About 20 per cent of Israeli citizens are Arabs. They are full citizens and vote in elections, but enjoy varying degrees of integration into Israeli society. In the past they haven’t wanted to form part of an Israeli government, and because their political parties bear at least some nominal allegiance to Palestinian causes the mainstream parties have not sought their endorsement.
As a result, to form a government an Israeli coalition needs in effect not 50 per cent plus one, but rather 51 of the 80 per cent of the vote which is Jewish. That has made forming a coalition extremely difficult.
Now, apart from his passionate supporters, the mood in Israeli politics is overwhelmingly that the Netanyahu period should end. This has enabled a coalition of astonishing ideological variety – one might say incoherence – to assemble. Three of the coalition party leaders – Bennett, Avigdor Liebermann and Gideon Saar – are to the right of Netanyahu on national security issues. I have interviewed all three at length and they are vastly more subtle and nuanced than any international caricature of them would suggest. Each has worked closely in government with Netanyahu in the past and would be natural coalition partners for Likud except for their desire to see Bibi gone.
Bennett spent part of his youth in the US, like Netanyahu served in an elite military unit, then made a fortune as a hi-tech entrepreneur before going into politics. In the coalition’s centre is Yair Lapid, a former TV presenter and figure of some glamour. His party is centrist on national security but mainly concerned with standard-of-living issues, and removing some of the exceptions and privileges of the ultra-orthodox Jewish community. To the left within the coalition is the Israeli Labor Party, and the even more left-wing Meretz Party. But then, for the first time in Israeli history, an Arab Islamist party, Raam, is also to be part of the coalition. Bennett gets to be PM for two years then hands over to Lapid for the second half of a four-year term.
That ideological spread guarantees no big moves regarding the Palestinian community, or Jewish settlements in the West Bank, or indeed many other issues. Who knows if it can possibly last four years? It will need to win a vote of confidence, probably as early as next week, and Netanyahu, 71, for the moment plans to be opposition leader.
But if this is the end of the Netanyahu era it deserves to be assessed in the round. Netanyahu is one of the most consequential figures in Israeli and Middle East history. I first interviewed him in the mid-1980s when he was the prodigy superstar Israeli ambassador to the UN. I’ve had the good fortune to interview him repeatedly since, when he was in opposition, when he was foreign minister and several times as PM.
He is as formidable an individual as I have met in international politics. Like most democratic leaders in most democratic nations, he was good and bad. On balance, his record is one of huge, nation-defining achievements, marred somewhat by the extreme messiness of his last couple of years.
One thing I’ve learnt from many conversations with Netanyahu is that although he is certainly a national-security hawk, his real interest is economics, or more precisely, commerce. A typical conversation with Netanyahu involves him running through the security issues of the day, but then his eyes really light up when he tells you in detail what the comprehensive computerisation of motor vehicles means for Israeli hi-tech in providing software and systems for cars. Or he’ll go on endlessly about the application of Artificial Intelligence in civilian technology. He also told me once he thought his reputation as a fierce national-security hawk was itself an asset for Israel, as it meant in part that he didn’t have to use force so much. In this he was a little like Ronald Reagan, actually quite cautious and even parsimonious in his use of force, though he would use it decisively if necessary.
This concentration on the Israeli economy is the key to everything else about Netanyahu. He has served at times as both foreign minister and finance minister. He is really the father of the modern Israeli economy. Israel began as a socialist, labour movement. The social solidarity represented in the kibbutz movement was the key not only to the ethos of Israel but its economic policies.
Netanyahu was the first free-market leader Israel ever had. In his first stint as PM he created the modern Israeli economy, deregulating key sectors and going all-in for hi-tech.
When he came back as PM in 2009 it was the same vision which propelled him. Although always a tough guy on security, he basically decided to ignore the Palestinian question. Instead he pioneered Israeli relationships with nations beyond the Middle East, for whom the Palestinian issue was not central. He especially took Israel into Asia, developing deep connections with India, Japan, China, Singapore and other nations. They wanted Israeli technology; he wanted their markets.
He had also, right from the start, seen the danger of Iran, not a difficult thing for any Israeli. This gave him a platform for improving relations with Gulf Arab nations. They wanted Israeli help in resisting Iran. This culminated in four new peace treaties with Muslim nations: the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan.
In some ways Netanyahu was less of a right-winger than he seemed. From 2009 he tried hard to form coalition governments with centrist and even left parties. He had coalitions with Labour, with the centrist Kadima party and with Yair Lapid’s party. He was not a particularly energetic builder of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. For all that, there was certainly a negative balance to the Netanyahu ledger. He is currently under indictment for three corruption charges. In truth, they look mostly pretty trivial – too many gifts of champagne and cigars, trying to influence the media.
But over the past few years Netanyahu has courted voters in the settlements, which means he has stopped enforcing action against those settlements which are illegal under Israeli law. I don’t mean here the big settlement blocs, but what you might call wildcat settlements, which operate without authorisation and seek to become so established that ultimately Israeli law must accommodate them.
In the past few years, Netanyahu just seemed to be too desperate to hang on to power. He drove almost all his potential successors out of the party. He has at times flirted with extremist personalities on the genuinely far right. He has demonised his domestic opponents, casting them as a grave threat to Israeli security and thus undermining the credibility of national security language. And at times he has made prejudiced comments about Israel’s Arab minority, talking of the dangers of too many of them voting. This has not stopped achievements, such as the Abraham accords. But Israeli politics has been wickedly polarised and savage over the past couple of years. In part it’s the power of social media, as with other Western societies. In part it’s Israel being influenced by the savagery of the regional environment in which it lives.
How does this all interact with the truly hideous recrudescence of anti-Semitism in Western societies? Anti-Semitism long predates the existence of Israel. Its origin lies in one of the original sins of Christianity. It is no secret I regard Christianity as one of the greatest forces for good in the human experience over the past 2000 years. However, Christians have certainly done some bad things. Nothing was worse than the intermittent hostility to Jews and Judaism which punctuated Christianity for 2000 years.
There were always pro-Jewish Christians. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the medieval theologians, was profoundly influenced by Moses Maimonides and his seminal Guide for the Perplexed. However, a faulty understanding of theology led too many Christians to conceive of Jews as the killers of Christ. This is wrong historically. Christ was executed by the Roman authorities. More than that, Christianity owes profound theological, philosophical and ethical debts to the Jewish tradition from which it grew. But it is the case that both Catholic and Protestant figures throughout the centuries propagated a range of anti-Jewish stereotypes that were profoundly destructive.
All Christian denominations have comprehensively repudiated this past. But these traditional anti-Semitic tropes, which you can see in Shakespeare and Dickens and all through Western culture, where you can also see their repudiation, have left a deep deposit of anti-Semitic images and constructs which are frequently appropriated now by new and different groups.
Nowadays the two main sources of anti-Semitism are Arab and Islamist politics, and radical left movements and even progressive politics in Western societies. Both these movements, sometimes unconsciously, draw on pre-existing anti-Jewish stereotypes.
The demonisation of Israel, and in the past decade and a half the demonisation also of Netanyahu, plays a huge role in modern anti-Semitism. It goes without saying that it is perfectly legitimate to criticise Israel. However, the standards to which Israel is held are often insanely high. Thus, uniquely among modern nations, Israel’s very right to exist is frequently denied and contested. There is a strong campaign in the West to boycott Israel for its alleged human-rights violations. Yet even if everything alleged against Israel were true, even then Israel would be not remotely anywhere near the worst offenders against human rights.
Turkey permanently and illegally occupies northern Cyprus, but there is no move to boycott Turkey, and so on.
The anti-Israel criticism reaches extremes of moral depravity so the Jewish state is often directly compared with Nazi Germany, which was responsible for the extermination of six million Jews.
In recent weeks we have witnessed sickening scenes. In Los Angeles and New York, Jews were attacked in the street by mobs of young men, mostly of Arab or Middle East origin. The same happened in Germany. In London, anti-Israel demonstrations have become overtly anti-Semitic. Carloads of young men drove through London screaming that they would “kill the Jews and rape their women”.
One of the most astonishing features of this grotesque behaviour is that while it has been condemned by civilised people, it has generated no energy in the popular culture. Where is the Jewish Lives Matter movement in the West? Where is the trending hashtag I Stand with the Jews?
The demonisation of Israel has effectively led to the demonisation of Jewish people in Western societies. Two contemporary dynamics are particularly powerful. One is so-called intersectionality on the left. Intersectionality means that you try to amalgamate all the grievances of identity politics that you can – race, gender, sexual orientation, et cetera – and use each one to magnify the other. Both its Arab opponents and its Western critics constantly criticise Israel in the terms of intersectionality campaigns – Israel is a colonial power, represents Western culture, is patriarchal and sexist, oppresses people of colour, promulgates a Western religion – and because of this, the politics of Palestinian protest has become part of the Black Lives Matter radical coalition.
It’s not just Thomas Jefferson they hate, it’s Israel and Netanyahu and Jews who happen to live among them.
The other relatively new dynamic is the power of social media. The dishonest editing of images, the wildly exaggerated misreporting of events in Israel, finds a ready audience on social media in the West. Add to this the paranoia of the Arab world view – we have such a supreme religion and culture, why are we not ruling the world? – and hostility to Western Jews becomes an easy part of the mix.
Netanyahu was a great defender of his people and his country, but his language was sometimes overdone. But the battle against the infamous hatreds of anti-Semitism should now be waged by every civilised person.
To join the conversation, please log in. Don't have an account? Register
Join the conversation, you are commenting as Logout