Bibi’s iron fist has achieved what soft diplomacy could not
Finally, the heat’s where it should be: on the genocidal fanatics who unleashed hell, ritual sacrifice of their own children and lies to a gullible West.
If one image has been ubiquitous during the past two awful years, it’s that of Benjamin Netanyahu.
He’s there on the obscene placards at the globalised anti-Israel protests: a “baby killer” with Hitler moustache.
He’s in countless photographs accompanying the millions of words written about the Gaza war, invariably depicted with shifty eyes and smug grin. “Slippery”, a journalist at The Age/Sydney Morning Herald described him this week while reporting on Donald Trump’s 20-point Gaza peace plan, the latter presented as the US President exerting his authority “after being outfoxed” by the “famously prideful” Israeli Prime Minister “at almost every turn”.
He was at the lectern at last week’s UN General Assembly, and for a “famously prideful” guy was willing to endure abject humiliation as dozens of diplomats staged a walkout. “For many countries here, when the going got tough, you caved!” he thundered to a near-empty auditorium.
‘I’m often grateful to Bibi for offering a get-out-of-jail card in conversations with my remaining handful of lefty friends.’
Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei, chief sponsor of jihadi terror and global anti-Semitism, gloated on X: “Today, the evil Zionist regime is the most despised and isolated regime in the world.”
It stings, I won’t lie.
It’s one thing for Israel to be cast out from the brotherhood of tyrants, murderers and hypocrites otherwise known as the UN. Quite another to be threatened with sanctions by the so-called good people of Europe. (Should Israel be evicted from Eurovision, who will Ireland’s feral contestants torment next time?)
Honestly, I’m often grateful to Bibi – why not use the nickname for one so familiar? – for offering a get-out-of-jail card in conversations with my remaining handful of lefty friends. “Netanyahu is a –,” fill in an expletive of choice. To which I respond with a wan smile, relieved The Israel Question can be put to bed with a simple denunciation of Bibi before we get on with ordering drinks.
Recently Netanyahu was interviewed – a rarity even within Israel – on the TRIGGERnometry podcast. “If we wanted to commit genocide, we would have done it in one afternoon,” he coolly remarked. As I was listening it occurred to me that the only place he could be guaranteed a fair interrogation was here, in the anti-woke media with its creed of questioning mainstream orthodoxy.
As the conflagration that started with Hamas’s barbaric invasion of Israel two years ago reaches an inflection point, a clear-eyed assessment is long overdue of the man whose right-wing nationalism has shaped Israel’s politics for 30 years and who has come to symbolise – and in the eyes of his harshest critics, justify – Israel’s pariah status.
To indulge in some Jewish chauvinism, just as we laid the foundations for monotheistic civilisation, so we delivered the first of the contemporary strongman leaders with autocratic designs.
Netanyahu’s original sin: the Israeli government
For in the beginning, long before Trump, let alone Viktor Orban, Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Vladimir Putin, there was Bibi. And his family. Wife Sara, famous for abusing the servants. Son Yair, Israel’s podcasting, strip-club frequenting answer to Donald John Trump Jr – or is it the other way around? Bibi is the best of the bunch even with his excessive attachment to champagne and cigars, allegedly to the extent of trading favours, and his alleged bribery to secure favourable media coverage in Israel. Netanyahu could use a bit of that, accused, as he is, of clinging to power to delay his corruption trial, and his reckoning over the colossal intelligence failure of October 7.
His most egregious act, undermining his nation’s integrity, is his government: the most right-wing in Israel’s history with two sensitive ministries awarded to far-right messianic coalition partners. Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich have since become household names and low-hanging fruit for governments such as our own, which sanctioned the pair for inciting settler violence and creating a culture of impunity on the West Bank.
The Israeli government is Netanyahu’s original sin, worse, in my view, than any decisions made in prosecuting the Gaza war – decisions that fast assumed a sinister complexion because of the original sin. He kept mum as extremist statements emanated from his ministers with unnerving regularity to the point where even (admittedly few) observers without baked-in animus towards Israel came to believe its ultimate plan was ethnically cleansing Gaza, annexing the territory and building Jewish settlements. All under the auspices of Trump’s overarching Riviera-on-the-Strip fever-dream that lasted two minutes.
“We believe a two-state solution is the only way to end the cycle of violence,” Foreign Minister Penny Wong said when announcing the sanctions on the Israeli ministers in June.
“And regrettably, it is also clear that the Netanyahu government rejects it. This is clear from its devastating military campaign in Gaza – civilians being killed by the thousands, children starving.”
Everyone supports a two-state solution — except Hamas
Her statement reeks of the sort of bad faith regularly dished out to Israel under cover of criticising its government. Every person and his dog supports the two-state solution – well, every person except for Hamas, the Iranian-led axis and the “From the river to the sea” mob shouting “ceasefire now” but only on terms detrimental to Israel, and yes, Netanyahu. Still, a prerequisite for a Palestinian state is dislodging Hamas, a goal Wong and other Western leaders supposedly endorse.
What none had the guts to admit – and what Netanyahu failed to adequately explain – was that defeating Hamas was always going to involve terrible suffering in a diabolically complex theatre of war, a tunnel network more extensive than the Tube and a civilian population locked in as human shields.
Whether a different leader with a different government might have done things better, avoiding disastrous and reckless tactics such as cutting off and limiting the flow of humanitarian aid in the hope of smoking out the terrorists, is impossible to say. Every Israeli leader would have struggled for oxygen amid the tsunami of the anti-Israel information complex.
As early as 2002 the progressive media in Britain had described the Israel Defence Forces’ counter-terrorism incursion into Jenin as “genocide”, and as heinous as 9/11. The death toll from Jenin, according to Human Rights Watch, was 57, mostly combatants.
Come a war of horrific images screened to people’s phones, and the Western street was destined to explode with hostile sentiment seeded over decades.
Meanwhile, Israelis, wild with grief and trauma, became convinced Netanyahu was prolonging the war to stop his far-right coalition from collapsing – thus keeping himself out of strife – even at the expense of hostages’ lives. The belief went mainstream in March when Israel resumed hostilities after a ceasefire and under the direction of a war cabinet now devoid of the centrists whose presence had helped maintain some public confidence in earlier phases of the war.
I was in Israel in May. The protest stickers around the military headquarters in Tel Aviv accused Netanyahu of everything from responsibility for the “Holocaust” of October 7 to being in the pay of Qatar (a claim that presumably has lost potency since Israel’s strike on Hamas targets in Doha) to “betraying even Sara”. (Not sure what that’s alluding to and prefer to remain ignorant.) One taxi driver of Mizrahi background – a constituency that leans heavily to Netanyahu – left me agog with a vicious anti-Bibi spray.
Shortly afterwards I read a piece from Israeli historian Benny Morris that related a similar encounter with a taxi driver. Unless we happened to score the same driver, I took this as proof the taxi drivers had deserted Bibi, which is remarkable given his almost every utterance is pitched at his heartland.
Blaming Bibi with the rise of anti-Semitism is wishful thinking
When Netanyahu lashes Emmanuel Macron for fuelling “the anti-Semitic fire” in France, when he slams Anthony Albanese as “a weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews”, he’s playing to home base. Just as Macron and Albanese virtue signal to their anti-Israel constituencies, so call it one-all.
Alas, Jewish diaspora communities sustain bruises whenever Bibi rides in on a white horse on their behalf. To put it unkindly: we need Bibi’s intervention like a hole in the head.
But what we need even less is the reversal of cause and effect that blames Netanyahu for the outbreak of anti-Semitism in the first place. This view is widely held, as the response to this week’s fatal Yom Kippur attack on Jewish worshippers in Manchester shows. Bushra Shaikh, who appears on the state-owned Channel 4 news, posted within hours of the attack: “I blame Netanyahu and his live-streamed genocide.”
I blame the scourge of Jew-hatred that has been around even longer than Bibi has been in power. Jihadis murder Jews in Manchester and in Israel because they hate them.
What Netanyahu told the empty room at the UN was right. In the face of regressive evil the world “caved”.
A stunning military achievement
And if Netanyahu must wear responsibility for October 7 and the mistakes and misdeeds thereafter, he also deserves credit for what he described as “one of the most stunning military comebacks in history”. From being encircled by a “ring of fire”, seven fronts extending from the Houthis’ stronghold in Yemen (the rebels being a hardy mosquito) to Tehran, head of the octopus, the checklist is stunning.
Lebanon: Hezbollah is neutered after Hassan Nasrallah was bombed to death in his bunker, his fighters summoned via pagers to the martyrdom they’d yearned for. Syria: the Assad regime handily fell as collateral damage. Iran: the 12-day war instigated by Israel and polished off with the US attack on the Fordo nuclear site disrupted, to some uncertain degree, the Islamic Republic’s alleged sprint to a nuclear weapon.
Even if it transpires that the war set back Tehran’s nuclear program by only a few months, doing nothing risked a scenario Israel couldn’t live with. Nor, if it’s honest, could the world, notwithstanding the ritualistic calls for “de-escalation” from the UN and world capitals. A nuclear-armed Iran has long been Netanyahu’s “red line” – the subject of many of his thundering addresses to a reliably hostile General Assembly.
When the consequences of not acting are potentially apocalyptic, the decisive leader is the only one worthy of the title.
And when it came to these battlefields beyond Gaza and on which his far-right partners have no biblical designs, behold Bibi spoke, and stirringly. We were reminded of the younger, more handsome, more urbane, US-educated Bibi who made his debut with international audiences as Israel’s spokesman during the first Gulf War.
“To the proud people of Iran,” he said.
“The moment your country is free, Israel’s top water experts will flood into every Iranian city bringing cutting-edge technology and know-how.”
While the Iranian people have yet to embrace his call to arms, the fall of Nasrallah and Assad saw Netanyahu hailed as a hero in parts of the region. The Lebanese army finds itself empowered to dismantle Hezbollah’s state-within-a-state military infrastructure. Astonishingly, Israel finds itself in security talks with Syria’s new, formerly al-Qa’ida, leader. Astonishingly, even after two years of the IDF pummelling Gaza, the elusive Israel-Saudi normalisation deal is not quite dead yet.
And even in Gaza – and this, for some, will be a bitter truth – he’s close to delivering on his twin war aims of disembowelling Hamas and freeing the hostages, of which 46 remain, 20 reportedly alive.
Signs Hamas will reject Trump’s peace deal
Whether Gaza’s nightmare stops here is officially a question for Hamas, with Trump, yes, alongside a satisfied Netanyahu, declaring that if the terror group were to reject his day-after plan, Israel would have his “full backing” to finish the job itself.
Finally, the heat’s where it should be: on the genocidal fanatics who unleashed hell two long years ago and sought to evade consequences through the ritual sacrifice of their own children and dissemination of lies to a gullible Western audience.
At the time of writing there are ominous signs Hamas will reject the deal, which dangles the release of prisoners from Israeli jails, safe passage out of the Strip or amnesty in return for laying down arms. Hamas officials are nonetheless reportedly studying the text “with absolute positivity”, as if on a wellness seminar for burnt-out jihadis.
Memo to the world: you’ve cynically enabled this macabre circus.
Until we know how this ends, a definitive judgment on Netanyahu must wait. If the assault on Gaza intensifies he’ll go down as the Prime Minister who trapped Israelis and Palestinians into a debilitating forever war. If, on the other hand, we’re on the verge of a new dawn of sorts in Gaza and the region (and Trump bags the Nobel Peace Prize) Netanyahu will emerge as the leader who delivered peace through strength, which, whether my lefty friends like it or not, is the only pathway to peace in the rough-as-guts Middle East.
We can already point to an inconvenient paradox about Netanyahu. The more Israel sheds legitimacy in the West, the more it becomes a nation of the Middle East. The more Netanyahu is demonised on the world stage – forced to avoid European capitals lest they arrest him under warrant – the more it illuminates the “weak-kneed” appeasing leaders, banishing to the dark corners of their conscience the skeletal hostage digging his own grave.
Last week’s walkout in the UN General Assembly, coupled with the grotesque cheering of the underwhelming and racist Mahmoud Abbas, did not condemn Netanyahu. On the contrary, it demonstrated his steel. Not despite his flaws but because of them. For as epic as his shortcomings are, they were nowhere near big enough to fill the moral vacuum of that near-empty auditorium
No, I won’t, as the saying goes, carry water for Bibi.
But I’m prepared to countenance the crazy idea that in his wrongness he was perhaps the right man for these upside-down times. That with his unclean hands he was the leader to steer Israel through the inevitably dirty war it was forced to fight, soaking up his fair share of the inevitable international opprobrium and the occasional trope about “slippery” Jews outfoxing even the world’s fox-in-chief.
Maybe more people admire him than the empty rooms and dialled-up vitriol suggest.
Julie Szego is a Melbourne-based freelance writer.
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