Closing act in the age of Netanyahu may lie ahead

The Middle East’s most powerful ruler, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, appears to be losing grip - but he’s a man not to be underestimated.

Israel’s four-term PM Benjamin Netanyahu. Picture: AP

The most powerful ruler in the Middle East, and one of its longest serving, may be about to enter the last chapter of his leadership. Then again, he may just survive the crisis and again outlast his enemies.

I am not talking about any hereditary monarch, military despot or one-party dictator. Rather, it is Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu who faces on April 9 a fateful national election, and before then possible criminal indictment on corruption charges.

Israel is a small, clever, tough, extraordinary nation — a land of limitless impossibilities, as they say. And it has had giants among its leaders: David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Yitzhak Rabin, legends of diplomacy like Abba Eban or Shimon Peres, and legendary military heroes like Moshe Dayan.

Netanyahu stands shoulder to shoulder with them. At a time when Western politics in many nations is falling apart, he has been the seemingly indispensable national leader for a decade, winning four elections. He is known for his national security policies but he has also presided over the birth and development of the so-called Start-up Nation, the progenitor of Nasdaq listings and patents and hi-tech everything.

He goes into the election with unemployment at barely 4 per cent and the economy growing in 2018 by well over 3 per cent, an astonishing figure for an economy as advanced as Israel’s.

Diplomatically, Netanyahu’s accomplishments are also formidable. He has taken everything that the extravagantly pro-Israel administration of Donald Trump has offered and then some. This is not without risks. It makes the maintenance of Israel’s bipartisan support in the US, among Democrats as well as Republicans, a bit harder to sustain.

Netanyahu has flattered and cajoled Trump, mostly effectively. But that, too, has its limits.

Though Trump moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, Israel was not consulted before Trump announced the withdrawal of US troops from Syria. Trump wants to pull back from the Middle East. ­Israel wants maximum US involvement.

Sometime after the Israeli election, the Trump administration will release its peace plan for the Israelis and the Palestinians. Word is that while it’s pretty understanding of Israel’s security concerns, it does make demands of Israel that will be uncomfortable.

Netanyahu is perhaps relying on the Palestinians rejecting the plan out of hand, thus letting him off the hook. But if circumstances are such that he has to say no to Trump, that could be rough.

Netanyahu has kept up an ­extraordinary tightrope performance with Russia. There are a million Israelis of Russian extraction. Israel is well regarded by the Russian public. Netanyahu has crafted a method of dealing with Moscow that doesn’t involve conniving in Moscow’s regional, much less global, ambitions, but keeps just enough distance ­between the forces of the two ­nations. This is astonishing given Russia is sponsoring Israel’s ­enemies in Syria and at least tolerates Iran.

But Israel is free to make heavy strikes against its Syrian enemies, and against Iranian forces in Syria, without any protest from Russia.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has mostly bypassed the increasingly enfeebled Europeans with their stale orthodoxies and irrelevant formulas and spent his diplomatic energy in Asia, especially with India and China, where he has overseen booming relationships.

Perhaps his diplomacy with the Arab and North African states is his most surprising success. Most of the Gulf states fear and loathe the revolutionary regime in Iran. They fear it much more than they dislike Israel. So a number of them, especially Saudi Arabia but others as well, are happy to make common cause with Israel. They also see Israel’s economic success and its influence in Washington.

I think Netanyahu oversells what this pragmatic co-operation can really deliver. I first met him in the mid-1980s when he was Israel’s ambassador to the UN and I interviewed him when he was foreign minister, later when he was in opposition, and several times when he was prime minister.

In one interview as PM he talked of “an outside-in peace process” in which an Arab world normalising its relations with Israel would pressure the Palestinian leadership into recognising Israel as a Jewish state and compromising on a Palestinian state that provided for Israeli security and accepted land swaps to make space for the West Bank Jewish settlements closest to Jerusalem.

Netanyahu is, I suspect, privately a completely hard-headed realist. The Arab leaders are not normalising their societies’ relations with Israel. Their populations remain profoundly opposed to Israel. The Arab leaders co-operating with ­Israel are acting pragmatically and substantially out of fear of Tehran. But this pragmatic co-operation allows Netanyahu to weave a narrative of global normalisation.

This is not universally true. Across Europe and even in much of non-Trump North America, opinion is hardening against Netanyahu and against Israel.

Netanyahu has never seemed more vulnerable. He is 69. In some ways he resembles John Howard at the end of his reign. They are radically different personalities and I don’t mean the comparison to the detriment of either man.

They resemble each other in these ways. They are democratic leaders who have both dominated their respective nations while ­always being despised by a good section of the media and never ­really commanding clear majority support. Both men are intensely pragmatic, tough but willing to compromise, always ready to tack into the wind. But they both have clear identities. As Howard used to say, a longstanding, well-known leader who has pursued a broadly coherent political program for a long time has money in the bank with the electorate.

Netanyahu’s identity was established early and has held consistently. He is a national security hawk and an economic liberal. He is silken tongued, speaks fluent American and enjoys the prestige — very important in Israeli politics — of a former elite special services soldier. He also enjoys the finer things of life and is ruthless about political power.

Netanyahu’s love of the finer things brings us to the corruption charges. But before that we should note two other elements in the case against Netanyahu. One is that, a little like Robert Menzies but to a vastly greater degree, he pushes out of public life any potential successor or alternative leader.

He has for years refused to appoint a foreign minister, for foreign ministers assume a big profile in Israel. Lots of them, like Peres, become stars and national leaders. So Netanyahu keeps the foreign affairs portfolio for himself.

Two of his former chiefs of staff, Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett, became leaders of their own political parties and both coalition partners with and personal rivals to Netanyahu. So he doesn’t want any adviser with a big profile.

In 2017 I was in Israel while Netanyahu was away. I interviewed a cabinet minister, Yuval Steinitz, and was surprised to find he was acting prime minister.

It turns out, though, that Netanyahu picks a different acting PM every time he’s overseas so that no alternative emerges. Similarly, since last year he has occupied the ­defence portfolio. And for years he has also held communications.

The other charge against Netanyahu is that he hasn’t done enough to promote peace with the Palestinians. Netanyahu has done much less settlement building in the West Bank than you would think from the media coverage. But he’s never drawn a line about where settlements will end. Sometimes he says he is committed to a two-state solution; at other times he seems to give the wink to nationalist forces opposed to this.

He sponsored a divisive nationality law that was needlessly provocative to the 20 per cent of Israelis who are Arabs. Sometimes he has spoken in unpleasant ways not only about Palestinian terrorists but about Israeli Arabs as well. Part of the plea in mitigation in favour of Netanyahu has been the extraordinary balancing acts he has needed to perform to keep his centre-Right coalition intact years since the last election.

But the biggest threat to Netanyahu, and the issue that stands most to besmirch his generally impressive legacy, is the corruption charges. The police have recommended he be charged in three of four corruption controversies.

Whether he is charged is up to Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit, who is reportedly working his team hard so he can make a decision before the ­election.

Controversy one concerns about $200,000 of champagne, ­cigars and other gifts Netanyahu and his wife received from an Israeli tycoon who stood to benefit from government policy. James Packer also gave the Netanyahus gifts, but there is no suggestion Packer sought anything in return.

Controversy two suggests Netanyahu sought to hurt the newspaper Israel Hayom to benefit a competitor who gave Netanyahu positive coverage. Controversy three concerns the Israel telco Bezeq getting favourable treatment in return for favours.

A fourth controversy relates to suggestions naval purchases were made in such a way as to benefit Netanyahu relatives and supporters, but there is no recommendation for prosecution.

Israeli practice is that any minister indicted on a criminal offence has to stand aside. But there has never been a serving prime minister criminally indicted. Netanyahu has declared he will not stand aside, much less resign, unless he is actually convicted. He has developed a defence something like Trump’s. The subtext goes like this: the media and the liberal elite hate me, which is really a way of hating you, the people who voted for me. So they are coming after me as a way of exercising contempt for you, my voters.

This works only with a minority of Israeli voters, the rusted-on Netanyahu supporters. But Netanyahu draws votes as well from a larger, pragmatic cohort of Israelis who like his economic achievements and are reassured by his toughness on security.

The Israeli electorate has moved substantially to the Right over the past 20 years as a result of the failure of the Rabin peace agreements with the Palestinians, the continuing terrorism especially of Hamas, the chaos and violence of some Arab states on its borders, especially Syria, the embattled feeling brought on by the undeniable recrudescence of anti-Semitism in the West and the continuing anti-Semitism of much of the Arab world, and the phenomenon of global terrorism.

Israel operates the purest proportional representation electoral system in the world. To govern, a coalition needs 61 of 120 members of the Knesset. At the moment there are 13 members of the Knesset elected by Arab parties.

Poll averages show Netanyahu’s Likud winning about 30 or 32 MKs, the largest of any party. This could fall by half a dozen if Netanyahu is indicted. A former military chief of staff, Benny Gantz, has founded a new centrist party, Israel Resilience. In alliance with an older centrist party, he could just possibly eclipse Likud, but it’s a long shot.

So the chances must be 50-50 that Netanyahu’s career goes on for one more cycle. But the age of Netanyahu is surely drawing to a close. One straw in the wind was that his favoured candidates did not prevail in the Likud primaries, suggesting that even the Likud is looking past Netanyahu.

But as all his enemies have discovered, Netanyahu can never be written off.