Accused and inescapable, Benjamin Netanyahu has long defined Israel

On March 23 Israelis went to the polls to elect a new parliament. The state’s 6.4 million voters are treated as a single constituency, with each individual voting for a pre-determined party list in a system of proportional representation. Once the members of the single chamber of parliament (known as the Knesset) are established, it falls to them to negotiate a coalition that can govern.

For decades this system has been a source of national pride, but last month’s election was the fourth in two years and already its inconclusive result has pundits forecasting a fifth. At the centre of this impasse is Benjamin Netanyahu, the longest-serving prime minister in the nation’s short history.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, right, leaves court during his corruption trial.Credit: AP

Who is he?

Netanyahu was born in 1949, the year after Israel declared its independence, into a family dominated by his father, Benzion, a history professor and key figure in Zionism’s right-wing Revisionist movement. An Israel dominated by the left-wing Labour movement offered the elder Netanyahu little hope of political or academic advancement, so he and his family migrated to the United States. His middle son, Benjamin, would attend high school and university there, equipping him with fluent American-accented English.

Benzion’s three sons all served in a special forces unit, the Sayeret Matkal, and in 1976 that service would change the family’s life forever when Netanyahu’s elder brother, Yonatan, was killed during a successful mission to rescue hostages from an Air France flight hijacked by Palestinian militants and taken to Entebbe Airport in Uganda.

Netanyahu set up a think tank devoted to the issue of terrorism named after his brother, and in the next decade would build an audience of influential US political advisers and politicians, including then president Ronald Reagan, culminating in the 1986 publication of Terrorism: How the West Can Win. The ideas about Middle East policy it set out would become hugely important for what is now known as the neo-conservative movement. In 1984 Netanyahu became Israel’s representative at the United Nations and four years later he would enter the Knesset.

What did he do this week?

On Monday Netanyahu found himself at the centre of two quite different sets of proceedings. In the Jerusalem District Court he listened as Deputy State Attorney Liat Ben-Ari set out a case against him of interfering in a major Israeli news website to suppress negative stories about his government and promote smear campaigns against his rivals.

At the same time, five kilometres away, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin began receiving leaders of parties elected to the Knesset to discuss who should lead the next government.

The Prime Minister has long dismissed allegations of personal corruption against him and his family as part of a conspiracy by top police, the judiciary and “the Left” to remove him from power by non-electoral means. His dominance of the electoral landscape was underlined by day’s end: after hours of talks, an exasperated Rivlin had no choice but to offer Netanyahu the first opportunity to form a coalition.

Why is this important?

In the year that Netanyahu entered the Knesset as a member of the right-wing Likud party, another Israeli with strong personal ties to the US was being removed: the far-right rabbi Meir Kahane and his party, Kach, were deemed too racist to stand for re-election (and designated a terrorist organisation by Washington). But though Kahane was banned from office in 1988 and assassinated in 1990, those who had elected him remained. In the ensuing years, through other small parties of the far right and religious right, they would give Likud the numbers for government. In return, Netanyahu would give their politics an internationally acceptable face.

An anti-Netanyahu billboard for the March 2019 elections shows the prime minister (third from right) surrounded by far-right associates against the yellow-and-black colours of the banned Kach party and the slogan “Kahane Lives”.Credit: AP

This relationship moved the national consensus in Israel further and further to the right. When he became prime minister for the first time in 1996, Netanyahu would inherit the Oslo Accords, which tentatively proposed a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on “land for peace”. While unable to entirely repudiate an agreement bearing Washington’s seal, he and his American supporters gradually pushed it into the background, preferring instead the formula “peace for peace”; Israel would fortify its position until both the region’s states and the stateless Palestinians accepted its stances on settlement of occupied territory and a final peace as immovable. This was a vision as old as Revisionist Zionism itself.

For many years, and especially after the terrorist attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, it was a vision with bipartisan support in the US. But Netanyahu has found himself increasingly at odds with Democratic presidents and increasingly dependent on the religious right in America, culminating in his enthusiastic embrace of Donald Trump and the Abraham Accords, which formalised relations with a number of Arab regimes while placing the Palestinian question to one side.

What happens next?

While Netanyahu’s various trials for fraud and breach of trust - which include allegations that he and his family received gifts linked to corruption from Australian billionaire James Packer - look set to run for months or even years, they are as unlikely to shift the political dial as Trump’s impeachment trials in the US:

The election of US President Joe Biden and his apparent determination to resurrect the Iran nuclear deal - which Netanyahu has vehemently opposed - could prove more significant in persuading Israelis that their prime minister since 2009 has become a liability. Yet who might replace him? Even his leading rivals on the right - Avigdor Lieberman and Naftali Bennett - cut their political teeth as chiefs of staff to Netanyahu before forming their own parties. Beyond the right, there is no figure with the national stature to shape a new Israeli consensus.

In 2012 Martin Indyk - an Australian who served as a senior US diplomat under Bill Clinton and Barack Obama - told me that “there’s a strong constraint against any American president … that wants to try to do something to move Israel in a direction that would involve pressure”. So long as that remains true, Benjamin Netanyahu will have room for political manoeuvre. In the last 25 years no one has matched his ability to use it.