Benjamin Netanyahu. Composite: Guardian Design/SIPA/Shutterstock
The Netanyahu doctrine: how Israel’s longest-serving leader reshaped the country in his image
He
first became prime minister in 1996, and has been pushing the country
further right ever since. Most agree his political days are numbered –
but the approach he established will prove very difficult to shift
An attack like Hamas’s 7 October massacre was not supposed to have been possible. Certainly not while prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu
was in charge. He was, as his acolytes put it, “Mr Security”. He wanted
to be remembered, he said, as “the protector of Israel”. He boasted
that Israel had never known a more peaceful and prosperous time than the
roughly 16 years he has been in power. It was under his successive
administrations that Israel installed the Iron Dome system to intercept
rockets from the Gaza Strip, and constructed, along the Gaza border, a
40-mile, $1.1bn fence, equipped with underground sensors,
remote-controlled weapons and an expansive camera system. The success of
Netanyahu’s vision of Fortress Israel could be measured in the
imperceptibility of the Palestinians and their suffering from the
comfort of a Tel Aviv cafe.
But the relative
calm of the last decade-and-a-half was built upon a series of illusions:
that the Palestinians and their aspirations for freedom could be hidden
behind concrete barriers and ignored; that any remaining resistance
could be managed through a combination of technology and overwhelming
firepower; that the world, and especially Sunni Arab states, had grown
so tired of the Palestinian issue that it could be removed from the
global agenda, and consequently, that Israeli governments could do as
they pleased and suffer few consequences.
The
attack on 7 October shattered all these presumptions. Hamas gunmen on
motorbikes and the backs of pickup trucks sailed through the “smart”
barrier that cost more than the entire GDP of Grenada. Caught off guard,
Israel’s army appeared almost immobilised, unable to regain control of some towns
and kibbutzim for more than 48 hours. Every aspect of Netanyahu’s
project collapsed on the Saturday morning Israelis have taken to calling
“the black shabbat”.
Successive Netanyahu
governments did not make Israelis safer. Instead, they made them
vulnerable to attacks such as the one Hamas carried out. Netanyahu did
not chart a path for Israel out of its dependence on the United States.
Instead, he left Israel as dependent on its US backer as it was during
the only comparable disaster in Israel’s history, the 1973 Yom Kippur
war. Netanyahu promised to streamline the state and make government more
efficient. Instead, Israel’s bureaucracy has been hollowed out, its
social services underfunded and unresponsive.
And
yet, while Netanyahu’s vision for Israel has been utterly discredited,
there is no clear successor poised to break with it. The iron tracks
that Netanyahu laid may prove too hard to shift. The current crisis may
very well mark the end of Netanyahu’s public career. But Israel may also
be trapped in conditions of his making long after he is gone.
On a dark October night in 1995, Netanyahu stood
on a balcony overlooking Jerusalem’s Zion Square. A banner reading
“Death to Arabs” had been unfurled before him. An inflamed crowd of tens
of thousands stood below him. Yitzhak Rabin, prime minister at the
time, was pushing for a negotiated settlement with the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO), and this was a protest organised by the
Oslo Accords’ rightwing opponents. At the time, Netanyahu was the
46-year-old elected leader of Israel’s rightwing Likud party. He was
widely seen as a brash new face in a tired political scene still
dominated by veterans of Israel’s founding.
A
savvy political operator, Netanyahu had staked his political future on
opposing the Oslo peace process. That summer, he had joined a
demonstration that featured a mock funeral procession for Rabin, replete
with a coffin and a noose, where protesters chanted “Death to Rabin”.
In the streets of Jerusalem that October night, demonstrators brandished
signs denouncing Rabin as a traitor. They held aloft pictures of him in
the uniform of the Nazi SS, and in PLO chair Yasser Arafat’s keffiyeh.
They chanted “in blood and fire we will expel Rabin”, and, again, “Death
to Rabin”.
One month later, a religious
nationalist law student named Yigal Amir fired two shots into Rabin’s
back, killing him and the vision of territorial compromise he
represented. Outside the hospital where Rabin’s death was announced, a
crowd of the prime minister’s supporters chanted “Bibi is a murderer”.
It was, of course, Amir who pulled the trigger. But Netanyahu was among
the most prominent figures who had fuelled the atmosphere of violence in
which Amir did the deed.
In 1996, the Labor
party leader and Rabin’s successor, Shimon Peres, called elections in
the hope of reaffirming a popular mandate for the Oslo peace process.
According to the polls, it was a safe bet. Netanyahu’s popularity had
begun to flag in the aftermath of Rabin’s assassination. But after a
string of suicide bombings in the months before the May elections,
Netanyahu’s fortunes began to improve. He hammered Peres on the perils
of territorial compromise, framed his dovish opponent as weak and warned
that Peres “would divide Jerusalem”. By a threadbare margin – less than
1% of the vote – Netanyahu staged a surprise upset. He became the
youngest prime minister in Israel’s history.
The
Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, left, and the Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat with US president Bill Clinton at the signing of the peace
accord between Israel and the Palestinians in 1993. Photograph: Ron Edmonds/AP
Netanyahu’s
first three-year term was not a success, but many of the hallmarks of
his approach were already evident. Pressed by the Clinton administration
to advance peace negotiations, Netanyahu strung the Americans along,
committing only to the bare minimum required to keep the peace process
alive, while doing everything possible to prevent a final status
agreement in the long run. In the eyes of his rightwing critics,
Netanyahu did not break decisively enough with the two-state solution.
As Netanyahu saw it, however, the best way to prevent a Palestinian
state was to do so quietly, without the fanfare that formal annexation
or direct rejection of the US-led peace process would have entailed.
Netanyahu
is not a conventional ideologue. His opposition to a two-state solution
does not derive from any messianic conviction or biblical inspiration.
While many of his supporters are religious traditionalists, he is
staunchly secular and doesn’t even keep kosher.
Instead, his worldview is shaped by deep pessimism. “I’m asked if we
will for ever live by the sword – yes,” he told a group of Knesset
members in 2015. He had absorbed this view as a child. His father,
Benzion Netanyahu, was a dyspeptic historian of the Spanish Inquisition
who died in 2012, at the age of 102. “Jewish history is in large measure a history of holocausts,” Netanyahu Sr once
told the New Yorker’s David Remnick. For Netanyahu the son, that
catastrophic vision of history has meant that nearly all matters of
defence appear refracted through the lens of existential threat.
According to such calculus, any Palestinian state would almost certainly
devolve into an Islamist terror state threatening Israel’s existence;
therefore indefinite Israeli control over the occupied territories is an
absolute necessity for Jewish survival.
Netanyahu
combined this bleak worldview with a mastery of the art of political
presentation. He was Israel’s first real TV prime minister. He took
acting classes to perfect his public performances. He wore makeup and
made sure the cameras only showed his good side. At a time when most
other Israeli politicians still favoured rolled-up shirt sleeves,
Netanyahu appeared in bold Brioni suits, and this taste for luxury, too,
would remain throughout his years in power.
A
former special forces commando turned management consultant, Netanyahu
embodied the new Israeli synthesis of hawkish neoliberalism. He was, at
once, a technocrat and a populist. In 1996, he arrived in office with
elaborate plans to remake the Israeli economy along Thatcherite
free-market lines: restructuring of the country’s bureaucracy,
liberalising the labour market; cutting subsidies for struggling
industries. He accomplished little of this programme. More significant
were the changes he brought to the country’s political culture. Ever
since Menachem Begin’s premiership in the 1970s, Likud had used the
rhetoric of class resentment and religious traditionalism to mobilise
its base of largely working-class Mizrahim, Jews of Middle Eastern and
north African origin. Netanyahu sharpened Likud’s populism for the age
of the soundbite. His supporters rallied behind the slogan “Netanyahu –
good for the Jews”, which implied that his opponents were disloyal to
Jewish interests.
After he returned to power
in 2009, Netanyahu vowed never to lose it. As Israeli journalist Ben
Caspit details in his book, The Netanyahu Years, Netanyahu crushed or
expelled any potential rivals within Likud. By 2015, he had
“metamorphosed”, Haaretz editor Aluf Benn wrote, “from a risk-averse
conservative into a rightwing radical”. He transformed a party that,
while always staunchly and even violently nationalist, had once included
economic and social liberals into an authoritarian populist party
centred on his charismatic personality. Encouraged by his wife, Sara,
and his son, Yair, Netanyahu also began to think of himself as
indispensable, as the incarnation of the national spirit, as identical
to the state itself. “Without Bibi,” Sara Netanyahu has repeatedly said,
“Israel is doomed.”
Over
his long years in power, a distinct “Netanyahu model” of politics
emerged. When it came to the issue of the Palestinians, Netanyahu’s core
belief was that the occupation could be managed and maintained
indefinitely. In theory, Netanyahu suggested that he would be willing to
accept the “demilitarised” Palestinian state that he described in a 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University.
Yet in practice, as he outlined in the same speech, the conditions
under which he would agree to such a state were ones that no Palestinian
leader could ever accept: not just demilitarisation and Israeli
security control over airspace, but also an Israeli capital in an
undivided Jerusalem. It was a bluff to keep the illusion of a peace
process alive while further entrenching the occupation.
Netanyahu’s
belief that the occupation could remain in perpetuity was, and is,
widely shared. The Israeli centre-right’s leading intellectual, the
philosopher Micah Goodman, gave the idea of occupation-management a
respectable patina of pragmatism in his 2018 book Catch-67.
Rather than hoping to “solve” the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Goodman
suggested that it might be “minimised” – for instance, by expanding
areas of limited Palestinian autonomy while maintaining ultimate Israeli
dominance in the occupied West Bank.
Even
Netanyahu’s political opponents have embraced this approach. The
short-lived “change” government led by the former TV host Yair Lapid and
settler leader Naftali Bennett, which briefly deposed Netanyahu in the
spring of 2021, did not deviate from the Netanyahu model, but deepened
it further. It was under the Lapid-Bennett government when Palestinian
casualties in the West Bank began to spike. This was also the period
when Benny Gantz, at the time minister of defence, designated six
leading Palestinian human rights NGOs “terrorist organisations” as part
of Israel’s efforts to quash opposition to the occupation.
To
its proponents, the occupation-management paradigm had numerous
practical advantages. Maintaining the status quo lowered the risk of
enraging the international community. Indefinite yet putatively
temporary occupation also enabled Israel to keep the Palestinians
disenfranchised, whereas formal annexation would require Israel to
decide whether to grant Palestinians in the annexed territories
citizenship and, from Israel’s point of view, risk jeopardising the
Jewish demographic majority.
Yet for Netanyahu
and his allies, it was not enough simply to entrench the occupation; it
was also necessary to guarantee that no unified Palestinian movement
might arise. The way to do that, according to Netanyahu, was to
strengthen the Islamist Hamas in Gaza at the expense of its rival, the
Fatah-dominated PLO in the West Bank. To prop up the Hamas government in
Gaza, at Israel’s request, the Qatari government transferred billions
of dollars to the militant group. “Anyone who wants to prevent the
creation of a Palestinian state needs to support strengthening Hamas,” said Netanyahu
at a Likud party meeting in 2019. “This is part of our strategy, to
divide the Palestinians between those in Gaza and those in Judea and
Samaria.”
What Israelis call “the conceptzia” –
this paradigm of occupation-management and divide-and-rule – had its
counterpart in the realm of foreign policy. Until 2020, the only Arab
states to sign treaties with Israel were Egypt and Jordan. That changed
when the Trump administration underwrote the 2020 Abraham Accords, the series of normalisation agreements between Israel and the Gulf States of Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, as well as Morocco and, later, Sudan.
It is not a coincidence that Hamas launched its attack just as Israel
and Saudi Arabia appeared to be getting closer to normalising relations.
Even after the current devastating war, Israel and the Saudis may very
well press on with this process, but it remains as clear as ever that
long-term regional stability – and Israeli security – will depend on
ending the occupation and realising Palestinian national aspirations.
Likud billboards in 2019 in Tel Aviv, showing Netanyahu greeting Trump and Putin. Photograph: Amir Levy/Getty Images
From
the perspective of Israel’s right, regional integration also provided
an alternative safety net as the US turned its focus away from the
Middle East and toward Asia. As one Israeli politician, a member of
Avigdor Liberman’s rightwing secularist Yisrael Beitenu party told me in
the summer of 2022, “the declining stature” of the US in world affairs
necessitated closer ties between Israel and other countries in the
region. “People understand that they need to hang on to each other,” he
said.
A Middle East where the US played a less
active role had also long been a dream of Israeli hawks, who view
Israeli reliance on the US as a constraint and strategic liability. In
1996, a group of neoconservative thinktankers lead by Richard Perle, who
would later join the George W Bush administration, published a paper
titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,
which outlined steps for how Israel under Netanyahu could “forge a new
basis for relations with the United States”. According to the authors,
Israel could gain “greater freedom of action and remove a significant
lever of pressure against it” if it was able to “cut itself free” from
US support by “liberalising its economy”.
To a
large extent, Netanyahu’s successive administrations followed this
strategy. Aggressive privatisations of banks and utilities, tax cuts and
sharp decreases on public spending, and anti-union measures did
transform Israel from a middling, state-dominated economy into an
affluent, military- and surveillance-tech exporting regional power, even
as inequality within Israel deepened. Under Netanyahu – first as
finance minister in Ariel Sharon’s government, then during his second
stint as prime minister – Israel reversed
its longstanding trade deficit and began to accumulate vast foreign
currency reserves. The stronger Israel became economically, the less it
required direct economic grant aid from the US, which ceased in 2008. Even US military aid to Israel, though it still amounts to the enormous sum of $38bn, mostly comes in the form of a discount for Israeli purchases of US arms and missile-defence funding – essentially a subsidy to US arms manufactures.
In
the 2010s, Netanyahu began to turn away from the US and its allies and
cultivate relationships with proudly illiberal states such as Viktor
Orbán’s Hungary and Poland under the rule of outgoing leader Jarosław
Kaczyński as a means of blocking potential measures against Israel by
the European Union. He boasted of his good working relationship with
Russia’s Vladmir Putin – 2019 Likud election campaign posters showed Netanyahu shaking hands with Putin
–and throughout Russian’s war on Ukraine, Israel has refused to supply
missile defence systems to Ukraine and has kept criticism of Russian
conduct to a minimum. Ever wary of US decline, Israel has also developed
closer ties with China. In 2021, as part of China’s belt and road
initiative, Israel granted
the state-owned Shanghai International Port Group a tender to operate
the Haifa Bay Port shipping terminal, which manages roughly half of the
country’s freight. Chinese companies have also worked on major Israeli
infrastructure projects, such as the new Tel Aviv light rail system.
In
Israel’s domestic sphere, Netanyahu developed a distinct mode of
personalistic rule. He granted ministerial and government agency
positions to Likud apparatchiks and yes-men, unknowns and incompetents
whose only credential seemed to be their loyalty to him. In 2020, after
he was indicted in several corruption cases, charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust, Netanyahu’s political style became increasingly paranoid. In a pre-trial speech,
he declared: “Elements in the police and the prosecution have joined
forces with the leftist media – I call them the ‘anyone but Bibi’ gang –
to manufacture baseless cases against me.” This marked the
crystallisation of what some Israeli commentators named “Bibism” – a
synthesis of bellicose nationalism, conspiracy theorising and, above all
else, the denunciation of Netanyahu’s opponents as traitors.
As
more of the electorate turned against him, Netanyahu maintained a
governing coalition by elevating extremist settlers and messianic
ethno-nationalists to positions of power within his government. These
included figures like Itamar Ben-Gvir,
now minister of national security, who has previously been convicted of
incitement to racism and terrorism, who as a young far-right militant
had been part of a group that assaulted Yitzhak Rabin’s motorcade, and
who, until recently, hung on his living room wall a picture of Baruch
Goldstein, a Brooklyn-born Israeli settler who massacred 29 Palestinians
at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron. As part of coalition
negotiations last winter, Netanyahu transferred authority
over the military government in the West Bank to finance minister and
hardline religious nationalist Bezalel Smotrich, who has called for the
formal annexation of the West Bank and the expulsion of any Palestinians
who resist.
Once invested with authority,
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich began to push immediately for the annexation of
parts of the occupied West Bank, implementing land-grab measures and
approving unbridled settlement expansion, which culminated, even before
the current war, in making 2023 the deadliest year for Palestinians
since the second intifada. Between 1 January and 6 October,
the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
recorded at least 199 Palestinian fatalities in the occupied West Bank,
including East Jerusalem, the highest figure since 2005.
Hamas’s
incursion on the morning of 7 October demolished each of the prongs of
Netanyahu’s project. The scale and cruelty of the assault demonstrated
the impossibility of maintaining the occupation for ever without
continuous, devastating loss of life. For most of the past two decades,
it was the Palestinians who bore the vast majority of this human cost,
and those years lulled Israel into a dangerous complacency and
indifference toward the fates of their Palestinian neighbours. The Hamas
leadership recognised this vulnerability and exploited it to murderous
effect.
While it will take time to grasp fully
the extent of the Israeli intelligence failure, what has emerged so far
is that military officials ignored what should have been warning signs.
According to Haaretz, Israel intelligence stopped listening
to Hamas walkie-talkie chatter months before the attacks. On a recent
TV interview, a 20-year-old soldier from the 7th armoured brigade said
his unit had received reports of unusual activity at about 11pm the
night of 6 October but were issued no follow-up command. At about 3am,
Ronen Bar, director of the Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security service,
received a call
in response to such reports. After hours of deliberation in the early
morning, he sent only a small special forces team to the Gaza
separation-fence area. Convinced that Hamas had been pacified, deterred
and integrated into the Israeli apparatus of occupation-management,
Israel’s generals did not take seriously that Hamas could carry out an
attack of such magnitude.
The attacks also
revealed with terrifying clarity the strategic risk posed by the ongoing
settlement enterprise in the West Bank. One reason why Hamas gunmen
managed to overwhelm Israeli defences, and why it took so long for
Israeli forces to retake the towns and kibbutzim that had been overrun,
was that much of Israel’s army had been sent to the West Bank. That
weekend was the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah – under normal
circumstances a time of joy and dancing, but in the occupied West Bank, a
time of heightened settler violence. The Israeli army had even
relocated forces away from the Gaza border to the West Bank, to guard
Israeli settlers. In total, 32 IDF battalions had deployed to the
occupied West Bank, while just two battalions deployed along the Gaza
border. This left the kibbutzim and towns of the western Negev – the
citizens of Israel proper – vulnerable, while West Bank settlers could
terrorise the Palestinian population under IDF cover. Advocates of
settlement-building have long claimed that their efforts bolstered
Israel’s security. Reality has proven their argument wrong.
![Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, inspects assault rifles as they are handed out to members of a volunteer security squad, in Ashkelon, Israel, on 27 October 2023.]()
Photograph: Hannibal Hanschke/EPA
Netanyahu’s
failures in the realm of foreign relations are no less stark. Contrary
to his long-held view, the question of Palestine will not simply go
away. No real Israeli integration into the broader Middle East will be
possible without a long-term agreement that ends the occupation of the
West Bank and the siege of the Gaza Strip. The current war has frayed
Israel’s relations with Egypt and Jordan, its two most crucial Arab
allies. With the help of the US, the Israeli government has attempted to
pressure the Egyptian government into taking Gazans into Egyptian
territory, a move that reflects a reckless disregard for the stability
of their south-west neighbour. Egyptian authorities have so far refused.
Massive protests have broken out not only in Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon,
but also in Turkey. The Abraham Accords, which Netanyahu took to be his
epochal achievement, have also shown signs of strain. In early
November, Bahrain recalled its ambassador from Israel and announced that it had suspended economic ties to show support for the Palestinian cause.
Above
all, the ostensible “self-reliance” that Netanyahu achieved has proved
to be a farce. Amid the threat of a broader regional war, Israel now
appears more dependent than ever on its US sponsor, which has moved two
aircraft carrier strike groups to the Middle East to deter regional
escalation of the conflict. The US provides Israel with everything from
small arms, such as automatic rifles, to key components of the Iron Dome
system. It even sent
three-star general James Glynn of the US Marines to advise the Israeli
general staff on how to conduct urban counterinsurgency. In an
unprecedented display of US involvement, secretary of state Antony
Blinken and secretary of defense Lloyd Austin have both sat in on
Israeli security cabinet planning meetings to counsel their Israeli
counterparts.
Within Israel, the incompetent
response to 7 October has exposed the toll Netanyahu’s long rule has
taken on the state. For days, and in some cases weeks, after the
attacks, some families reported that they had heard nothing from
government officials about the whereabouts of their missing relatives;
daytime TV anchors stepped in to create hotlines for those desperate for
information. On the day of the attacks, when dozens of police were
killed, Ben-Gvir, whose office oversees the police, was nowhere to be
found; only later did he emerge, not to take responsibility for what had
happened, but to stage photo-ops of himself distributing assault rifles
to civilian defence units in Israeli cities. State efforts to relocate,
feed and clothe the tens of thousands of Israelis evacuated from the
northern and southern borders were so ineffectual that protest groups,
which had formed during the demonstrations against the government’s
judicial overhaul plan, stepped in to fill the void. Budget cuts to the
ministry of health have created a shortage of state-funded social
workers and psychologists to handle the thousands of people in need of
treatment for trauma.
For his part, Netanyahu
seems to be managing the crisis with his increasingly dim political
future in mind. As ever, his concern is optics. He has not attended a
single funeral for those killed on 7 October, presumably out of fear
that attendees might accost him. He has favoured broadcast addresses and
staged photo-ops with elite military units. When he finally met with
representatives of the families of those taken hostage, a far-right
activist with no known ties to any hostages, but with close ties to the
Netanyahu family, just happened to suddenly appear
at the meeting to praise him. Having already attempted to blame
military and intelligence officials for the 7 October disaster,
Netanyahu is now busy collecting evidence to exculpate himself when, after the war, he finally faces a reckoning.
Despite
such efforts at image rehabilitation, Netanyahu is all but finished
politically. The public’s anger towards him and his government is
immense. In a recent survey conducted by Israel’s Channel 13 News, 76% of respondents
said Netanyahu needs to resign – either at the end of the war (47%) or
immediately (29%). During a recent interview with the Israeli liberal
daily Haaretz, the former defence minister Moshe Ya’alon, a man whose
political views are to Netanyahu’s right, called the prime minister “an
existential threat” to the country. Another poll found that less than 4%
of Israelis believe Netanyahu is a reliable source of information about
the current war.
What comes after Netanyahu? Before 7 October, his attempt to dismantle the country’s judiciary had sparked the largest protest movement
in Israel’s history. For more than nine months, hundreds of thousands
took to the streets in an attempt to stave off a reactionary
constitutional revolution that would have made it almost impossible for
the right to lose power. These protests revitalised Israeli civil
society, which had shrivelled over the course of Netanyahu’s tenure. The
perceived threat of an Orbán- or Erdoğan-style autocracy has
re-politicised and, in some cases, even radicalised segments of Israel’s
liberal, secular, educated middle classes. Any new political force that
might not just challenge Netanyahu the man, but also break with his
policies, will probably emerge out of this movement.
Israelis protest against the government’s judicial overhaul plan, March 2023. Photograph: Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Still,
what remains of Israel’s left finds itself in a difficult place. The
last few years of repeated elections – there have been five since 2019 –
devastated the Labor Zionist parties that once dominated Israeli
political life. The Labor party itself has been reduced to just four
parliamentary seats. Meretz, the civil libertarian, social-democratic
party that long represented the country’s peace camp has no seats. Since
7 October, Yair Golan,
a 61-year-old former IDF general and erstwhile Meretz chairman has
become something of a national celebrity after he donned his uniform and
rescued civilians under Hamas attack; for the time being, he is the
Israeli centre-left’s last, best hope to bring a negotiated compromise
with the Palestinians back to the Israeli mainstream – but it is an
extremely remote possibility.
Israel’s public
discourse has lurched much further to the right. TV news amplifies the
calls for revenge and the use of disproportionate force, even as the
death toll in Gaza rises into the tens of thousands. Each day, another
Likud politician or government minister emerges to call unashamedly for
war crimes. Agriculture minister Avi Dichter appeared
on television last week to urge on the “Gaza Nakba”, as he described
Israel’s current ground operation. Deputy speaker of the Knesset, Nissim
Vaturi, tweeted that Israel should “Burn Gaza now, nothing less!” Earlier this month, the minister of heritage, Amihai Eliyahu suggested Israel could drop drop a nuclear bomb on the Gaza Strip. Some Israeli pop stars have begun
to sing of conquering and rebuilding Israeli settlements in the Gaza
Strip. Though the political leaders of the settler right, such as
Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, have been discredited, the veteran pollster Dudi
Hasid recently observed that there might be space even further to their
right awaiting to be filled. Netanyahu and his government have said that
the aim of the war is to topple Hamas; Israel’s almost inevitable
failure to fully meet this goal could, in fact, generate an increased
ethno-nationalist backlash.
The
most likely possibility, however, is that the Netanyahu project
persists in the absence of the man himself. The most probable successor
to Netanyahu is his closest rival of several years, Benny Gantz, the
former IDF chief and leader of the centre-right National Unity party,
whose ratings
have skyrocketed in the past six weeks. The tall, blue-eyed Gantz
presents an image of martial rectitude compared to Netanyahu’s
mafioso-populism. Yet Gantz is less an ideological alternative to
Netanyahu than a cosmetic one. A loyal soldier for his entire life, he
has known nothing other than the occupation-management paradigm, and
would probably maintain it. Polling just behind Gantz, former prime
minister Naftali Bennett also appears poised for a bid at power. Bennett
– who once served as Netanyahu’s chief of staff – would also probably
stick to the Netanyahu playbook.
For years, Netanyahu has imagined himself
as the Middle East’s Winston Churchill. The Israeli journalist Ari
Shavit has observed that Netanyahu sees himself not simply as battling
threats to Israel’s existence, but as a frontline defender of the west
against its mortal enemies. Since the start of the current war,
Netanyahu’s grandiose illusions have been on display. “We are sons of
light, they are sons of darkness,” he recently declared.
Yet it is, at least in part, this very pessimism – the worldview in
which it is always 1933 – that has doomed Israel under Netanyahu to
endless wars – seven since he assumed power in 2009 – and condemned the
Palestinians in Gaza to repeated bombardment.
Any
break with the Netanyahu paradigm will require moving beyond the
mentality according to which Israel’s existence hangs ever in the
balance – a task that, after the massacres of 7 October, will be much
more difficult. But as Israeli security officials will freely
acknowledge, this ghastly war, even with its threat of turning into
multi-front conflagration, is not an existential war for Israel. If
there is to be any hope of undoing the Netanyahu legacy, it will come
from an Israeli leader, perhaps one whose name is not yet known, with
the courage to acknowledge frankly Israel’s strength and use it as a
basis for a renewed push for peace.
For now,
however, there are no such candidates. Netanyahu has reshaped the
country in his image; he has led the country for longer than David
Ben-Gurion, the country’s founding father. Even after Netanyahu the man
is gone, his legacy discredited, the mould he set will prove difficult
to shatter.