That’s the day he secures his legacy just by waking up, becoming the longest serving prime minister in Israel’s history, outlasting the iconic David Ben-Gurion.
.. Whatever your feelings about him, no one can dispute his genius at political survival.
.. The ability to persist, to keep going even when the world hates you, when the ground is crumbling beneath your feet, this is what he most values
.. After two decades in the public eye, what else can we say Bibi wants?
.. taking us on a slog through what he identifies as nine decisive moments in Netanyahu’s career and then rehashing, largely using newspaper clips, the Machiavellian minutiae.
.. On one side is the imagined inner voice of Benzion Netanyahu, Bibi’s father
.. A severe, aggrieved man, a scholar of the Spanish Inquisition, Benzion was to the right of the right — no compromises, no room for two states, etc. — and would frequently say things like “The tendency toward conflict is in the essence of the Arab.”
.. the evidence of Netanyahu’s political dexterity — winning an election in 1996 by hewing to the center, winning a different one in 2015 by lurching to the right. He often seems guided only by a very attuned political antenna that has him joining forces with the religious parties and settler zealots one day and seeking a coalition with the Labor party the next.
.. What does it mean, for example, that on the eve of his last election, in March 2015, Bibi answered definitively that he would not allow a Palestinian state to rise during his tenure? Is that a revelation of his true ideological nature? Or was he, in that moment, merely trying to shore up his right flank, which he did? And what do we make of his flip-flop a few months later, on a trip to Washington in November, when he stated that he remained “committed to a vision of peace of two states for two people”?
.. What Lochery fails to explore are the consequences of Bibi’s “pragmatism” in a place like Israel. Because, in practice, pragmatism for Netanyahu means twisting every which way to avoid confronting the problems of the occupation.
.. The tumult of the Middle East today, between ISIS and Syria and the sad harvest of the Arab Spring (not to mention his favorite bugbear, a rising Iran), allows Bibi to free himself or Israel of any need to take action vis-à-vis the Palestinians.
.. Netanyahu described a “real Middle East” filled with “large swathes of fundamentalism and dictatorial regimes” and engaged in a civilizational battle “much bigger than the battle with Zionism.”
.. The implication, in 1998 and repeated these days like a mantra, is that the only thing Israel can do is hunker down. But this is also an ideology of sorts
.. In the 1920s, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism and grandfather of today’s right wing (and Benzion Netanyahu’s mentor), dubbed his strategy “the iron wall.” In order for Jews to gain their own state they needed to harshly defend their own interests. For Jabotinsky this meant waging relentless war against the local Arab population until they understood that the Jews would never leave.
.. But still the ethos of the iron wall remains. Today, it manifests itself as an insistence that Israel cannot ever make concessions, that it must hold the line at all cost, its existence as fragile as it was in 1948. Netanyahu is the embodiment of that iron wall — unloved but strangely comforting to his people, a man who is a pure projection of the simple desire to continue existing, but who has no ambition to reach for more.
Why Israel Still Refuses to Choose
Next year it will be a half-century since the Israeli occupation of the West Bank began. More than 370,000 settlers now live there, excluding in East Jerusalem, up from about 249,000 in 2005.
.. The Israeli announcement this month of a new West Bank settlement was the final straw, coming just weeks after the United States concluded a $38 billion, 10-year military aid deal. Israel’s explanation that the settlement was a “satellite” of another did not wash; its actions were viewed as egregious. Seldom has Moshe Dayan’s old dictum — “Our American friends offer us money, arms and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice” — been more vividly illustrated.
.. Within Israel, where Netanyahu has now amassed more than a decade in power, the political and cultural drift is toward ever more assertive and intolerant nationalism. Criticism is increasingly equated with treason.
.. The Messianic religious Zionism that holds all the West Bank to be Israel’s by biblical decree is ascendant. The left is in feeble disarray.
.. It is sobering to note that Netanyahu probably represents the more moderate wing of his government.
.. Two states had become a bad joke. Young people had more faith in nonviolent resistance leading eventually to equal rights within a single state than in yet another aborted international peace initiative or aborted uprising.
.. In a sense, then, Israel has won. David Ben-Gurion was right when he observed in 1949 that, “When the matter is dragged out — it brings us benefits.”
.. “Israel needs to be democratic more than Jewish,” says Reem Younis, an Arab Israeli.
.. It is time for incremental steps instead. Israel could find lots of ways to ease humiliations and economic hardship for Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, without compromising its security. It could take down some roadblocks, curtail the formalities for movement in and out of Gaza, and grant more building permits in the West Bank, as it just has in quietly authorizing some Palestinian development plans in West Bank areas under exclusive Israeli control. It could even, without saying so, stop settlement expansion.
.. Netanyahu will one day have to tell Israelis if he wants a big binational state or a smaller Jewish-majority state side by side with a Palestinian state. He is trying his best to avoid making the choice, keeping millions of Palestinians in limbo; the West helps him with a “peace process” that goes nowhere. Abbas also owes his people clarity and accountability — as well as a political destination.
.. “One state or two states? Who cares?” he told me. “What matters is human dignity and equality under the same law. Palestinian kids want to live well. That’s what they want.”
How Benjamin Netanyahu Is Crushing Israel’s Free Press
In its annual report released this spring, Freedom House, an American democracy advocacy organization, downgraded Israel’s freedom of the press ranking from “free” to “partly free.” To anyone following Israeli news media over the past year and a half, this was hardly surprising.
.. For the past 18 months, in addition to his prime ministerial duties, he has served as Israel’s communications minister (as well as its foreign minister, economy minister and minister of regional cooperation).
.. Efforts to stifle freedom of the press can be seen as part of a broader attack by Mr. Netanyahu and his ministers on Israel’s democratic institutions, including the Supreme Court and nongovernmental organizations. Dissent from the official government line is consistently called into suspicion. In this climate, the news media has become a personal battleground for Mr. Netanyahu. Nahum Barnea, a pre-eminent Israeli columnist, said last year that Mr. Netanyahu’s “obsession” with the news media showed him to be “gripped by fear and paranoia.”
..Any objections that this move may have raised were pre-empted by Mr. Netanyahu, who had already required all members of his coalition to sign a “communications clause,” guaranteeing their automatic support for any decision made in the future by the communications minister — in other words, by him... many Israelis view Mr. Netanyahu’s battle for control over the news media as a long-overdue corrective after years of a liberal or left-wing bias... more than they are sick of him they despise the old leftist elites,”.. “At some point Netanyahu realized that his battle with the media makes him very popular among his base supporters,”.. most Israelis are getting their news from Israel Hayom or Walla News, and when the only remaining liberal bastion — Haaretz — struggles to stay afloat.
Netanyahu, Prime Minister of the State of Israel-Palestine
Soon, this newspaper will have to call Netanyahu what he’s made himself into: “Prime Minister of the State of Israel-Palestine.”
.. Yediot Aharonot columnist Nahum Barnea wrote, “Instead of presenting to the world a more moderate government ahead of the diplomatic battles to come in the fall, Netanyahu is presenting the most radical government to ever exist in Israeli history.”
Yaalon himself warned, “Extremist and dangerous forces have taken over Israel and the Likud movement and are destabilizing our home and threatening to harm its inhabitants.”
.. This whole episode started March 24 when Azaria, a medic, was caught on video shooting the wounded Palestinian. He was one of two Palestinians armed with knives who had stabbed an Israeli soldier, lightly wounding him. Azaria just decided on his own to kill him.
Yaalon and the Army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot, reacted swiftly, saying this is not how the Israeli Army behaves. Azaria was charged with manslaughter and inappropriate military conduct. At first Netanyahu, too, said the killing violated the army’s values, but when his settler base came out in favor of the killing, Netanyahu shifted, urging the court to take a balanced view of what happened. Lieberman actually went to the court to show support for Azaria.
.. “Israel’s ruling party being transformed from a hawkish nationalist party that used to have a humanitarian and democratic base, into an ultranationalist party that is now defined by turning against the ‘enemies’ from within — the courts, the NGOs, the education system, the Arab minority and now, the army — anyone who stands in the way of their project of permanent occupation of the West Bank.