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.
West Bank Settlers Prepare for Clash, With Israeli Government
A flagship of the settler enterprise, Amona is becoming a test of how far Israel’s right-wing government will go to avoid a clash with its constituency and how vested it is in more than 100 outposts built without authorization across the West Bank.
.. Mr. Netanyahu’s government has been working to retroactively legalize dozens of settler outposts that sit on public land. But Amona was built on privately owned Palestinian land, where Israel’s own judiciary insists the state cannot simply rubber-stamp construction.
.. Leafing through a bound folio of maps, photographs and documents from the outpost’s early years, Mr. Buaron pointed out how the state helped provide its infrastructure: a high-voltage power line, Housing Ministry plans to prepare 40 plots for permanent homes, a road.
.. The settlers are pushing for legislation that would force Palestinian owners to accept compensation rather than get their land back, arguing that the current legal strictures could be applied to thousands of settler homes beyond Amona. The attorney general has already ruled out that option, but 25 of the 30 Parliament members from Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud Party nonetheless signed a petition backing it last month.
.. Mr. Buaron, the Amona leader, said there was nothing stopping Palestinians from coming to work their land, but Mr. Hamed’s wife, Nihad, 56, expressed a widely held fear.
“They would shoot us,” she said, noting that an unarmed man from Silwad was killed by Israeli soldiers in August. “I wouldn’t send my sons.”
.. Abdallah Abu Rahmeh, a Palestinian Authority official who focuses on settlements, saw the Israeli debate as hairsplitting that obscures the depth of the occupation. “It is not up to Israel to determine where each piece of land is going to go in our own country,” he said.