Cartoon by Emad Hajjaj

Is This the End of Bibi?

By David Remnick

The New Yorker: Benjamin Netanyahu has been Prime Minister of Israel longer than anyone in the history of the state, longer than F.D.R. was President of the United States. And yet, for all his electoral success, he has always been a known quantity. Twenty-five years ago, during Netanyahu’s first term, I spoke with his predecessor and fellow Likud member Yitzhak Shamir. “Bibi?” Shamir said. “He is not a very trustworthy man.” He added, “I don’t believe he believes in anything. He has a huge ego. People don’t like such people. I don’t like him.” Not long after, I spoke with Shimon Peres, the Labor Party leader who had lost to Netanyahu in 1996. Peres was furious with Netanyahu’s determination to undermine the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians. His general assessment of Netanyahu’s amoralism and cynicism was much like Shamir’s. “Netanyahu’s only consideration is his own coalition,” Peres said. “He’s always worried about losing power—that is always his first priority.”

On the same reporting trip to Jerusalem, I discovered that the cliché is true: No man is a hero to his director of communications and policy planning. David Bar-Illan, a former concert pianist and editor of the Jerusalem Post, was without illusions about Netanyahu even as he pledged abiding loyalty to him. When I asked Bar-Illan how Netanyahu won the ultra-Orthodox vote despite his rigorously secular life style, Bar-Illan said, “Finessing his being secular was nothing compared to other things, like adultery. One thing is to have an affair with a shiksa—but a married woman! With a shiksa, even the rebbes do it. But a married woman! Now Bibi’ll go to synagogue on Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, maybe he’s gone to the Western Wall, or he’ll say the phrase ‘With God’s help.’ But he’s not fooling anyone.”

When Bar-Illan’s remarks were published in The New Yorker and then in the Israeli press, Netanyahu was incensed. He barred his spinmeister from his plane and his next trip to Washington. Bar-Illan, who died in 2003, panicked and not only denied that he’d said those things to me but he also told Israeli television that he had never even met me. (This forced me to go on Israeli TV to display the copy of his book “Eye on the Media,” which he had inscribed, “To David from David, With admiration and best wishes.”)

The point is, Netanyahu has never really fooled anyone. He didn’t fool his fellow-politicians or various American Presidents, who knew him to be a liar and an opportunist. He was not fooling the Mizrahim, who obviously knew that he came from an Ashkenazic background. Nor has he fooled the ultra-Orthodox, who have always known that he followed the rules of fidelity and kashruth with equal attention. Netanyahu’s cynicism, deceptions, and ethical gymnastics are no more shocking to his Israeli supporters than Trump’s similar qualities are to his immense base. He won so long as he could deliver for his constituents.

And now this generation-long drama, the Netanyahu era, has reached its dispiriting resolution. Netanyahu has pursued his aim to cling to power at all costs. Facing criminal charges, he has made common cause with a cabinet of messianic authoritarians and bigots who are righteously determined to hack away at judicial independence, freedom of the press, minority rights, protest and opposition politics, and democracy itself. Next week, the Knesset is poised to get rid of the so-called reasonableness clause, a stricture borrowed from British tradition which allows the Supreme Court to strike down actions of the legislature. Such a move, in a state with no constitution, would undermine what modest balance of powers exists in Israeli political life. Avichai Mandelblit, a former Attorney General, warned recently that, if Netanyahu fails to restrain his coalition, Israel is in the process of turning into a “borderline dictatorial state.”

The government’s ability to act without judicial restraint is only one item on an illiberal menu that also includes efforts to restrict media outlets that are deemed excessively critical and to enshrine as a right the ultra-Orthodox community’s exemption from military conscription. In its contempt for the rule of law, the balance of powers, immigration, and ethnic and sexual minorities, the ruling coalition is in synch with intolerant governments and parties around the world; it is, in fact, a harbinger of Trump 2.0. Netanyahu, who can count, sees that the most religious citizens of his country procreate at a high rate, and he has staked his future with them. As Celeste Marcus writes in the latest issue of the journal Liberties, “Netanyahu, who has for decades projected the image of Israel’s protector, has allied with people who insist the study of Torah provides Israel with as much security as the army does, and therefore shirk mandatory conscription. His cynicism is bottomless.” >>>