After a half-century of occupying Palestinian territory, Israel is succumbing to its deepest ethno-centrist impulses, and increasingly rejecting recognized boundaries. Israel is now on its way to join the growing club of illiberal democracies, and it has Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to thank.
Over the course of 11 years as Israel’s prime minister, Netanyahu has reshaped the country’s collective psyche. He has elevated the isolated, traumatized ‘Jew’—still at odds with the ‘gentiles,’ not to mention the ‘Arabs’—above the secular, liberal, and globalized ‘Israeli’ envisioned by the country’s founding fathers.
Netanyahu himself is a secular, cynical hedonist who faces an ongoing investigation into his alleged acceptance of lavish illicit gifts from a Hollywood mogul. Yet he is adept at playing the ‘Jewish card’ to his own benefit. In 1996, his promise to be ‘good for the Jews’ won him power. In 2015, his warning that Jews must rush to vote for him, or have their fate decided by ‘droves’ of Arabs supposedly headed to the polling stations, did the same.
Just as appealing to people’s Jewishness wins elections, it blocks negotiations on a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Netanyahu’s insistence that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state in 2014 became the last nail in the coffin of an already dying peace process.
In many ways, Netanyahu’s political profile matches that of the most hardline Republicans. His wife once boasted that, had he been born in the US, he could have been president. He probably would have preferred such a life, largely for the sheer power it would afford him. It also would have enabled him to avoid eight frustrating years at loggerheads with President Barack Obama.
Now, however, Netanyahu is relieved to have in the White House Donald Trump, a like-minded Republican who is, in practically every way, the polar opposite of Obama. The last US president showed empathy for minorities and immigrants; defended human and civil rights; achieved a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran; sought peace in Palestine; and, most problematic, attempted to hold the Israeli leader to account. One of Obama’s last acts as president was to have the US abstain from voting on a United Nations Security Council resolution against Israeli settlement-building in the occupied territories, rather than vetoing it.
Read the full article by Shlomo Ben-Ami at The Strategist.