For all the vitriol in the U.S. surrounding Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech last week to Congress, it was nothing compared with what the Israeli prime minister faced upon his homecoming. Israeli politics are generally more vicious than their American parallel, and Netanyahu returned to face what is almost a perfect storm raging around his re-election campaign.
It began with comments by Meir Dagan, a former director of Mossad, who said that the prime minister’s conduct of the conflict with the Palestinians would lead Israel to being either a binational or an apartheid state. Dagan has long been critical of Netanyahu, but former Mossad chiefs have virtual demigod status in Israel, so his accusation (which he repeated in front of an estimated 80,000 peopleat an anti-Netanyahu rally Saturday in Tel Aviv, where he also said that Netanyahu has brought Israel to its worst crisis since its creation) clearly stung.
The Likud itself brought on the second phase of the storm with an undeniably stupid and offensive TV ad that showed people in a self-help group, all there due to Netanyahu’s policies. There was the mobile-phone company executive who can no longer charge customers through the nose, the port worker who can no longer get away with working only three hours a week, and a Hamas terrorist complaining about Netanyahu’s war on terrorism. In a country with deep socialist roots, the nasty portrayal of lazy workers was edgy enough. But depicting a Hamas terrorist in the same group as laborers went way too far. Israelis woke up Monday morning to a YNet headline noting that a Likud candidate, the head of Israel’s Airport Authority, said publicly that his workers are telling him they will not vote Likud because of the ad in which Netanyahu compared them to the enemy. Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, long known as a straight shooter, said Netanyahu didn’t know about the content of the ad. Given that the prime minister was filmed reciting lines clearly meant for the ad, though, people found even Yaalon hard to believe this time.
The third blow was a leaked document allegedly indicating that the prime minister had agreed in principle to return to the 1967 lines in a deal with the Palestinians, something he has said publicly he would never do. Avi Issacharoff, one of Israel’s leading political commentators, wondered whether the leak originated with U.S. President Barack Obama andwas payback for the speech to Congress — an indication of how damaging he thought it might prove. On Sunday night, apparently seeking to prove that Netanyahu has not softened, the Likud announced that the prime minister no longer supports the two-state solution. Hours later, Netanyahu denied he ever said that. The Likud is desperate, struggling to keep the ship afloat in a storm that keeps growing stronger.
It has been a steep and precipitous fall since those glory moments on the podium before the U.S. Congress. Netanyahu is clearly in trouble. The two major questions that will determine the outcome of next week’s election are what number of Likud voters will actually abandon the right-wing camp, and whether fear of Tzipi Livni as prime minister will prevent many people from voting Labor (now the Zionist Union). Isaac Herzog is apparently palatable for many, but not so Livni, who co-chairs the party. A large ad running on YNet this week showed Herzog’s face, and said, “You start with him … .” Then the photo slowly morphed into Livni, and the ad continued, “But you’ll be stuck with her as your Prime Minister for two years.” It was an ad for Likud, which seems to have decided that its strongest argument is no longer pro-Netanyahu, but anti-Livni.
Whatever the outcome, this election will almost certainly prove much closer than Netanyahu ever imagined it would be. Calling these elections seems to have been a major political blunder. President Reuven Rivlin has announced that in the event of a tie between the two major parties, he will work toward a unity government instead of an illogical amalgam of small parties cobbled together — precisely what Netanyahu was hoping to put behind him.
For Netanyahu, the specter of a unity government is painfully ironic. It was a unity government in 1967, just before the Six Day War, that got Menachem Begin (Likud’s founder) into the government. If Israelis end up with a unity government in the next few weeks, the looming question will be whether these elections were a slight bump in Likud’s enduring run, or whether they signal the gradual return to power of Labor, which — beginning in January 1949 — ruled this country uninterrupted for 29 years.
To contact the author on this story:
Daniel Gordis at danielgordis@outlook.com
A subsequently uploaded piece on the New England Review corroborated my intuitive reaction.
@ ArnoldHarris:
The former, to which all the right-wingers have apparently been invited.
@ rsklaroff:
RSK:
Which rally are you referring to? Was this an event that took place on Sunday March 8? Or is it a rally that will take place two days before the election, on Sunday March 15? This is a real question, not a response gimmick.
Remember, I am writing from southern Wisconsin USA, not from somewhere in Israel. Also, my wife and I purposely have no television. So our point of reference here is what we pick up from online sources, or read from our extensive library. I am inclined to think that a very significant and large rally two days before the election is more meaningful than one that took place 11 days before the election.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
@ ArnoldHarris:
I appreciate your endorsement, but my focus was on the specifics … notwithstanding the fact that this was published in a lib-entity.
1. A long-time critic – albeit Mossad – doesn’t offset others who support BB; also, the disproven gambit that emerged a fortnight ago [when the claim emerged that the anonymous Mossad had contradicted BB on Iran] illustrates the desperation of the anti-BB contingent [which is tossing as much mud upon the wall, as possible].
2. I didn’t see the offending ad, presumably one of many; they should simply keep running the “babysitter” ad [which was hysterical] which, it is hoped, will remind voters that only BB is prepared to stand up to BHO.
3. The third bogus-claim was debunked by everyone, including Dennis Ross [with whom I have problems, but who had no reason to be dishonest in this situation]; thus, it also should properly fade from memory long before next Tuesday.
Overall, it seems to be desirable to anticipate that Sunday’s rally will offset last week’s and remind the swing-voting parties that they could help Israel survive two more years of BHO with BB’s erudition and forthrightness setting the political tone.
@ rsklaroff:
RSK:
Your pre-election guestimates are fairly close to my own. And I sincerely hope our assumptions are correct. Because, at this point in time, if anyone other than Binyamin Netanyahu and Likud forms the next government coalition, the show will be run by Herzog’s and Livni’s leftists.
Those people are the potential gravediggers of the State of Israel. And if they achieve power, they will surrender Jewish national rights not only in Shomron and Yehuda, but also in Jerusalem. And they will treat the Iranian nuclear weapons threat as something to be concerned about but nothing to take military action to stop.
And I would consider all that the beginning of the end of the Third Temple — the State of Israel.
These and other considerations are among key reasons that I have little or no use for liberal democracy, either here in the USA or in the State of Israel. What happens under democracy is that privileged gangs use their money power to subvert the republic and empower themselves, almost always wrecking the ability of the government to carry out its legitimate functions.
For these reasons, I truly wish the United States and Israel as well were managed by nationalist leadership cadres such as that of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin in Russia. His country and his people are regaining their sense of pride in the history of the Russian nation. In contrast, pride in the now-multiple nations of the United States of America is plainly dying.
Let that not happen to the Jewish state as it is happening to this unfortunate and fading imperium.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Perhaps my pro-BB bias is on-view, but none of these three events appears to trump the underlying point that all the polls show he is the preferred-leader … regardless of how the parties divvy-up the Knesset seats.