Israel's Savior Becomes It's Biggest Liability
How Netanyahu Gained And Maintained Power, And How To Get Rid Of Him
Israel has received strong support from the American public since the October 7th Hamas attacks, but it has gotten increasingly harder for pro-Israel supporters to defend the country’s response no thanks to its embattled and extremist prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. He added to the problem this week when he publicly came out against a two-state solution, the preferred path to peace for the American government that envisions Israeli and Palestinian states living side by side.
His comments, meant to sure up his embattled coalition government, which relies on small far-right anti-Palestinian political parties, miffed even the most Zionist officials in Washington. Since October 7th, Netanyahu has grown more unpopular than ever at home, but the possibility of a new regime coming to power before the end of the war in Gaza is slim, and that makes defending Israel when there is no plan for post-war Gaza uneasy and difficult.
Since the start of the war, the level of anti-Israel rhetoric coming from progressive and young activists has shocked many Jews and Zionists, but their views on Israel are logical. Too young to remember events in Israel or the Middle East before Netanyahu swept to power in 2009, Israel as far as they know it *is* Netanyahu.
How he came to “be” Israel though is worth exploring and explains a lot.
The roots of Netanyahu’s return to power came before most Zoomers were even born. During the 1990s, as Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization led by Yasser Arafat attempted to find a peaceful co-existence, Hamas, Hezbollah, and Islamic Jihad were engaging in a terror campaign against Israeli citizens, bombing buses, cafes, nightclubs, and other soft targets. This came after decades of terrorism at the hands of the PLO that included aircraft hijackings, assassinations, and the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics, which followed three successive invasions of Israel by its Arab neighbors which Israel repelled.
Israelis endured war and terror alongside a hope and expectation of eventual peace. Progress was made with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1993. Right-wing Israelis often threw cold water on peace proposals and warned that Palestinians were not acting in good faith, pointing to the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, a result of his making peace with Israel, as an example. Nevertheless, most Israeli voters generally ignored or were openly hostile to the far right,1 choosing instead to believe a path to peace existed.
That hope for peace was shattered in 2000 when a proposal for a Palestinian state was rejected. The move validated the right-wing opposition in Israel, then led by former military leader Ariel Sharon2, who had predicted Palestinians would never agree to a deal. The frustration and sense of betrayal among Israelis brought Sharon to power in 2001 and the right has governed Israel ever since. As premier, Sharon built a wall around the West Bank in the early 2000s, a major contributor to the apartheid allegations against Israel. His actions helped to trigger the Second Intifada, a violent conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians in the early 2000s.
Nevertheless, Sharon did seek peace in the waning days of the Second Intifada. He agreed to end the occupation and pull all Jewish settlements out of Gaza, angering some of his political allies, Netanyahu among them. He also aimed to clear out Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which numbered few at the time. In January 2006, however, Sharon suffered a stroke that left him incapacitated. This split Sharon’s Likud Party and his successor, Ehud Olmert formed his own party, Kadima, and pushed for Sharon’s policies to the frustration of far right-wingers like Netanyahu.
The Israeli far right was further validated after the de-occupation of Gaza and free democratic elections in Palestinian territories. To everyone’s surprise, Hamas narrowly won the 2006 elections and became the governing party of Palestine. This resulted in a civil war that left Hamas will full control of now-unoccupied Gaza, something far-right Israelis predicted would happen if Israelis left. Hamas’ victories in 2006 gave credibility to the Netanyahu faction’s view that Palestinians were uninterested in peace and that helped make his case to the exasperated Israeli people, which ultimately brought him to power.
In 2008, Barack Obama was elected President of the United States. Obama was seen as more pro-Palestinian than any recent American president. He was critical of settlement expansion in the West Bank, for example. Netanyahu, who grew up in the United States for a time and had political connections with American Republican officials, made the case to the Israeli people that Obama wouldn’t be friendly to their cause. He argued Israel needed a prime minister who could leverage support from both Obama’s political opponents and the American public to push Obama to their side.
Netanyahu’s political team engaged in racially insensitive campaign strategies both in Israel and in the US, even leveraging the fact that Obama’s father was Muslim as a reason to suggest Obama secretly harbored anti-semitic and anti-Israel sentiments. In New York, home to a large Zionist population, Netanyahu’s allies even accused Obama of having spoken positively about the Holocaust and secured members of the Democratic Party, like former New York Mayor Ed Koch, to come out against Obama on Israel policy. Koch helped deliver a massive political defeat to Obama in a New York City congressional race in 2011 and Netanyahu’s allies helped muster 30 percent of the Jewish vote to Mitt Romney in 2012, the highest ever for a Republican presidential candidate. The Israeli leader even snubbed Obama and welcomed an invitation from Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner to speak to Congress, where he openly criticized the administration3.
As a result, Obama toned down his criticism of Israel and agreed to fund Israeli defense systems like the Iron Dome, which protects Israel from Hamas rocket attacks even today. Obama secretly harbored resentment toward the Netanyahu government, however. In December 2016, the Obama administration embarrassed Israel by abstaining from the UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which declared Israeli settlements in the West Bank a violation of international law, but that came after Donald Trump had already won the election to succeed Obama a month earlier.
Though Netanyahu was politically radical, his early premiership happened during a time of relative peace inside Israel. The barrage of suicide bombings and terror attacks that plagued Israel under his predecessors had slowed to a trickle, and that strengthened Netanyahu’s argument that his policies, no matter how radical, protected Israelis. That helped him maintain power even as he engaged in unpopular and corrupt domestic policies.
The barrage of suicide bombings and terror attacks that plagued Israel under his predecessors had slowed to a trickle, and that strengthened Netanyahu’s argument that his policies, no matter how radical, protected Israelis.
Trump’s presidency further entrenched Netanyahu. The president’s support for Israel validated Netanyahu’s longtime claim that Israel needed a prime minister who could influence American politics to their country’s benefit. Trump turned a blind eye to the proliferation of settlements in the West Bank, where the population grew to almost 750,000 people by the end of his presidency from just about 100,000 when Ariel Sharon prepared to dismantle them in 2005. This made any future attempt at moving settlers out of the West Bank even more difficult than it was two decades ago, perhaps even impossible at this point. Such a policy would be necessary for a two-state solution to succeed.
That leads us to today. President Biden, Obama’s vice president, was still viewed skeptically by the Israeli people before October 7th. Biden was considered a more dovish member of Obama’s administration compared to more hawkishly pro-Israel figures like former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Since October 7th, owning to his strong support for Israel even against backlash from his coalition, Biden’s popularity in Israel and among Zionist Americans has skyrocketed.
Despite the “Genocide Joe” rage from the American left, this is a glimmer of hope. October 7th destroyed the only viable argument for Netanyahu to stay in power – Israel’s security. No matter how many suicide bombings he might have been credited with preventing, the fact that Netanyahu allowed the worst pogrom against Jews since the Holocaust to occur under his watch in the Jewish homeland eviscerates his legacy, and his argument for staying in power.
For the first time perhaps ever there exists a political dynamic where a left-leaning pro-two-state solution American president is more popular in Israel than a right-wing prime minister. Netanyahu’s comments this week coming out against a two-state solution was seen as a slap in Biden’s face, and many within Israel view it that way too. Netanyahu’s political rival, former Prime Minister Yair Lapid, whose coalition is polling way ahead of the incumbent’s, called out Netanyahu:
“The relations with the United States are too important to turn them into public quarrels whose only purpose is political gain against the base,” Lapid tweeted. “To do this during wartime, when the USA stands by us, is already really lawless.”
Netanyahu is counting on a change in the American leadership this year. A Donald Trump win in November would ensure Netanyahu stays in power indefinitely. It would give the far right in Israel political cover to annex and resettle Gaza and further settle the West Bank, eventually pushing Palestinians out completely. Since Trump has close personal relationships with Arab leaders in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, it is unlikely any Arab power will stand in the way. Short of a region-wide uprising greater than the Arab Spring, Palestinians could be exiled from their land if Netanyahu stays in office with little pushback.
If Biden wins, he will have a political mandate to influence a change in Israeli leadership, assuming it doesn’t happen before then, and sustain that change. There are still plenty of hurdles along the way, the most obvious of which is whether Palestinians will ever have leadership who wants peace, but Israeli leadership needs to change, and there’s no way that will happen if Trump wins in November.
For many American progressives threatening to throw the election to Trump, none of this matters. Their ultimate goal is to abolish Israel entirely and create one single Palestinian state regardless of what happens to the seven million Jews living there. For them, the motivations of the Israeli public are irrelevant because the anti-Israel left doesn’t believe Israeli people should even exist.
In a convoluted way, this anti-Israel rhetoric has helped Biden build respect and support in Israel that he can leverage later when it comes time for Israelis to pick a new government. The anti-Israel left‘s salience in American political discussion has frightened many Israelis, who have come to appreciate that Biden doesn’t seem worried about them enough to bend their way. When Netanyahu’s government ultimately falls, which is extremely likely as the war in Gaza dies down in the coming months, Biden’s popularity in Israel may influence Israeli voters to finally dump the far right and elect a more moderate government under Lapid, if Biden can stay in office.
This would be the only possible way on the Israeli side to forge a path to a peaceful solution – if one even still exists.
In 1995, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the architect of the peace deal with Jordan, was assassinated by a far-right Israeli inspired by the harsh criticism of Rabin from, among others, Benjamin Netanyahu
Sharon was known as the “Butcher of Beirut” because of his role in the massacre of Palestinian civilians in Lebanon in 1982
Jewish voters are a longtime Democratic bloc in the United States and vital in swing states like Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and Republicans had hoped Obama’s criticism of Israel would push Jewish voters to them.