Benjamin Netanyahu is the worst Jewish leader in history
Part 2: Accountability, strategy, Judaism and Jews
One of the most remarkable aspects of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership is his unwillingness to demonstrate accountability. This is especially true after the Oct. 7th attacks. Nor does he want to be reminded of his accountability after the worst pogroms against Jews since the Holocaust.
To this day, Netanyahu has refused to admit any responsibility for the deaths of 1,200 Israelis; the rape and wounding of many others; the kidnapping of 250 hostages; the wholesale destruction, in a single day, of thriving border communities; and the ensuing evacuation of communities in Israel’s north.1
Consider that he has not given a single interview to the non-sycophantic Israeli media since the attacks. (Netanyahu did grant an interview to Channel 14, Israel’s Bibist TV station, in June.) According to Amir Tibon, Ha’aretz’s diplomatic correspondent, Netanyahu hasn’t visited a single community that was attacked on Oct. 7. However, he did engage in a photo opportunity at Kfar Aza when it was emptied of residents. Tibon says Netanyahu is gaslighting the hostage families, providing them with the illusion that he wants to make a deal to get their loved ones home.2
Attempts to create accountability for the worst attack in the country’s history are floundering. While Israel can use a state commission of inquiry to investigate failures, such as the Oct. 7th attack, that responsibility lies with the government. Don’t count on that inquiry happening any time soon — or ever.
“Over 17 years of Netanyahu governments, we had zero number of inquiries,” Raanan Sulitzeanu-Kenan, a professor of public policy at Hebrew University, says. Historically, Israel has had a public inquiry roughly every two years, he says, but not under its present and longest-serving leader. The purchase of German submarines and surface vessels sparked an inquiry in 2022, but only during Netanyahu’s 18-month spell out of office.
“Although it is very clear that one should be appointed, the political likelihood is almost zero under the current government,” says Sulitzeanu-Kenan. “Once you appoint a public inquiry, you send at least an implicit message that something wrong has happened.”3
Not only has Netanyahu dodged accountability for his failures — Tibon called him the “most failed leader in Israeli history”4 - he deployed his supporters and his massive social media operation against the families of the hostages. He made the hostage deal a politically divisive issue and left the protest movement ineffective, according to Barak Ravid.5 We can debate whether the protest movement is ineffective, but Israeli police have been repeatedly arresting the members of hostage families at gatherings.
This absence of accountability is directly tied to his primary strategy: divide and rule. He has used this tactic in Israeli politics and against the Palestinians. AFP reported in 2019 how Netanyahu practiced this strategy against his political opponents.
"What you're probably going to see is him exacerbating the polarisation -- us versus them," said Reuven Hazan, political science professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. "He realises that this is a battle for his survival."
On election day in 2015, Netanyahu infamously warned that Arab voters were going to the polls "in droves" -- and, according to state investigators, made sure a news website featured the video.
This year, he has continually sought to convince voters that his main opponent, former military chief Benny Gantz, would ally with Arab political parties.
As part of that argument, he has used the catchphrase that the election is a choice between "Bibi or Tibi" -- using his own nickname and referring to prominent Israeli Arab politician Ahmad Tibi, a staunch anti-Zionist.6
That is how Netanyahu addressed the largest minority group in Israel. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship account for about 21 per cent of the population. Often, when defenders of Israel argue that the country isn’t an apartheid state, they point to Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. When the prime minister is racist, it is therefore unsurprising that “Death to Arabs” is a regular chant from Israeli Jews, and “May your village burn” from Kobi Peretz is a popular song.
What works against Benny Gantz was also deployed against the Palestinians to block the creation of a Palestinian state. He weakened the Palestinian Authority and President Mahmoud Abbas in favour of Hamas. Netanyahu’s governments allowed millions of dollars from Qatar to enter Gaza, and he allowed thousands of Palestinians to work inside Israel. According to reports, he said that the transfer of funds to Gaza should be supported because maintaining the enclave’s separation from the West Bank would prevent the establishment of Palestine.7
Then there are the many intelligence failures before the Oct. 7th attacks as there were multiple warning signs. According to The New York Times, Israeli officials actually saw a 40-page attack plan from Hamas. Warnings from Israeli military spotters, mostly female, about military exercises for an imminent attack were ignored.8 The man, who styled himself as Mr. Security, earned a new nickname for his abandonment of the hostages in Gaza: Mr. Death.9
When not practicing divide-and-rule, Netanyahu’s only other strategy is to prolong his term in office. Non-stop war will accomplish that goal. No less than U.S. President Joe Biden expressed in June that Netanyahu is prolonging the war for his own preservation.10 He has been ordered to stand trial in this December for charges of corruption.11 This explains why the initial goals of defeating Hamas and returning the hostages haven’t been achieved and why there’s no day-after plan for Gaza. The war allows Netanyahu to evade accountability, and it gives him a chance to rewrite his narrative as an Israeli leader.
These two strategies existed long before Oct. 7. Consider Netanyahu’s obsession with Iran as the locus of international evil. If that’s one’s worldview, then one would not want Iran to obtain a nuclear bomb. However, Netanyahu directly opposed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) to constrain Iran’s nuclear ambitions. He spoke out against the agreement in the U.S. Congress in 2015, calling it a “very bad deal.”12 The U.S. eventually cancelled the JCPOA in 2018. Former Israeli Intelligence official Danny Citrinowicz in 2023 pointed out the flaw with Netanyahu’s Iran policy.
But what is the strategic purpose of this policy? After all, in recent years, it’s evident that, without a political framework and despite the threats from all sides, Iran has progressed almost unhindered its enrichment program—and in a way that takes the sting out of almost any non-political solution. The ability to roll back the Iranian nuclear threat is extremely unlikely in any scenario. Additionally, Iran reportedly has a consensus regarding its right to enrich; thus, in the foreseeable future, Iran will not dismantle its nuclear facilities under any scenario.13
This absence of vision extends to the multi-front war Israel is fighting at this moment against Gaza, Lebanon, Yemen and Iran. The Guardian’s analysis makes several important points.
In Israel’s expanding war, as Israeli security analyst Michael Milshtein told the Guardian last week, there have been “tactical victories” but “no strategic vision” and certainly not one that unites the different fronts….
Even as Israel has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza, levelled large areas of the coastal strip and displaced a population assailed by hunger, death and sickness on multiple occasions, Israeli armour was assaulting areas of the strip once more this weekend in a new operation into northern Gaza to prevent Hamas regrouping.
Hezbollah too, despite sustaining heavy losses in its leadership, retains a potency fighting on its own terrain in the villages of southern Lebanon where it has had almost two decades to prepare for this conflict.
All of which raises serious questions as to whether Israel has any clearer vision for its escalating conflict with Iran.14
That isn’t the only question being asked of Netanyahu’s government. The other questions why the opportunities for Israel to peacefully integrate into the Middle East are being ignored. Browen Maddox of Chatham House explains the issue succinctly.
However, Netanyahu and his government show no interest in a wider strategy in which Israel does not just survive by beating back threats, but thrives through better relations with its neighbours. His government has vowed not to pursue a two-state solution with the Palestinians, nor shown interest in talks to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia.
The Saudi deal is the great prize above all others for Israel – offering it an ally to help counter Iran and a gateway to connections with the Sunni Islamic world, say, with Malaysia and Indonesia too. But the kingdom has made clear that talks are a non-starter without a ceasefire in Gaza and a commitment to a path to a Palestinian state.15
Essentially, Netanyahu’s strategies are prolonging Israel’s wars and harming diplomatic efforts to resolve the conflict, real and shadow, with Iran.
Our last category is about Judaism and Jews. As Israel is a Jewish state with a nation-state law that prioritizes Jews above all other citizens, then it’s reasonable to suggest that Judaism and Jewish ethics should inform its decisions. (NB: I am not saying I agree with any of these points; I don’t.) Netanyahu was in power, I will remind you, when that nation-state law was passed.
However, Netanyahu does not care for Pikuach Nefesh (the saving of a life), the commandment of Pidyon Shuvyim (the rescuing of hostages) and a Talmudic text that says “save one life, save the world.” Any of those points, on their own, would be reason enough to cut a deal with Hamas to return the hostages. There’s already a precedent for such a deal in 2011. Netanyahu made a deal for kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit in exchange for a thousand Palestinian prisoners.
Nor does he care about diaspora Jews. That’s because he has weaponized antisemitism to such a degree against his real and imagined opponents that he is diluting its meaning. In Netanyahu’s worldview, anyone that disagrees with him or Israel is a raging Jew hater. That includes Karim Khan, the International Criminal Court prosecutor, who is one of the “great antisemites of modern times.” The students protesting on U.S. college campuses are, for the Israeli prime minister “antisemitic mobs.”16 According to historian and journalist Tom Segev, Netanyahu has long used Jewish trauma, including the Holocaust, to further his goals.17
What’s worse is that Netanyahu is totally okay with actual antisemites such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban (a George Soros conspiracy theorist) or Poland’s government when it lied about Poles helping Jews during the Holocaust. The catch is that these antisemites are accepting of Israel’s occupation.18 A Ha’aretz editorial from Sept. 18, 2023 nails the issue. “In Europe and in the U.S., Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has no problem joining forces with the Holocaust deniers, antisemites and their enablers who pose a threat to the safety of Jews, as long as it serves his political interests.”19
What Netanyahu’s embrace of antisemites does exacerbate the schism between Israel and diaspora Jews. The two populations are moving in different directions because of their different values. This creates a contradiction, according to Eric Levitz in New York Magazine.
As minority populations, diasporic Jewish communities have an interest in pluralism, egalitarianism, and inviolable human-rights protections. By contrast, as the vanguard of a Jewish supremacist project that aims to either ethnically cleanse Palestinians in the occupied territories or subject them to unending apartheid, the current Israeli government is hostile to all of those values. Therefore, its search for allies abroad inevitably leads it into the arms of parties and political figures who are bad for the (diaspora) Jews.20
Case in point: Republican candidate Donald Trump. “Any Jewish person that votes for Democrats hates their religion,” Trump retorted Monday on a talk show. “They hate everything about Israel.”21
To conclude this two-part argument, there are several truths we can lean on.
1) No leader is in power forever. Netanyahu is not immune from the forces of change and history. He will leave office at some point.
2) However, he is damaging Israel and its institutions, including its international standing and its economy. Alongside those trends, a brain drain of secular, liberal Jews from Israel is an impending financial and social disaster.
3) Netanyahu has convinced many Israelis that they can live with undefined borders and endless occupation of the Palestinians. Of course, that’s possible; it’s also apartheid.
4) None of the wars (Gaza, Lebanon) currently being fought under his leadership have spared Israel from having to deal with the Palestinians to ensure the country’s long-term future.
Here’s wishing you a gmar chatimah tovah (a good sealing). During the Days of Awe, the tradition is to get your name signed in the Book of Life on the Jewish New Year. On Yom Kippur, you get your name sealed. May we (Jews, Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese, anyone who yearns for a better world) all be sealed in the Book of Life.
Aluf Benn in Foreign Affairs: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/middle-east/israel-paradox-defeat-aluf-benn
CNN in June 2024: https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/20/middleeast/israel-gaza-intelligence-accountability-analysis-intl-cmd/index.html
Barak Ravid’s analysis is here: https://www.axios.com/2024/10/06/netanyahu-israel-political-strategy
AFP is here: https://www.france24.com/en/20190402-close-election-netanyahu-relies-us-versus-them
See Tal Schneider in the Times of Israel on Oct. 8, 2023: https://www.timesofisrael.com/for-years-netanyahu-propped-up-hamas-now-its-blown-up-in-our-faces/
The Guardian here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/28/israeli-military-had-warning-of-hamas-training-for-attack-reports-say; The Guardian also here: 023/dec/04/hamas-drew-detailed-attack-plans-for-years-with-help-of-spies-idf-says
Here’s the Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/mr-death-hostage-families-say-netanyahu-has-condemned-their-loved-ones-to-die/
There are multiple stories on this theme. Here’s The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/04/biden-netanyahu-ceasefire-israel-gaza-war
See Jerusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-809630
NPR’s reporting from 2015: https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/03/03/390250986/netanyahu-to-outline-iran-threats-in-much-anticipated-speech-to-congress
The Atlantic Council in 2023: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/iransource/netanyahus-iran-policy-is-expected-to-fail-again/
The Guardian is here: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/06/israel-iran-war-idf-lebanon-military-doctrine?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
Bronwen Maddox is here: https://www.chathamhouse.org/2024/10/israel-needs-strategy-its-place-region-not-just-attacks-current-threats
AP’s story in at pbs.org: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/netanyahu-frequently-makes-claims-of-antisemitism-critics-say-hes-deflecting-blame
Ibid
Mehdi Hasan has a very entertaining video on Netanyahu’s antisemitic friends here: https://theintercept.com/2018/08/23/benjamin-netanyahu-anti-semitic/
See the headline here: https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/editorial/2023-09-18/ty-article/.premium/israeli-premier-netanyahu-the-antisemites-cheerleader/0000018a-a503-d05a-abfe-fd27e15e0000
Eric Levitz is here: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/11/in-bibis-israel-musks-brand-of-antisemitism-is-kosher.html
https://apnews.com/article/trump-jewish-voters-democrats-antisemitism-a43bf6f6266d9c6a4b761b82281aa512