Benjamin Netanyahu, right, during his time with the Israeli army's elite Sayeret Matkal commando unit. (Photo courtesy of the IDF)

 

NETANYAHU'S LOSS OF POWER: "IN A WORD, IT'S PERSONAL"

[Note by Tom Gross]

I attach Bret Stephens' essay about Benjamin Netanyahu from the July/August 2021 issue of the American magazine "Commentary".

It's a good piece raising some interesting and important issues. I hesitated before sending it, worried that readers may be bored by Bibi. But, like him or loathe him, he shouldn't be written off yet - some analysts think he may well be Israel's prime minister again sooner than we think. And even if his political career is in fact over, it is worth reflecting on it (he is the most dominant figure in Israeli politics since David Ben-Gurion) and on why he alienated political allies.

As Bret Stephens writes "Netanyahu is hardly Tolstoy. Still, he's a man of formidable ambition and talent who entered the political fray looking for the harmonious universe in which a Jewish state - recognized, whole, and secure - could take its rightful place among the nations. What he found instead was that there was no straight way to get there, and perhaps no way at all, given the implacability of many of its enemies and the faithlessness of some of its friends. The two great 'solutions' are equally false. There is no plausible Palestinian state that can satisfy Israeli security requirements and Palestinian desires. There is also no map of Israel that can simply swallow the Palestinians without risking being swallowed by them in turn.

"What there is, then, is a muddled reality that must deeply disappoint idealists of every stripe. But it's also a reality that beats every conceivable alternative. Netanyahu understands this, even if it's not something he would say out loud."

 

FURTHER LINKS

From June 14, a panel discussion (including myself) on Turkish television: Will Naftali Bennett be a successful Israeli PM? Is Bibi's career over?

From June 8: Naftali Bennett, The Man Behind the Slogans and Stereotypes

In case you didn't see it, here are my thoughts on Netanyahu's achievements, failings and legacy, recorded on June 2, eleven days before he lost power.

You may also be interested in: "Conversations with friends: Tom Gross talks to Bret Stephens about his life"

 

THE PARADOXES OF BENJAMIN NETANYAHU

The Paradoxes of Benjamin Netanyahu
The fox who is also the hedgehog
By Bret Stephens
Commentary magazine
July/August 2021 issue

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/bret-stephens/benjamin-netanyahu-paradoxical-leader

I once got an unexpected, unpleasant, and altogether unforgettable phone call from Benjamin Netanyahu. This was in 2004, when Netanyahu was serving as finance minister in Ariel Sharon's government and I was editor of the Jerusalem Post. At the time, nobody thought of Israel as the dynamic "Start-up Nation" that it would later become, thanks largely to Netanyahu's policies. Instead, it was a country beset not just by waves of Palestinian suicide bombers but also by the stultifying legacies of the country's socialist roots: high taxes, inefficient state-owned companies, excessive welfare subsidies, a bloated public sector. From an economic standpoint, Israel was more likely to be compared to Argentina than, say, Switzerland.

Netanyahu knew that I was one of the few editors in Israel who fully endorsed his controversial agenda of tax cuts, privatization, deregulation, and budgetary discipline. He also knew that while the Post's influence in Israel was limited, the paper was widely read by many of the foreign investors, policymakers, financial analysts, and machers of the sort he was always keen to cultivate. But he wasn't interested in talking about his plans. Instead, he lit into me because one of the Post's opinion columnists had mentioned a notorious 1993 episode in which Netanyahu had gone on TV to confess an extramarital relationship while denouncing a blackmail attempt. "My children can now read English, you know!" he said, eliding the fact that his children could just as easily have learned of the affair on the Internet from sources in Hebrew. It took me a few minutes to realize that the point of his tirade wasn't to complain about unfair or inaccurate coverage. It was a rebuke for failing to provide compliant coverage, as if the purpose of the Post was to burnish his children's image of their father. Unlike most politicians, he wasn't interested in cultivating me as a friendly media voice. He wanted me as a patsy, and he wasn't subtle about letting me know it. In itself, this long-ago encounter with the once and future prime minister didn't mean much - although Netanyahu's habit of demanding obsequious reporting would come to haunt him after he had returned to the prime minister's chair.

Yet the story helps explain the paradox of Benjamin Netanyahu, in perhaps the most paradoxical year of his long political career. To wit, how does a man of such ambition, talent, and undeniable achievements manage so often to be so petty and self-defeating? And how can a prime minister whose recent triumphs include peace agreements with four Arab states, a series of spectacular blows to Iran's nuclear program, and a world-beating COVID-19 vaccination effort lose to the strangest coalition of political bedfellows ever assembled in Israeli - if not Western - history?

In a word, it's personal. In 1998, during Netanyahu's turbulent first term as prime minister, his father, Benzion, gave a candid interview about his second son: "He doesn't know how to develop manners that captivate people by praise or grace," he said, adding, "He doesn't always succeed in choosing the most suitable people." About the nicest thing Benzion could say of his boy was, "He may well have been more suited as foreign minister than as head of state. But at this moment I don't see anyone better." One doesn't have to play armchair psychoanalysis to observe: some father.

In fact, Benjamin Netanyahu can also be engaging and charming, at least when he's in the public eye. But there was more than a grain of truth to the father's observations. When I first arrived in Israel as editor of the Post, I paid a visit to my predecessor as editor, David Bar-Illan, the pianist and polemicist who had gone to work for Netanyahu as his press spokesman before running afoul - like so many who came before and after - of Netanyahu's feared and unpopular wife, Sara. So traumatized was David by the manner in which the Netanyahus had treated him that, after suffering a crippling heart attack, he waved off Netanyahu from a sickbed visit. Stories like this are remarkably common among those who have known Netanyahu over the years. And they go far to explain how Netanyahu's long reign as prime minister came to an end - not because he was defeated by his ideological opponents, or brought down by a legal case against him, or turned out of office following some policy fiasco. Rather, Netanyahu fell because, through a combination of high-handedness and jealousy, he allowed too many of his onetime allies and ideological fellow-travelers to become permanently embittered ex-friends.

Naftali Bennett, the new prime minister, was a Netanyahu prot?g? who served as his chief of staff from 2006 to 2008 before an angry falling out. Gideon Sa'ar, the new justice minister, was brought into the Likud by Netanyahu but fell out with him once Netanyahu began to perceive him as a credible rival for party leadership. Benny Gantz, defense minister in the new government and the last, whom Netanyahu had appointed as IDF chief of staff, was double-crossed and politically humiliated last year after he agreed to a power-sharing deal with Netanyahu - a deal Netanyahu had no intention of honoring (and, predictably, didn't). Avigdor Lieberman, the new finance minister, was an ideological soulmate and right-hand man to Netanyahu who came to despise him after he authorized private investigations and an anonymous legal hit on his family (or so Lieberman claims).

"By my code this is a sin for which there is no forgiveness, even on Yom Kippur," Lieberman said in March. "The thought that I will sit with Netanyahu is a fantasy with no chances." These four men command 28 Knesset seats between them. Together with one or both of the ultra-Orthodox parties, they would have easily given Netanyahu and his 30-seat Likud party a robust, right-of-center mandate in the last election - if only he could have won them over to his side. Yet when it came to the prime minister, the feud was personal. That they preferred to join forces with Yair Lapid's centrist Yesh Atid, Mansour Abbas's Islamist Ra'am, and the left-wingers of Labor and Meretz is a vivid demonstration that Netanyahu's powers of personal repulsion have exceeded those of ideological attraction. To know "King Bibi" up close and personal is to also to understand why he's king no longer.

Yet if we are to judge Netanyahu by his faults alone, it would be impossible to account for the fact that he is the most dominant figure in Israeli politics since David Ben-Gurion. To his inveterate critics, that's merely a function of his ability to win elections, which they attribute to his being a silver-tongued fearmonger who appeals to Israel's racist side - in effect, a Donald Trump-like figure with a better brain.

The caricature sells Netanyahu and his voters short. It also fails to comprehend the scale of his achievements in his second, 12-year tenure in office. Let's list a few.

DIPLOMACY: The crown jewels in Netanyahu's diplomatic legacy are the Abraham Accords, which effectively represent the end of the Arab-Israeli conflict (even if subsidiary conflicts, above all with Palestinians, remain). The accords did not happen by accident. They are the result of Arab admiration for Israel's economic success; respect among Arab leaders for Netanyahu's willingness to denounce the Iran nuclear pact (and, by implication, Barack Obama) in the U.S. Congress; and some canny deal-making that involved a threat to annex much of the West Bank, which was then used as a bargaining chip for diplomatic recognition. But the Accords are not Netanyahu's only diplomatic victories. He renewed or strengthened Israel's old ties with African countries - Uganda, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Chad, Nigeria - that are battleground states in the fight against Islamist terror. He developed strong personal bonds with Narendra Modi of India and Shinzo Abe of Japan. He maintained a functional relationship with Vladimir Putin, which is a vital Israeli interest whatever one thinks of the Russian dictator. He forged strategic ties with Greece, historically one of the more anti-Israel countries in Europe.

And, of course, he cultivated Trump. Many American Jews consider this a scandal, as if Netanyahu would have done better by sneering at the American president in the manner of, say, Canada's Justin Trudeau. But the payoff for Israelis of Netanyahu's courtship of the 45th president was spectacular: an American Embassy in Jerusalem, U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty on the Golan Heights, a severe downgrading of U.S. relations with the Palestinian leadership. The Biden administration has predictably reversed this policy but is unlikely to reverse course on the embassy or the Heights. This achievement, for Israel, is permanent.

SECURITY: Despite three traumatic wars with Hamas in Gaza and the harrowing "knife intifada" of 2015, Israelis have enjoyed greater security during Netanyahu's time in office than they had in the 10 years of terror and retreat between his first and second terms. The regional picture for Israel also seems to be relatively better, at least when it comes to the Sunni Arab states. And Netanyahu never made any irreversible concessions to the Palestinians, even in the face of eight years of heavy Obama-administration pressure to do so.

The reason for the relative calm has much to do with what Israeli generals call "the war between the wars," but which might also be described as the Netanyahu Doctrine. After being dissuaded in 2010 from a full-scale strike on Iran's nuclear facilities, Netanyahu settled for a strategy of applying low-grade but continuous military pressure on Israel's enemies in ways that seldom invite open retaliation or create international controversy. In 2019, the IDF Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot told me, with respect to Syria, that Israel had "struck thousands of targets without claiming responsibility or asking for credit." Jerusalem has also been instrumental in helping Cairo deal with an Islamist insurgency in Sinai, in ways that go all but unnoticed in the West but have helped solidify its security ties in the Arab world.

Then there is Iran, where Israel has conducted the most extraordinary and long-term covert-ops campaign in modern history. The Mossad's 2018 acquisition of Iran's entire nuclear archive caused the U.S. to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal, and further attacks on nuclear installations and scientists continue to set back the Islamic Republic's nuclear timetable. When Iran's largest naval ship sank in early June, on the same day that a major fire broke out at a large oil refinery serving Tehran, it was difficult to imagine that pure coincidence was at play.

ECONOMY: Netanyahu was Israel's first prime minister to have a serious grasp of economics and an appreciation for business. Netanyahu also understood that there was no good reason Israel couldn't be a wealthy country - and that such wealth was a benefit to Israel's overall well-being, not a stain on its moral virtue.

When Netanyahu returned to the prime minister's office in 2009, Israel's gross domestic product (in current prices) stood at $207 billion. Ten years later, just before the pandemic, it had nearly doubled in size, to about $400 billion. By comparison, the U.K. economy grew by just 17 percent over the same time period. The average monthly wage in Israel is now nearly 50 percent higher than it was in 2009. Israel is no longer the country where, as the old saying had it, you could make a small fortune if you arrived with a large one.

As in any country, there are arguments to be made about the nature of wealth inequality and distribution, not least along class, ethnic, and religious lines. What should be inarguable is that wealth gives Israel strategic advantages it didn't previously enjoy. As one New York Times writer recently pointed out, 40 years ago, U.S. aid to Israel amounted to 10 percent of its economy, while today, at nearly $4 billion a year, it's closer to 1 percent. Wealth diminishes dependency. It also makes Israel a more attractive destination to Jews who no longer feel entirely secure in their diasporic homes, or who may simply be seeking opportunity.

PALESTINIANS: Most of Netanyahu's predecessors as prime minister had gotten the Palestinian issue wrong - some by imagining that Palestinians didn't, or shouldn't, exist as a separate people; others by believing they were the most important, if not the only, thing that mattered. Both approaches had proved disastrous.

Netanyahu understood that Israel can neither separate politically from the Palestinians safely nor coexist with them indefinitely. The right approach was one of long-term tactical management, not grandiose peace plans and "final-status" solutions.

Undergirding that view is the belief that time is, in fact, on Israel's side, for at least three reasons. First, the demographic picture is hardly as bleak for Jews as is often suggested (an idea that has ample empirical basis, at least if Israeli Jews maintain their robust birth rate while Arab birth rates continue to decline). The Cassandras of the left have been warning for decades of a ticking demographic time bomb, but, much like the notorious clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the hands never seem to reach midnight.

Second, the ideological picture also isn't as dire for Israel as widely believed - squeamish liberals, campus BDS campaigns, and rising anti-Semitism in Europe and the U.S. notwithstanding - because much of the world is moving in a more nationalist direction. That gives Israel new friends in the world, whether they are evangelical Christians in the U.S. or Hindu nationalists in India (as well as some unsavory figures like Hungary's Viktor Orban). The abiding threat of Islamism also helps Israel, insofar as Israel is broadly seen, and widely admired, for its success in fighting it.

Finally, Arab states are growing tired of the Palestinian cause, at least in its maximalist versions, and are prepared to put the issue on ice in pursuit of the goals they share with the Jewish state. The fact that one barely heard a peep of protest from Cairo, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, or other Arab capitals during the last round of fighting in Gaza suggests there is much to that belief.

*

LITTLE OF THIS goes noticed outside of Israel, thanks mainly to shoddy media coverage, monomaniacal obsession with Palestinian grievances, and what can only be described as a kind of Bibi Derangement Syndrome among his critics, many of them left-leaning American Jews. (Some of these critics are fond of insisting that their problems with Israel are all about their disdain for Netanyahu. Don't hold your breath waiting for them to moderate their views under the new coalition.)

Yet Netanyahu lasted as long as he did in his job because he was, in many ways, very good at it. After the utopian follies of the peace processers in the 1990s, the trauma of the second intifada at the start of the century, and Ehud Olmert's incompetent handling of the 2006 Lebanon War, it's easy to see the appeal (as one of his campaign ads had it) of the "Bibisitter" - the safe pair of hands who'll make sure the kids sleep well at night.

But, again, this isn't quite the whole story.

The usual rap on Netanyahu is that he's a remorseless ideologue whose only goal is "Greater Israel" and who will do whatever it takes to get it, whether it's through sly prevarication or open demagogy. An alternative view, most often held by Netanyahu's conservative critics, is that he either lacks the courage of his convictions, or just believes in little beyond himself.

"How is he better than Rabin or Peres?" the former Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir railed against Netanyahu after Israel withdrew from parts of the West Bank after the 1998 Wye River agreement during Bibi's first go as prime minister. "He has a desire for power for its own sake." Several years later, as a member of Ariel Sharon's government, Netanyahu claimed to oppose Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, but kept voting in favor of its implementation. "After supporting disengagement four times" in cabinet and Knesset votes, Sharon said of his finance minister, "Bibi ran away." Naftali Bennett's own break with Netanyahu became definite after the latter's 2009 speech at Bar-Ilan University, in which he accepted the principle of a Palestinian state.

"We go along with this vision that is impractical, and then, we are surprised why the world is angry with us for not fulfilling that vision," Bennett told me in a 2015 interview. "You can't say 'I support a Palestinian state' and then not execute according to that. I think people appreciate honesty."

That last point strikes me as unfair: It's perfectly consistent to accept the idea of a Palestinian state in principle - the principle being that it should model itself on Costa Rica or the U.A.E. - while rejecting it in practice - the current reality being that it has more in common with Lebanon or Yemen as an unstable terrorist entrepot that has no interest in meeting even minimal Israeli demands for peace and security. Asking the lion to lie down with the lamb is a beautiful wish and a terrible policy.

But the deeper criticism is that Netanyahu's tenure amounts to little more than a holding action, a bravura performance in kicking cans down the road.

When I interviewed Netanyahu in 2009, just as he was about to return to office and Operation Cast Lead was winding down, he was quick to criticize the outcome. "Notwithstanding the blows to Hamas, it's still in Gaza, it's still ruling Gaza," he said. Netanyahu's "optimal outcome," he claimed, would be regime change for the Strip, but "the minimal outcome would have been to seal Gaza" from being able to acquire lethal munitions. Yet 12 years and three wars later, not much has changed, except that Hamas has gained greater international legitimacy while Israelis have grown used to spending time in their safe rooms periodically.

Something similar might be said of Netanyahu's approach to Tehran. Dazzling as Israel's intelligence and diplomatic coups have been, Iran is now enriching uranium to unprecedented levels of purity even as the Biden administration maneuvers to re-enter the nuclear deal. That goes also in the north, where thousands of Israeli air strikes have blunted Iran's power without altering the fact that Bashar al-Assad remains firmly ensconced in power in Damascus while Hezbollah maintains its firm grip in Lebanon.

In these respects, the strategic picture has not decisively changed on Netanyahu's watch, and Prime Minister Bennett will face almost exactly the same unenviable choices Netanyahu did in the early days of his tenure. There are circumstances in which buying time amounts to a form of progress, but history hasn't yet provided a verdict as to whether this was one of them.

There have also been hidden costs to this style of leadership. The essence of good policy - containment comes to mind - is that it establishes conditions in which less-than-superb leaders can be entrusted with its execution. Under Netanyahu, by contrast, the man and the policy effectively became one and the same. "Bibi-ism" isn't really a set of principles or concepts that his successors can apply or adapt. It's the view that one man, and one man only, has the wisdom, experience, and instincts to run the country.

The result has been an extraordinary personalization of Israeli politics. At least a quarter of Israelis - starting with Netanyahu himself - seem to believe that apr?s Bibi, le d?luge. That has encouraged Netanyahu and his allies to vilify their political opponents in ways that are both hysterical and potentially dangerous. Early in June, Likud lawmaker May Golan compared Bennett and Sa'ar to "suicide bombers," while Aryeh Deri, leader of the Shas party, warned that Bennett would "destroy Shabbat."

Netanyahu's political opponents, by contrast, have come to believe that Bibi is "le d?luge" and have been intent to do just about anything to destroy him. Among the many paradoxes of the last few years of Israeli politics is that the legal cases that have been ginned up against the prime minister (and which, at least by my reading, mainly suggest aggressive or sleazy political behavior, not criminal offenses) did more to encourage him to cling to his office by nearly any means necessary than they did to give him an opportunity for a graceful exit.

That's what happens when the essence of one's political program is to stay in power as long as possible, whether out of a belief in one's own indispensability or a need for legal self-preservation (or, in Netanyahu's case, both). Democracies do best when parties stand for ideas, not personalities, and when political opponents aren't viewed as mortal enemies. They also do better when leaders observe some moral boundaries, like not bidding for the support of the Kahanist party or not seeking a pardon for a soldier who murdered a Palestinian terrorist after he'd been neutralized. But that wasn't Bibi's way.

*

IN HIS OFTEN cited (if seldom read) essay "The Hedgehog and the Fox," Isaiah Berlin begins with the ancient distinction between the fox, which "knows many things," and the hedgehog, "which knows one big thing." At the Jerusalem Post, a colleague once made the point to me, during the 2002 Likud leadership contest between Ariel Sharon and Netanyahu, that the former was the hedgehog while the latter was the fox. It was another way of saying that Bibi was clever but Arik was wise. In that race, the hedgehog won.

This is one way of looking at Netanyahu. To nearly all of his bitter critics, on either side of the ideological spectrum, he is nothing but an arch-maneuverer, although they don't all agree on what he is maneuvering toward. The left sees him as a dedicated ideologue who occasionally feigns pragmatism. For the right, it's the opposite: He's a self-serving pragmatist who pretends to have an ideology. In a public career spanning nearly 40 years, it's easy to find evidence for both views. The Bar-Ilan speech that so offended Naftali Bennett is supposed to prove the first; the unwillingness to retake Gaza supposedly demonstrates the second.

Yet the point of Berlin's essay tends to be missed. In real life, as opposed to parable or literary criticism, there are at least a few people who are both hedgehog and fox, men who "looked for a harmonious universe, but everywhere found war and disorder." Berlin's great example of this type was Leo Tolstoy, whose "sense of reality was until the end too devastating to be compatible with any moral ideal which he was able to construct out of the fragments into which his intellect shivered in the world."

Netanyahu is hardly Tolstoy. Still, he's a man of formidable ambition and talent who entered the political fray looking for the harmonious universe in which a Jewish state - recognized, whole, and secure - could take its rightful place among the nations. What he found instead was that there was no straight way to get there, and perhaps no way at all, given the implacability of many of its enemies and the faithlessness of some of its friends. The two great "solutions" are equally false. There is no plausible Palestinian state that can satisfy Israeli security requirements and Palestinian desires. There is also no map of Israel that can simply swallow the Palestinians without risking being swallowed by them in turn.

What there is, then, is a muddled reality that must deeply disappoint idealists of every stripe. But it's also a reality that beats every conceivable alternative. Netanyahu understands this, even if it's not something he would say out loud. The criticism that he does nothing but kick cans down the road ignores the fact that, when it comes to Israel's major strategic challenges, at least for now, that's the only thing an Israeli prime minister can do. The question is how far the can gets kicked, and how much power and flexibility Israel can gain - militarily, economically, demographically, and so on - before it needs to kick it again. As Michael Oren, the historian and former Israeli ambassador to the U.S., has pointed out to me, Israel's entire history is one long "war of attrition" or "war between the wars." Still, it's a war that Israel can fight for the long term while its people continue to flourish.

The paradox of Benjamin Netanyahu is that a man who rose to power on the strength of a certain vision of Israel held on to power at the expense of that vision. It's that a man who did much to strengthen Israel's position in the world through the bullishness of his personality also did much to damage to Israel's politics through the same bullishness. It's that a man whose thoughts, ambitions, and actions always seemed to have the broadest sweep could become the agent of his own political undoing thanks to a succession of small grievances and petty power plays.

There's no reason to search for definitive answers anytime soon. The coalition that succeeds Netanyahu is fractious and thin, held together by little more than its loathing for a singular man. Nobody knows this better than Netanyahu himself, which is why the thought that must surely run through his head, rightly, is, "I'll be back."

 

* You can also find other items that are not in these dispatches if you "like" this page on Facebook www.facebook.com/TomGrossMedia

THE STRUGGLES OVER WIKIPEDIA ENTRIES

[Notes by Tom Gross]

Those, like me, who have enjoyed the novels of Isaac Bashevis Singer, may find the article below interesting, as will those who follow the political wars continuing over thousands of other Wikipedia entries.

The struggle over the Wikipedia entry on Singer ? the only Yiddish-language author to win the Nobel Prize for literature ? came to wider notice after the New York Times apparently used Wikipedia as a source on Singer in April, and removed reference to the fact he was Jewish. This has since been restored on Wikipedia.

Singer was intensely Jewish, both in his life and literature. He escaped Europe in 1935 as the Nazis introduced further antisemitic measures. His father was a Hasidic rabbi and his mother, Bathsheba, was the daughter of the rabbi of Biłgoraj, the shtetl where Singer spent part of his youth.

 

REMOVING JEWISH HISTORY AND VICTIMS

There are many entries on Wikipedia, including the one about Horochov (or Gorokhov), the Polish shtetl where my grandfather (Abraham Gross) was born and grew up, where almost all Jewish (and in this case also Polish) references have been removed in concerted campaigns by Ukrainian nationalists to rewrite history.

Here is the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horokhiv

The parts about the Jewish (and Polish) history and the ghetto, and the references to Yad Vashem as a source, have been removed.

Horochov had a majority Jewish population for most of its history, and was 70 percent Jewish in 1940, almost all the remaining residents being Poles.

The Jews were killed en masse by the Germans and Ukrainians, and the territory was then occupied by Ukraine, the Poles were expelled, Ukrainians moved in, and towns including this one were renamed.

There were 5,000 Jews in Horochov in 1940 and only a handful survived the Holocaust, including Charlene Schiff (Shulamit Perlmutter), who hid alone aged 12-14 in the forests outside Horochov, eating wild fruits and insects.

The Washington Post ran an obituary of her here in 2013:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/charlene-schiff-holocaust-survivor-dies-at-83/2013/03/16/4b9674e8-89d5-11e2-a051-6810d606108d_story.html

 

RENIA'S DIARY

Similarly, other east European nationalists have sought to remove or downplay Jewish history.

As Asaf Shalev notes in his article below, the dispute over the Isaac Bashevis Singer entry is not the only time Wikipedian Oliver Szydlowski (who was awarded the "Polish Barnstar of National Merit, 1st Class" by something called "WikiProject Poland") has insisted on striking "Jewish" from the first sentence of Wikipedia articles on notable Polish Jews.

In 2019, for example, he became embroiled in an argument with other Wikipedians over Renia Spiegel, a teenage Holocaust victim whose diary has been compared to that of Anne Frank. After a great deal of effort, Wikipedia overrode Szydlowski and other Polish nationalists and noted that Spiegel, who was executed because she was Jewish in the Przemyśl ghetto at the age of 18, on July 30, 1942, was Jewish.

 

FABRICATING CHRISTIAN* VICTIMS OF GAS CHAMBERS

In 2019, I posted this dispatch (Poland's fabricated death camp: Wikipedia's longest hoax, exposed), which includes a photo of a church memorial plaque commemorating "200,000 Polish Christian victims" who Polish ultra-nationalists wrongly claim were gassed to death in an "extermination camp" in Warsaw that never actually existed. They made-up entries and references on Wikipedia about it.

It's an invented camp, "it's fake history," part of a Polish nationalist campaign to try and distort the Holocaust and pretend Jews were not its overwhelmingly central victims, Prof. Havi Dreifuss, a leading Holocaust expert at Yad Vashem said.

As I noted in my 2019 dispatch:

It is only one part of a systematic effort by Polish nationalists to whitewash hundreds of Wikipedia articles relating to Poland and the Holocaust and parrots the revised historical narrative currently being enacted by the Polish government to cover up Polish cooperation and collaboration with the Nazi murder of Jews.

Among Wikipedia entries in Polish that have been rewritten to pretend the Germans rather than Poles were responsible for mass murders of Jewish civilians, are the July 1941 pogroms at Radzilow (where Poles rounded up hundreds of their Jewish neighbors, barricaded them in a barn and set it on fire) and the Polish massacre of Jews at Jedwabne.

In 2009, WikiLeaks (which is not connected to Wikipedia) released a batch of emails revealing the existence of a group of Wikipedia editors from Ukraine, the Baltic states and Poland, that were coordinating their actions and working together to skew content there to push a nationalistic line with fake history.

(* The vast majority of the victims of Nazi gas chambers were Jewish, but some were Christians. For example, some among the 19,000 Roma who were killed in gas chambers at Auschwitz, were Christian. Soviet prisoners of war and others were murdered by the Nazis en masse, but not generally in gas chambers.)

 

Above: a post from Imam Mohamad Tawhidi, the Iranian-born Shia reformist Imam who has lived in Australia since 2015. There are an increasing number of Arabs and Muslims who are sympathetic to Israel. (Several of them subscribe to this list.) Of course, anti-Israel media such as the BBC and New York Times will not give them a voice -- Tom Gross

 

 

Above: Israeli Prime Minister-designate Naftali Bennett, who is due to be sworn into office on Sunday, with senior British Cabinet Minister Michael Gove (center) and, on the left, Tom Gross, at one of their past meetings. Bennett, who represent a small party with only six Knesset seats will lead an 8-party coalition comprising secular and religious Jews and Muslims, and parties of both left and right. Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party, which at 30 seats is easily the biggest party in the Knesset, will go into opposition.

I have met Bennett on a number of occasions. He has occasionally shared my posts or TV interviews. For example, here on his Facebook page in 2014 which garnered 234,000 views.

 

Below, is a lengthy article about Bennett from the left-wing Israeli paper Haaretz for those who are unaware of his background (albeit written from a certain point of view).

In case you didn't see it, here is my conversation with Haviv Retting Gur (of the Times of Israel) on the subject of Benjamin Netanyahu's achievements, failings and legacy. For all his faults Netanyahu has turned Israel into a global power, and greatly increased Israel's strategic and economic standing. -- Tom Gross

 

ARTICLE

NAFTALI BENNETT, NEXT ISRAELI PM: THE MAN BEHIND THE SLOGANS AND STEREOTYPES

Naftali Bennett, Next Israeli PM: The Man Behind the Slogans and Stereotypes

Bennett, a leader of a small party running the show is a bizarre occurrence that won't repeat. But the former Israeli startup executive can be remembered as the person who ended the Netanyahu era and helped usher in political stability

By Anshel Pfeffer
Haaretz
Jun. 6, 2021

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-naftali-bennett-next-israeli-pm-the-man-behind-the-slogans-and-stereotypes-1.9864203

Naftali Bennett, who is on track to become Israel's 13th prime minister within days, is easily labeled ? religious hard-liner, ultranationalist and settler leader on the one hand, high-tech millionaire, special-forces operative and political wunderkind on the other. Most of these labels, on closer scrutiny, don't really apply. At least not fully.

Bennett at 49 is the man who has come closest to the holy grail of Israeli politics, replacing Benjamin Netanyahu, but he's not really a politician, certainly not a consistent one. In the last 14 years he has been in five different parties. He entered the Knesset for the first time just eight years ago, and just two years ago one of his parties even failed to cross the electoral threshold. Now he's about to become prime minister and Bennett's current party, Yamina, is falling apart with half its members having either defected or considering it.

In interviews he likes to present himself as not being like other politicians "who never ran a business" ? instead, he's a tech executive and a commando, "an expert in hunting down rocket launchers behind enemy lines." But the sum of his years in the military and business is even shorter than his stint in politics. Those who know him well predict that in a few years he'll be doing something else.

The same goes for his personal background. He wears a tiny kippa, improbably perching on his bald head with the help of two-sided tape, but that doesn't define him. Or his family. He has American parents and spent part of his early childhood in New York and Montreal, but he's at most an ambivalent "Anglo." As a self-professed fanatic of the Greater Land of Israel, he has never shown much interest in living in the West Bank and built a house in the placid upscale Tel Aviv suburb of Ra'anana.

In a visit to the Chabad center in Haifa five years ago, Bennett described how his parents, who emigrated from San Francisco in 1967 following the Six-Day War, began keeping kosher and observing Shabbat because of him. Naftali was born in Haifa in 1972 and when he was 3, the family moved to Canada, where his father, Jim, worked as a fundraiser for the Haifa-based Technion technology institute. The toddler was placed in a Chabad kindergarten so he could keep up his Hebrew.

"I came home a dos, with a kippa and tzitzit" is how he tells the story, using the Israeli slang for a religious person and referring to the fringes that protrude from a religious man's undershirt. "And I asked my father why he didn't have a kippa and tzitzit of his own, and we slowly began observing more, going to synagogue, keeping kashrut."

But this was more likely part of a wider spiritual process his secular parents were undergoing that led to their emigration to Israel and their gradual observance, which was never especially stringent. This process was accompanied by their political journey from students who protested against the Vietnam War to right-wingers who protested against the Oslo Accords in the 1990s and Israel's pullout from Gaza in 2005. Of Jim and Myrna's three sons, Naftali would be the one to spend years without a kippa and marry a secular woman.

So how religious is Israel's "first religious prime minister"? And does it even matter?

By all accounts, he's what is known in today's Israel as dati lite, religious lite, not a regular synagogue-goer and not the kind of person who can tell you what the weekly Torah portion or Hebrew date is. His high school, Haifa's Yavneh school, may have been called a yeshiva but he didn't graduate with much of a taste for the Talmud.

He entered the Knesset as the leader of the Habayit Hayehudi party, which means "Jewish home," the rebranded venerable National Religious Party. But he immediately went about trying to fill his team with secular politicians and visibly chafed whenever he had to meet with rabbis for "guidance." When he meets voters, unlike other religious politicians, he will rarely have any wisdom from the Torah to dish out, but will regale them with stories from his time in the army or business.

So what kind of a religious Israeli is he? Probably a Bnei Akiva youth movement kind, though not the austere Bnei Akiva of today, with its gender segregation and emphasis on observance. Bennett's Bnei Akiva back in 1980s Haifa was about dancing and hiking and the counselors' talks on patriotism and service.

"YONI'S LETTERS"

Bnei Akiva was also where Bennett first heard the name Netanyahu, though it was Bibi's older brother, Yoni. At Bnei Akiva, Bennett would have repeatedly seen a film on the special forces' legendary hostage rescue at Uganda's Entebbe Airport in 1976; Yoni is killed at the end. "Yoni's Letters," the book of letters that Yoni wrote as a teenager forced to move with his parents to Philadelphia, and later as a commando in the Israel Defense Forces, were a staple of Bnei Akiva talks.

Yoni wrote about the higher purpose of serving one's country, as opposed to the boys in Philadelphia, who "are so poor in substance" and only "talk about cars and girls." "Yoni's Letters" is a lot less popular in today's more cynical and materialistic Israel, but it was the teenage Bennett's Bible, so at 18 he volunteered for the Sayeret Matkal commando unit that Yoni had led at Entebbe. For years, Bennett had prepared himself physically for the demands of Israel's most elite special forces unit.

FACE-TO-FACE WITH HEZBOLLAH

At the time, 1990, the IDF's top units weren't yet filled with the graduates of religious schools. Bennett didn't enjoy being seen as "one of the dosim," and a year and a half later when he was sent for officer training, he was no longer wearing his kippa and was enjoying a much more secular lifestyle when on leave.

Bennett's six years in the military satisfied his craving for danger and adventure. Sayeret Matkal taught him to operate in a small team behind enemy lines, but as a young soldier he saw little action, and when he became an officer he faced a dilemma. He could go back to Matkal and take part in "core missions" ? but as an operator, not a commander ? or move to a slightly less elite unit in order to receive a command.

He chose the latter and swiftly became a team leader and then a company commander in the Maglan unit, but the fact that some of his contemporaries returned to Matkal to command teams of their own (as had the Netanyahu brothers Yoni and Bibi) would leave him with a feeling of inadequacy even beyond his military career. He was by all accounts a capable and creative commander, popular with his men despite often pushing them beyond their physical limits, but an occasional nuisance to his senior officers, who didn't always appreciate it when he argued with their orders.

Ultimately he chose to leave the service, though he could have continued. He had already made the decision when he became involved in an incident with international implications. In April 1996, Israel bombarded southern Lebanon for 17 days in Operation Grapes of Wrath, an attempt to get Hezbollah to stop firing on northern Israel and on IDF forces in Israel's self-declared security zone in southern Lebanon.

Bennett led a company in a night raid on Hezbollah positions, until on the eighth day of the mission the soldiers came under mortar fire. Bennett called for artillery support, which rained down on the mortar team's position, near a UN compound where hundreds of Lebanese civilians were taking shelter. One hundred and six people were killed and international condemnations forced Israel to end Operation Grapes of Wrath earlier than planned, without realizing its objectives.

Bennett wasn't responsible for the targeting of the shells, but years later he justified the artillery fire. "Hezbollah was firing from schools and hospitals," he said, adding that the covering fire "saved our lives."

He only found out about the disaster hours later, after helicopters flew the commandos back to Israel. Still, years later, anonymous senior officers said his alleged panicking under fire led to an over-hasty artillery response, adding to his feeling that his military genius was underappreciated and that the IDF's high command suffers from mediocrity. Either way, it was time to get out.

Bennett loves to talk about his army days and did many stints as a reservist. But he's also easily riled when his short military career comes up and has trouble facing the fact that in Israel hundreds of men have more impressive operational records. Still, the experience would help him in his next career.

After his discharge, Bennett spent three years as a rather indifferent law and business student at Hebrew University. He still preferred to spend his time lecturing to young people about service, and that's how he met his wife, Gilat, speaking to high school students at the battle site on Jerusalem's Ammunition Hill. She was a soldier in the IDF Education and Youth Corps, five years younger.

The fact that Naftali and Gilat moved in together before their marriage is another sign of his laid-back religiosity. After their wedding in 1999, they moved to the settlement of Bet Arye. But Bennett only lived across the Green Line for a few months. He was more interested in making money than settling the hilltops, and as CEO of Cyota, a startup specializing in online banking security software, he needed to move to a major financial center.

The Bennetts would spend the next four years in New York; he pursued investors and customers for Cyota, she worked as a pastry chef in Manhattan restaurants.

Just as with his military career, Bennett has spent much more time talking than doing. Of Cyota's four Israeli founders, only one had tech know-how and none had any real business experience. But that wasn't so unusual for Israeli entrepreneurs at the height of the dotcom bubble. And what Bennett lacked in scientific expertise, he made up elsewhere.

As CEO, Bennett brought to his job the same determination he had as an officer, and this time he would remind his partners, "What can happen? Nobody is going to get killed. Nobody is going to step on a mine."

As the initial investment dwindled and they were forced to cut staff, they even began looking for loans from relatives. Their eventual success owed nearly as much to Bennett's perseverance and confident charm as the main salesman ? and their product was a big success in helping banks curb online fraud. It was that confidence that got Cyota sold for $145 million to RSA Security in 2005, before it ever turned a profit, making Bennett a millionaire at 33.

That's also when Bennett began to lose interest in his new career. He stayed on a few months after the sale and had offers to join other companies and investment funds. He would make a few brief forays in tech, including at least two more startup investments that would net him more millions, but he had already achieved the elusive startup exit dream. More money wasn't enough of a temptation; he had enough to go back to Israel, build a house and have children with Gilat.

Bennett was always engaged with politics and there was no question as to where he stood on Israel's political spectrum. By his teenage years, his parents had completed their own personal journey to the far right, which opposed any compromise on territory. Bennett himself was active in the youth wing of the Tehiya party, which had been founded in 1979 to the right of Likud and protested Menachem Begin's willingness to return all of Sinai to Egypt for peace.

One leader of the youth wing was Gideon Sa'ar, whom Bennett would meet 20 years later as an upcoming Likud politician and now a partner in the nascent governing coalition as leader of the New Hope party. But Bennett missed the two great struggles of the Israeli right ? he was in the army during the protest wave against the Oslo Accords in the early and mid-'90s, and in the United States with Cyota during the fight against the Gaza disengagement in 2005.

Despite his ideological fervor, he only decided to go into politics at 35, after having enough of business and experiencing yet more frustration in the IDF as a reserve commander during the failed Second Lebanon War of 2006.

It was a nadir for the right wing, especially Likud. Ariel Sharon, architect of the disengagement, and other Likud leaders split with the party at the end of 2005 and formed the centrist Kadima with senior Laborites including Shimon Peres. Sharon soon had two strokes and slipped into an eight-year coma, but Kadima, under the accidental leadership of Ehud Olmert, still managed to trounce Likud in the 2006 election.

Likud won only 12 Knesset seats under Netanyahu, who had finally returned as party leader ? six years after he resigned following the end of his first term as prime minister and his election defeat to Labor's Ehud Barak. Many predicted that Likud would never return to power; certainly its leader's career would never recover.

At the time, Netanyahu was synonymous with defeat; plenty of Likudniks were out to replace him. Then came the Olmert government's disastrous handling of the Lebanon war, which is also when Bennett arrived.

MEDIOCRE BENNETT

On the face of it, for a man who entered politics as the opposition leader's chief of staff less than 15 years ago, and now is about to become prime minister, Bennett has enjoyed a meteoric rise. But a closer look shows a much more erratic path.

He lasted barely a year and a half in Netanyahu's office before falling out first with Netanyahu's circle of old loyal advisers, then with Bibi's wife and finally with the boss himself. He was fired from his next political job, as CEO of the settlers' Yesha Council after an even shorter stint, when the council's veterans tired of his media stunts and rebranding exercises.

The last straw was his decision to join, as Yesha CEO, the left-wing social justice protests in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2011. Bennett claimed that he wanted to broaden the settlers' engagement with other parts of Israeli society. His critics felt he was building his own personal brand.

After losing that job, Bennett's next political adventure was to found a new party, The Israelis, which lasted a month, before he decided to take over an existing party. In fact, Bennett has been involved in five parties over the past 15 years.

He joined Likud in 2007 in the belief that his new job with Netanyahu would get him into the Knesset in the next election. But by the time this came around in 2009, he had already been banished, and Netanyahu made it back to power without Bennett.

Bennett abandoned his plans for a new party when he realized there was an easier way of getting into the Knesset. The old National Religious Party had fallen on bad times, as younger religious Zionist voters preferred either more radical parties or simply didn't feel the need to vote for a religious party. Like Bennett, their religion wasn't important enough to dictate their politics. He of course had never voted for the party, but it was about to hold its first primary in the hope of attracting new members, and Bennett joined up. The old guard didn't have a chance and Bennett romped to victory with two-thirds of the vote.

His six years as leader of Habayit Hayehudi was the longest time Bennett spent in any job. It was also one of his least favorite. He chafed at the need to consult with the rabbis and party functionaries, and was blocked when he wanted to bring in attractive new secular candidates, most humiliatingly when he was forced to backtrack on former Beitar Jerusalem striker and Mizrahi icon Eli Ohana joining Habayit Hayehudi's party slate.

Most of all he hated how the other leaders of the party and its rabbis accepted that Habayit Hayehudi would always play second fiddle to Likud and Netanyahu, rather than challenge for the national leadership. Which is why Bennett finally broke with Habayit Hayehudi in 2018, forming his fourth party, New Right, which only brought him more humiliation and nearly the end of his political career when the new team failed, by 1,400 votes, to cross the electoral threshold. This left him out of the Knesset, but thanks to Netanyahu's failure to form a coalition, Bennett was back a few months later, this time with his latest party, Yamina, which means rightward.

Yamina has hardly won resounding success, but its mere seven seats have given Bennett the leverage to demand the prime minister's job in return for joining the coalition to replace Netanyahu.

Bennett's flitting between fringe parties doesn't give us much of an indication of what kind of a prime minister he would be, and neither do his ministerial roles. He failed to leave much of a mark as economics minister for two years. Its bureaucratic nature bored him. He was much more excited to be a member of the security cabinet, finally having a say on military and security affairs, and demanding that he receive personal intelligence briefings.

The next three and a half years as education minister were more rewarding; he led reforms that improved the teaching of math and reduced crowding in classrooms. But he also picked silly culture-war fights, one in which he dropped from the curriculum Dorit Rabinyan's novel on a relationship between a Jewish woman and a Palestinian man. Bennett also forbade high schools to host lectures by the former soldiers in Breaking the Silence.

But despite the Education Ministry's high profile, his heart wasn't in it. Netanyahu promised him the Defense Ministry before the 2015 election, but that was another broken promise. Bennett got Defense finally in late 2019, but only because Netanyahu was desperate to prevent a governing coalition led by Kahol Lavan leader Benny Gantz. Six months later, Gantz replaced Bennett anyway.

Bennett's hard-line right-wing posturing and his racist statements on having "killed many Arabs" in his army days haven't amounted to much in terms of policy. His grandiose Stability Initiative from 2012 includes the annexation of Area C in the West Bank (giving the 80,000 Palestinians there full Israeli citizenship), but it has never been a real priority for him. Officially he still supports annexation, but he has never tried to make it government policy.

As a minister under Netanyahu he admitted: "I'm in a great position, always a bit to the right of Bibi. Whenever I make a statement on security or diplomatic matters, he has to match me."

People who have worked closely with him insist he's actually much more moderate and the hard-right statements are largely electioneering to differentiate himself from Netanyahu. "Just wait until Netanyahu goes and there's a bit more space," one of them once said. "Naftali will become much more moderate and try to appeal to centrist voters."

He tried to do that during the pandemic when he scolded other right-wingers for trying to push their agendas. "Not corona, not important," became his slogan.

If he becomes prime minister, he will be in office with the support of Labor, left-wing Meretz and the United Arab List. His right-wing ideology, such as it is, isn't his prime motivator. So what is?

JUST WANTING TO BE LOVED

In his most recent interview with Channel 12's Amit Segal, after the coalition agreements were signed, Bennett squirmed and made excuses for breaking his key election promises ? to prioritize a right-wing coalition, not to serve in a government with Meretz or the United Arab List, and not to agree to Yair Lapid becoming prime minister. There were a couple of authentic moments, though.

"I told my kids that their father is going to make a move that will make him the most hated man in Israel," he dolefully told Segal. "But I'm doing it for my country."

That hardly makes sense. Most Israelis want to see Netanyahu replaced, and Bennett knows those numbers. Still, the angry protests outside his home and those of other Yamina legislators, and Netanyahu's accusations that he has carried out the "fraud of the century" have the power to make him feel hated.

Bennett wants to be prime minister and still seeks to emulate Netanyahu, but unlike Netanyahu, who wants to be admired and feared, Bennett really just wants to be loved.

Which is why he's still yearning for Netanyahu's approval, despite the constant abuse, the mocking in public and the vicious secret smearing of him and his family by Bibi and Sara in the compliant media. He kept on coming back in the hope that one day Netanyahu would recognize him as the prodigal son. It took Netanyahu's shambolic managing of the COVID-19 crisis (until the vaccines arrived) for Bennett to finally realize that his idol, for all his grand statesmanship and rhetorical brilliance, is actually a lousy manager.

And as Bennett said Sunday night, when he finally burned his bridges, Netanyahu is prepared "to take the entire State of Israel to his personal Masada."

But if he can't have Netanyahu's affirmation, he needs it from others around him ? from Ayelet Shaked, who first brought him to work with Netanyahu and then suffered the same abuse as Bennett in the Byzantine court, including baseless innuendo of their having an affair. For all his bravado, Bennett still needs Shaked, who escaped with him from jobs in Netanyahu's office and remained with him throughout his political wanderings.

Thus in the last days of the coalition talks he stood aside while Shaked nearly wrecked the deal over her demand for a seat on the Judicial Appointments Committee. He needs her in this government and her demands will be met.

And it's why Bennett is so anxious to tell everyone that Lapid has been such a mensch throughout the negotiations, so honest and fair-minded. He needs it to be true. He needs to resurrect the "pact of brothers" he had back in 2013 with Lapid, when the two new party leaders demanded that Netanyahu take both of them into his coalition, or they would both stay out. But this time it's not to force Netanyahu's hand. Netanyahu is gone, as far as Bennett is concerned. It's so Bennett can be surrounded by love and support.

ISRAEL 3.0

The 11 men and one woman who have served as Israeli prime minister can be categorized in different ways. Seven (Ben-Gurion, Sharett, Eshkol, Meir, Rabin, Peres, Barak) came from the Labor movement, four were Likudniks (Begin, Shamir, Sharon, Netanyahu), and Ehud Olmert, who most of his career was in Likud, became prime minister as a member of the short-lived Kadima party. In one sense, Bennett is like Olmert, representing neither of the two historical parties of the Zionist movement and coming to office under freak circumstances.

Meanwhile, nine of the prime ministers belonged to the "founders' generation," whether as leaders of the state in its early decades (Ben-Gurion, Sharett, Eshkol, Meir) leaders of the pre-state right-wing militias (Begin, Shamir), or the younger founders who were field commanders and bureaucrats at Israel's foundation (Rabin, Peres, Sharon). Even though 42 years of age separated them, they all shared in the struggle for Jewish statehood and in the early years of uncertainty about Israel's security and sustainability.

Three prime ministers (Netanyahu, Barak, Olmert) belong to the generation of the state, growing up in the '50s and '60s, cocky young sabras who while perhaps not taking Israel's existence totally for granted were fully at home in the realm of Jewish sovereignty and Israeli power.

Bennett and his partner Lapid, should either of them be sworn in, are the first prime ministers of a new generation, growing up in a much more confident era after the Six-Day War. It was a time when Israel's regional dominance was more pronounced and Israeli life was rapidly becoming less parochial and closer to a Western standard of living.

Their politics, family and religious backgrounds are different, but they share a type of ruthless pragmatism, unabashed Zionism and a sense of entitlement, typical of the Israeli upper middle class that's at home in Tel Aviv but very comfortable in Manhattan as well. In part, they're the products of the Netanyahu era and have learned their political styles from observing him, but they lack Netanyahu's deep-seated phobias and existential fears.

But between Bennett and Lapid, Bennett is more representative of today's Israel. Lapid ultimately is a product of the Tel Aviv media elite into which he was born and remains part of, while Bennett is much harder to pin down but is connected to a much wider range of Israeli groups without being beholden to any of them.

Bennett isn't just the first of the third generation of Israeli prime ministers, he's Israel 3.0: a Jewish nationalist but not really dogmatic. A bit religious, but certainly not devout. A military man who prefers the comforts of civilian urban life and a high-tech entrepreneur who isn't looking to make any more millions. A supporter of the Greater Land of Israel but not a settler. And he may well not be a lifelong politician either, though so far politics is the career he has spent the most time in.

Bennett is unlikely to spend very long as Israel's prime minister. If the new government defies expectations by surviving two years, he will abide by the deal to rotate the premiership with Lapid in August 2023, but after occupying the top job, it will be tough to get used to being just another minister again. And his chances of winning enough seats in a future election to return as prime minister are exceedingly slim. A leader of a small party serving as prime minister is a bizarre occurrence that will not repeat.

He's 49, and by his early 50s he'll have nothing to prove any longer in politics. If with Lapid he can make this unlikely government a success and stay the course for the next four years, he will be remembered as the prime minister who ended the Netanyahu era and helped usher in a period of political stability. It will be mission accomplished and time to move on to his next adventure. Just like other members of the Israel 3.0 generation, he has trouble staying in the same place for too long.

 

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Above: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with the sultan of Oman, where he was warmly welcomed in 2018

 

IS NETANYAHU ABOUT TO LOSE POWER?

It looks like Benjamin Netanyahu's long stint as Israeli prime minister may be coming to an end, at least for the time being. At any rate, even if he survives a little while longer, the heyday of "King Bibi" may be over.

Haviv Rettig Gur, a senior analyst at the Times of Israel, and international affairs commentator Tom Gross discuss the Netanyahu legacy. How will he be remembered, both as an Israeli leader and as an international figure?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dznA8zJXTfc

(Recorded today, June 2, 2021)

 

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