I won’t bury the lede. The tragic irony of the Israeli state is that it’s become what it despises: An authoritarian theocracy.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s autocratic tendencies have grown ever more pronounced over two decades spent dominating local politics. For almost 18 years, political jostling in Israel’s been defined by efforts to sustain Netanyahu’s grip on power or break it.
That’s an unhealthy dynamic reminiscent of the domestic political landscape in Turkey and Hungary, where government and governance became inseparable from Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Viktor Orban. When one man makes himself synonymous with a nation’s politics, it’s a signpost of democratic backsliding. Donald Trump has achieved that synonymity in America.
These days, Netanyahu can barely be bothered with the minimalistic pretenses required to keep up democratic appearances. That’s saying something in a world that’s becoming less democratic all the time.
The bar for calling your country a “democracy” is a lot lower than it was a decade ago. So low, in fact, that clearing it basically just entails paying regular lip service to democratic precepts. Netanyahu, like Trump, shows little interest in that perfunctory exercise.
In the lead up to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, Netanyahu was in the process of pushing through a series of “reforms” aimed at curtailing the power of the judiciary. That effort drew hundreds of thousands of protestors into the streets, in what counted as the most acute civil unrest in the country’s history.
Those protests ended with the Hamas attacks, which produced what I’m confident in calling the most enthusiastic “rally around the flag” effect in modern history. Netanyahu’s kept the country on a war footing ever since. If you don’t think that’s deliberate, you’re a fool.
The Hamas attacks were a veritable godsend for Netanyahu, which raises some pretty uncomfortable questions, particularly in the context of multiple reports which suggest he was warned in advance about Yahya Sinwar’s “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood” by the UAE and Egypt.
Not one to waste a “good” crisis, Netanyahu used the Hamas attacks as an excuse to level Gaza, decimate Hezbollah and take a run at the Holy Grail of militant Zionism: Overthrowing, by force, the Revolution in Tehran. In the process, Netanyahu established himself as a full-blown autocrat, beholden only to domestic political actors even more prone to zealotry than himself.
Throughout, the IDF retained some agency and in the lead up to this week’s parliamentary vote, the military’s chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, apparently told Netanyahu no when Bibi intimated that Israel should launch a new attack on Iran prior to the elections.
That framing’s too strong. The IDF didn’t tell Netanyahu to pound sand (and there’s a lot of it over there, sand, all of it holy according to the half a billion lunatics who comprise the local population). Rather, as The New York Times wrote, Netanyahu “ran into resistance” from the IDF’s top brass, who “raised a number of objections and concerns and ultimately concluded that there was no immediate or urgent need for action.” General Zamir, the Times went on, “believed [new strikes] would be a miscalculation that could provoke Iran into attacking Israel.”
Of course, that was very likely the whole point. I talked about this on October 22 in “Not Done Yet?” If Netanyahu can goad Iran into lobbing a bunch of missiles into Israel, he can declare some manner of emergency or, at the very least, push for another one of his “unity” governments (led by him, naturally) on the excuse that the fraught, post-election coalition-building process which could see him lose the premiership would distract from the national defense.
To the extent that’s an accurate characterization, it’s indicative of Netanyahu’s autocratic tendencies, but it’s something a lot worse than that too: It suggests he’s willing to sacrifice the lives of Israelis to save his own ass which, let’s face it, is exactly what he’s been doing during three years of war. The longer this existential battle lasts, the longer he can put off any sort of reckoning with corruption allegations and avoid serious inquiries into the “security lapses” (note the scare quotes) that allowed Hamas to do what they did.
To be clear, Israel’s policy towards the Palestinian question isn’t going to change even if Netanyahu’s rival, former IDF chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, manages to cobble together enough support to form a government. A two-state solution’s out of the question. That ship sailed, and not on October 7, 2023. Rather, during the The Second Intifada. And being a military man, Eisenkot isn’t going to take it easy on Israel’s regional foes (what’s left of them anyway), so the war footing wouldn’t change either, although it’d probably be less overt.
But — and this is the crux of the issue — Eisenkot wouldn’t preside as an autocrat, let alone the dictator Netanyahu will be if he forms another government. And yes, I’m prepared to stand by that characterization. Netanyahu’s already an autocrat. If Israelis hand him another government, he’ll run the country as a de facto dictator which, among other things, will entail keeping the country at war in perpetuity. Or until Iran’s a 636,000-square mile sheet of blood-streaked glass.
