The iron wall of Israel
Simply enduring might not seem the best measure of leadership — a race that Vladimir Putin or Robert Mugabe would surely win — but to Mr Netanyahu it is everything. The ability to persist, to keep going even when the world hates you, when the ground is crumbling beneath your feet, this is what he most values, both in the history of the Jewish people and in his own political career.
One could even argue that this, alone, is Bibi’s entire discernible modus operandi: Slathering the status quo in thick concrete, sitting atop it and waiting, resiliently — to hell with the rest of West Asia, to hell with the Palestinians, to hell even with the Americans.
After two decades in the public eye, what else can we say Bibi wants? What other vision has he offered Israel besides one of himself standing guard against any change? At one level, Neill Lochery, the author of a new biography with the tantalising title The Resistible Rise of
understands this. Right up front he declares that the normal tools for assessing the success or failure of leaders must be discarded when sizing up the Israeli prime minister. For Mr Netanyahu, it “has been all about survival.” This is a startling starting point, especially when we’re talking about the leader of Israel, a country that doesn’t even have internationally recognised borders and that for a thousand reasons, moral to demographic, cannot afford to recline. A biography — and Mr Lochery’s is apparently the first in English — must tell us how Bibi came to embrace this ethos of resilience for resilience’s sake and why it has proved so popular with the Israeli people through four hardfought elections, leaving him no serious opponents in sight.
Instead, Mr Lochery, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at University College London, aims much lower, taking us on a slog through what he identifies as nine decisive moments in Mr Netanyahu’s career and then rehashing, largely using newspaper clips, the Machiavellian minutiae. It’s altogether a boring and narrow lens — delving into how ministerial portfolios were handed out or who came second and third on party lists for Parliament. But even more unfortunate is the simplistic binary that Mr Lochery applies to it all: Is Bibi, at heart, an ideologue or a pragmatist?
This is not a new question. Legions of commentators have used it to try to interpret Mr Netanyahu’s actions. On one side is the imagined inner voice of Benzion Netanyahu, Bibi’s father, who died in 2012 at the age of 102. A severe, aggrieved man, a scholar of the Spanish Inquisition, Benzion Netanyahu was to the right of the right — no compromises, no room for two states, etc.
On the other side is the evidence of Mr Netanyahu’s political dexterity — winning an election in 1996 by hewing to the centre, winning a different one in 2015 by lurching to the right.
Using these two broad categories, Mr Lochery struggles to decipher the mysterious thing he clunkily calls “Netanyahuism”. “For a deeper understanding of Netanyahu’s resilience, it is important to look at his pragmatic skills of reinvention,” he concludes. “Much of the outside world mistakes his apparent hawkish perspective towards the Palestinians, the Arab world and Iran as evidence of his strong ideologically motivated brand of politics.”
Pragmatism doesn’t tell us much. Every successful politician is pragmatic, if this simply means reading and responding to your public. What Mr Lochery fails to explore are the consequences of Bibi’s “pragmatism” in a place like Israel. Because, in practice, pragmatism for Mr Netanyahu means twisting every which way to avoid confronting the problems of the occupation. The tumult of West Asia today, between ISIS and Syria and the sad harvest of the Arab Spring (not to mention his favourite bugbear, a rising Iran), allows Bibi to free himself or Israel of any need to take action vis-à-vis the Palestinians. But this isn’t a new attitude on his part.
The implication, in 1998 and repeated these days like a mantra, is that the only thing Israel can do is hunker down. But this is also an ideology of sorts. In the 1920s, Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism and grandfather of today’s right wing (and Benzion Netanyahu’s mentor), dubbed his strategy “the iron wall”. For Jabotinsky this meant waging relentless war against the local Arab population until they understood that the Jews would never leave.
Many of them understand this now. But still the ethos of the iron wall remains. Today, it manifests itself as an insistence that Israel cannot ever make concessions, that it must hold the line at all cost, its existence as fragile as it was in 1948. Mr Netanyahu is the embodiment of that iron wall — unloved but strangely comforting to his people, a man who is a pure projection of the simple desire to continue existing, but who has no ambition to reach for more. Neill Lochery Bloomsbury 378 pages; $30