Netanyahu’s departure may worsen tensions with Western liberals

Did you hear that? In case you missed it, a collective sigh of relief swept the globe as Benjamin Netanyahu’s 12-year reign as Israeli prime minister came to an end. For many on the Left, who detest Israel’s longest-serving premier, the arrival of fresh leadership heralds a more promising era of Israeli policy, primarily vis-à-vis the Palestinians.

Indeed, Netanyahu’s actions in recent years have rightly distressed onlookers; be it his race-baiting of Arab-Israelis, his courting of extremist politicians, his demonization of political opponents or his unrelenting attacks on the judiciary (never mind his ongoing corruption trial). A less abrasive approach to Capitol Hill, too, will likely ease tensions with US President Joe Biden and the Democrats, at least in the short term.

Notwithstanding these changes and the inclusion of left-wing, centrist and Muslim parties in the “change coalition,” Netanyahu’s departure is unlikely to improve relations between Israel and its liberal and progressive critics in the West. Rather, it may well heighten already soaring tensions, because in a post-Netanyahu Israel, many of his critics on the Left will be confronted with an uncomfortable reality: It’s not really Bibi they dislike. It’s Israel.

With Netanyahu gone, his left-wing critics will realize that the key policies they abhorred and assumed would be revoked after his departure actually have widespread support across the Israeli political spectrum.

This impending shock is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the Middle East common on the Left.

Liberals and progressives have long-opposed what they term Israel’s “occupation” of the West Bank (to Jews, the biblical homeland of Judea and Samaria). For decades they have demanded that Israel withdraw to the pre-1967 lines, creating space for a Palestinian state. Indeed, for much of the 20th century, the Israeli Left viewed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a land dispute, believing that peace only required vacating the territories captured in 1967.

But while most Israelis have long-abandoned such fantasies, liberals and progressives in the West continue to insist that “ending the occupation” will finally solve the world’s most intractable conflict. Unsurprisingly, these calls fall on deaf ears in Israel.

This is, in large part, due to the Palestinians’ manic suicide-bombing campaign beginning in 2000, which targeted Israeli nightclubs, buses and restaurants, and devastated Israel’s peace camp. Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Gaza Strip merely exacerbated this, when, after watching weeping soldiers drag Israelis from their homes of more than 30 years, Israelis looked on in 2007 as Hamas, an internationally-recognized – and genocidally antisemitic – terrorist organization, violently took over the enclave. Since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, Palestinian terrorists have fired more than 15,000 rockets at Israeli civilians.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu only became prime minister in 2009 (bar a short stint in the 1990s). Evidently, the underlying causes of the current impasse were in place long before his election.

Many on the Left also misread the regional context in which Israelis find themselves. While the West obsesses over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israelis worry about Hezbollah in Lebanon (with 150,000 rockets aimed at

Tel Aviv), the war raging in Syria (a 90-minute drive from the West Bank), the ever-tenuous Jordanian monarchy and the increasingly real nuclear threat from Iran’s ayatollahs. Should Israel withdraw from the West Bank, which overlooks its major population centers, Israelis fear that rather than creating a Palestinian state, it will produce a power vacuum to be filled by one of the myriad regional actors committed to perpetrating another Holocaust.

We thus find ourselves in a predicament where few Israelis believe a solution to the conflict exists. According to a joint 2020 study between Tel Aviv University and the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, Israeli Jews show more opposition than support for the two-state solution.

It’s this realization from a post-Netanyahu Israel that will shock many liberals and progressives. Contrary to what they claim, Bibi is not why the two-state solution lies comatose; nor has he led Israel down an irredeemable path of ‘creeping annexation’ of territories viewed by Palestinians as part of their future state. Rather, the past two decades have left Israelis overwhelmingly skeptical about any prospects for a peaceful withdrawal from Palestinian territories.

Israelis aren’t blind. They’re well aware of the daily indignities Israel’s military presence in the West Bank causes Palestinians. But what Israelis understand, unlike many liberals and progressives in the West, is that there’s no quick fix. Until the Palestinians demonstrate in good faith that they have, once and for all, accepted Israel’s permanence in the region as a Jewish state, Israelis will continue to dismiss calls for territorial withdrawals. This is a reality that cuts across the ideological divides of Israel’s new coalition.

In the coming months, Netanyahu’s critics on the Left will come to realize that it’s not just Netanyahu who opposed grand maneuvers on the Palestinian front, it’s the majority of Israelis. Once reality sinks in, they’ll have two choices: to turn their hostility toward the world’s only Jewish state, or to re-evaluate their long-held creeds surrounding the conflict.