Netanyahu will be seen as an arch manipulator
Take yourself back to June 1996. John Major was British prime minister, embarrassed by Eurosceptic MPs and ministers whose now minor-seeming peccadilloes failed his ‘‘back to basics’’ test.
Bill Clinton was in his first term as American president, Boris Yeltsin his Russian counterpart. China’s gross domestic product was growing fast, and looking as if it might some day overtake Italy’s. It was a simpler and more optimistic time.
It was also when a 46-year-old Benjamin Netanyahu first became prime minister of Israel.
Today, 25 years later, Yeltsin is dead and Clinton and Tony Blair receding into history, but Netanyahu is still clinging on in Beit Aghion, his official residence.
For all but two years when he stepped away from politics, ‘‘Bibi’’ has been a dominant figure in that period, serving as prime minister for three years to 1999 and then, after other filling various senior ministerial roles, securing three more terms since 2009.
This time, however, the fight might be unwinnable. The coalition constructed by his many enemies has finally forged a Knesset majority to oust him, even if that majority is wafer thin.
Few doubt though, that his legacy will survive him. For Israel’s critics around the world, that legacy is one of apartheid, as described by a recent Human Rights Watch report, in which Palestinian-Arab residents of both Israel and the West Bank have been rendered secondclass citizens in their own homes, in apparent perpetuity. That assessment is profoundly opposed not only by Netanyahu but by a majority of Israel’s politicians, including those who dominate the new coalition.
This divide between how Israel sees itself and how much of the world sees it is perhaps Netanyahu’s greater legacy.
For many critics Netanyahu was a populist leader before the idea was popular.
His nationalist politics and brilliant deployment of divide and rule tactics to split centrists, liberals and the left and conquer them one by one made him the prototype of Trump, Modi and the rest.
‘‘Narcissistic, anti-democratic, ethno-nationalist, arsonist would-be kings,’’ was the unflattering description by David Rothkopf, the influential former editor of Foreign Policy magazine, comparing Donald Trump and Netanyahu in an article for Israel’s liberal daily, Haaretz, last month.
While their ideas might be down, their ideas were not yet out, he warned. ‘‘They have both left a legacy of empowering small groups of extremists, who ensure both that they will remain relevant in the political system and that the worst of the ideas they embraced will poison the political system in their countries for years to come.’’
It is too simplistic, however, to say that Netanyahu invented a new politics. His skill in the art of manipulating public opinion was learnt in his years in America, where he served as press spokesman, deputy ambassador and UN ambassador in the 1980s.
Netanyahu’s genius was to take these skills and turn them to rightwing advantage, often against those like Blair and Clinton who thought they were the masters of the craft. In Britain, Netanyahu’s flattery of Blair, sucking him into pro-Israel positions against the will of the majority of his party, helped to tear Labour apart, silencing a potentially powerful voice of opposition in the West.
He has pulled off similar feats again and again. He saw early that Trump, a man with little previous interest in the Middle East, could be easily cajoled into fronting a new ‘‘peace process’’ that conformed exactly with Israel’s own strategic interests