MIDWAY through the election campaign Israel’s leading satirical TV show, Eretz Nehederet, came up with a new take on the man who has dominated the country’s politics for the past 20 years. Benjamin ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu, it suggested, was cursed as a child to be Israel’s prime minister for eternity. His only chance to break the spell was to become its worst-ever leader.Well, if that was his strategy, he has failed again. Despite having run a government that delivered too few jobs, stagnant wages, a rapidly rising cost of living and a full-blown housing crisis – it now costs the average Israeli 148 months’ salary to buy a home, compared to 66 months for the average American – Israelis voted him back into power in last Tuesday’s election.
Only a week ago, he was running behind in the polls, but a massive last-minute scare campaign turned it around. On polling day, Netanyahu even put a video clip on his Facebook page in which he warned that “the rule of the right is in danger. The [Israeli] Arabs are moving in droves to the polling stations. Left-wing organisations are bringing them there in buses.” And who was paying for those buses? “American money,” explained Bibi’s campaign team.
Israel’s voting system of strict proportional representation has never given a single party a majority of the Knesset’s 120 seats in any election in the state’s 67-year history. Netanyahu’s Likud Party won 30 seats, while its nearest rival, the centre-left Zionist Union, got only 24. But that gives Likud the first chance to form a coalition with the required 61 seats, and there are enough smaller right-wing parties to make up the numbers.
Bibi is back for up to five more years (which would make him the longest-serving prime minister in Israeli history). But turning the tide had a price, and Israel has not yet begun to pay it.
Netanyahu won mainly by cannibalizing the vote of the parties to Likud’s right, but that strategy required him to say some things out loud that he had previously conveyed to his hard-right admirers only by nods and winks. The most dramatic shift came just one day before the election, when he finally said plainly that he would never allow the creation of a Palestinian state. (He walked back his words on March 19 however, telling MSNBC “I don’t want a one-state solution. I want a sustainable, peaceful two-state solution.”)
Only a couple days earlier, he said: “I think that anyone who moves to establish a Palestinian state and evacuate [Israeli-occupied Palestinian] territory gives territory away to radical Islamist attacks against Israel.” Does that mean that a Palestinian state would not be permitted if he were re-elected, asked the interviewer. “Indeed,” Netanyahu replied.
This will come as a vast surprise to practically nobody. Netanyahu’s entire political career has been dedicated to sabotaging the 1993 Oslo Accords (which envisaged Israeli and Palestinian states living side-by-side in peace) and planting so many Jewish settlers on the Israeli-occupied territories that a separate Palestinian state becomes physically impossible.
He largely destroyed the Oslo agreement in his first term as prime minister in 1996-99 (the creation of a Palestinian state was scheduled for 1998). Almost 10 per cent of Israel’s Jews now live in the occupied Palestinian territories (east Jerusalem and the West Bank) that would make up a Palestinian state. But to keep his American allies and his European supporters happy, he never actually said he would not allow an independent Palestine.
Netanyahu finally spoke the truth on Monday last because that’s what the settlers and their supporters wanted to hear, and he needed those votes in order to survive politically. But it destroyed the myth, useful to the United States and the European Union, that there is some surviving “peace process” that must be protected by keeping the Israelis happy. The “peace process” is dead, dead, dead. Has been for years. There is no “two-state solution” on the table.
This makes it a lot harder for the US to veto resolutions critical of Israel at the United Nations. Without the cover of peace talks, these vetoes become votes for perpetual Israeli rule over the Palestinian people. And it will accelerate the broader erosion of the old pro-Israel reflexes of people in Europe and the US who needed the reassurance that someday, somehow, there would be a just peace settlement.
Netanyahu made matters considerably worse during the campaign by openly showing his contempt for United States President Barack Obama. His panic-mongering speech to the US Congress, painting Obama’s quest for a nuclear deal with Iran as a naive surrender to Iran’s alleged desire for nuclear weapons, was an unprecedented foreign intervention in the US political process. It will not be forgiven or forgotten by Obama.
His election promise to speed up Jewish settlement in the Palestinian territories (which is illegal under international law) was another nail in the coffin of peace negotiations. Still, it did help to get Netanyahu re-elected, and for him that’s all that counts.
He still truly believes that only he understands the real and existential dangers facing Israel, and has the will to do something about them. Except that all he ever really does is kick those dangers down the road a bit. Unable to believe that a peaceful settlement is possible or even desirable, he condemns his country to perpetual conflict and growing isolation.
By Gwynne Dyer
(Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries)
