Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has finally stepped down from his high office. He abused his power and resulted in his indictment, in 2019, on charges of bribery, corruption, and breach of trust.
By Nazarul Islam
Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has finally stepped down from his high office. During his tenure (2009-2021), he had used his talents and political acumen to parlay Israel’s formidable intelligence capabilities, military prowess, and reputation as the “startup nation” into a prominent role for his country on the world stage. Relations with India, China, Russia, Africa, and Latin America burgeoned.
So did strategic cooperation with Arab states, especially as the threat to Israel’s neighbors from Iran and the Islamic State (or ISIS) waxed and as their faith in the reliability of the United States waned. Although he ruptured relations with neighboring Jordan, Netanyahu’s crowning achievement was the normalization of relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan, and Morocco under the umbrella of the Abraham accords, signed in 2020.
For all these achievements, as time went on, Netanyahu became more narcissistic, arrogant, and paranoid. These were the flaws that led to his undoing and perhaps that solely explained his failures in relations with the United States and the Palestinians, both of which he leaves in poor condition. Now, the new Bennett-Lapid government, with its razor-thin majority, is tasked with repairing the damage.
To the best of my beliefs, Netanyahu was convinced that the press was his enemy. He was determined to manipulate the message by gaining control of media outlets, convincing the American billionaire Sheldon Adelson to establish a free newspaper to carry his message and using his position as communications minister to shape television and Internet coverage.
This obsession led him to abuse his power and resulted in his indictment, in 2019, on charges of bribery, corruption, and breach of trust. In the process, Netanyahu so mistreated his staff and advisers that three of his closest aides are now testifying against him in that trial.
Similar behavior turned his political partners against him, too. Ironically, although Netanyahu succeeded in using his populist appeal to drive the Israeli polity to the right, his politics were so divisive that he managed to split his base. In the end, three right-wing parties joined the effort to bring him down.
Again, in his ever more desperate attempts to secure a majority, he brought new players into the political mainstream, legitimizing far-right Jewish extremists and Ra’am, an Arab Islamist party that he had previously marginalized along with the other Arab political parties. In the process, Netanyahu engineered his own downfall: first, the Jewish extremists vetoed a government with Arabs in it; then, the newly legitimized Arab Islamists joined the coalition against him. It was a classic tale of hubris.
Not surprisingly, the same self-destructive instincts ruined Netanyahu’s relations with the United States, Israel’s most important source of support, without whose backing none of his achievements on the world stage would have been possible. Ensuring bipartisan support had been the carefully cultivated approach of all previous Israeli prime ministers.
But as U.S. politics became more polarized, Netanyahu deliberately chose to side with Republicans and their evangelical and Orthodox Jewish voters. He judged liberal Jews, who make up the bulk of the American Jewish community and are a mainstay of the Democratic Party, as unreliable. So he abandoned them.
Much to dismay of his followers, Netanyahu had pitted Republicans against Democrats in his failed effort to thwart the Iran nuclear deal and then embraced Donald Trump’s divisive politics, drawing the U.S. president into his increasingly desperate attempts to get reelected. That had really secured him the move of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and U.S. recognition of Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, but those interventions were not sufficient to help him achieve a majority.
In May 2021, the chickens came home to roost when the progressive wing of the Democratic Party harshly criticized Israel’s efforts to defend its citizens against Hamas’s rocket attacks and called for the conditioning of U.S. military assistance; some of Israel’s strongest Democratic supporters in Congress spoke out, too.
Netanyahu had been warned repeatedly that it was a mistake to put all Israel’s eggs in the Republican basket, but he thought he knew American politics better. Thirteen long years of his leadership, had shrunk—and cut down to size, because he thought he was smarter than others….
[author title=”Nazarul Islam ” image=”https://sindhcourier.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Nazarul-Islam-2.png”]The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles.[/author]
