Published: 18 October 2019
Last updated: 4 March 2024
“Bibi is in a different league,” the slogans read.
The billboards were Netanyahu’s attempt to market his many, ostensibly successful, foreign policy achievements. “No-one has a relationship with world leaders like Netanyahu,” the signs screamed out.
Although foreign policy is rarely a vote-getter in domestic politics, Netanyahu’s promotion of his foreign policy’s achievements was a calculated strategic move. Netanyahu’s voter base is largely poorer, less educated, and more conservative, nationalistic and collectivistically oriented than that of his opponents, and his years in office have not made their lives better.
During his decade as prime minister, the cost of living has spiralled upwards, and the price of apartments makes home-owning impossible for many people. Within the OECD, Israel has one of the highest levels of inequality and the highest level of child poverty.
Netanyahu has provided his constituents with dissension and polarisation as a salve for their socio-economic decline and to mask his crony capitalism. Unable to offer many of them individual mastery over their own lives, he offers them the opportunity to vicariously share his pride and purported mastery of world events. It works for them.
Netanyahu’s use of foreign policy for domestic purposes is supremely ironic. Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger famously remarked that Israel has no foreign policy, only domestic politics. Netanyahu has taken this one step further: His foreign policy is not merely domestic politics; it is personal politics, aimed at maintaining his voter base in order to create government that would offer him immunity or some other scheme to save him from going to jail as indictments for three separate criminal cases looming over his future.
His foreign policy as a get-out-of-jail-free card has been based on three pillars: a bromance with US President Donald Trump; alliances with the leaders of illiberal democracies and authoritarian regimes throughout the world; and a belligerent attitude towards Iran.
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Trump and Netanyahu have maintained a mutual admiration society that provides them with mutual advantages. While their opponents view Trump’s gestures towards Israel – and in particular, moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognising Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights – as empty and needlessly provocative, they have played well with both Netanyahu’s and Trump’s supporters.
Trump may seem like a buffoon to some of us, but many Israelis view his decisions as bold and creative, an American form of Israeli derring-do. And while Netanyahu’s opponents viewed his decisions – such as refusing to allow Democratic congresswomen Ilan Omar and Rashida Tlaib into Israel – as partisan and therefore bad for Israel, many Americans viewed them as proof of Israel’s grateful loyalty to the American ethos.
Trump demands absolute loyalty, which Netanyahu has willingly provided. To please Trump, he has, for the first time in the history of US-Israeli relations, openly sided with the Republican party against the Democratic party and agreed to turn Israel into a wedge, partisan issue within the US.
Netanyahu is not the first Israeli leader to cosy up to unsavoury regimes. But in the past, such relationships were justified as necessary evils, to be conducted quietly and humbly. Netanyahu is the first to flaunt them.
Elsewhere in the world, Netanyahu has defined the leading, Western-oriented countries of the EU, with their focus on human rights and attendant criticism of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, as anti-Israel and even anti-Semitic.
This, too, plays well with his insularly minded constituency, who seem to believe, as Netanyahu proclaims, that Jewish sovereignty after the Holocaust allows Israel to pretty much do as it pleases and to disagree is to be anti-Semitic.
Netanyahu has courted relationships with the illiberal democracies and authoritarian regimes throughout central and Eastern Europe and the rest of the world. These leaders have few qualms about human and minority rights, occupation, social equality, or other such trivial issues.
Netanyahu has visited and/or welcomed not only Russian President Vladimir Putin, but also Narendra Modi of India, Viktor Orban of Hungary, Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines (who once compared himself to Hitler), Prime Minister Mateusz Norawiecki of Poland, and others – all of whom pander, like Netanyahu, to their constituencies’ distrust of the media, disdain for the intellectual and social elites and hatred for liberal institutions, such as the courts and universities.
Through relationships with these countries and their leaders, Netanyahu can show that Israel is not internationally isolated. Furthermore, with friends like these, he has no reason to fear that there will be any pressure to move towards the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that he, his coalition partners, and his constituencies, so oppose.
Netanyahu is not the first Israeli leader – or the first world leader, for that matter – to cosy up to unsavoury regimes. But in the past, such relationships were justified as necessary evils, realpolitik to be conducted quietly and humbly. Netanyahu is the first to flaunt them.
Iran is the third pillar on which his domestic foreign policy rests. And while few would doubt that Iran’s insistence on offensive nuclear capability poses a threat to Israel – and to most of the world - most would also agree that the situation is diplomatically and militarily complex, requiring finesse and subtlety.
Instead, Netanyahu consistently spews fiery rhetoric. He knows, of course, that he can’t win in a war with Iran, but he also knows that his arrogant posturing can provide macho satisfaction for his followers.
It could also lead Iran to avenge its honour and open a long-term front against Israel. But Netanyahu seems to believe that thanks to his relationship with Trump, the US will bring down the Iranian regime.
However, these pillars on which he has based his immunity-driven foreign policy have started to crumble.
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Trump has proven to be a very unreliable bro. Since the elections, and seeing Netanyahu’s political situation is precarious, Trump has basically broken off contact with Israel. He has openly attempted to improve relations with Iran and publicly courted its President, Hassan Rouhani. Furthermore, unlike his decision in December 2018 to pull 2,000 troops out of Syria, his most recent withdrawal came with no advance warning.
Even worse, Trump has shown both Netanyahu and the world that he can’t be counted on to defend his allies. Emboldened by the knowledge that Trump would not respond, Iran attacked Saudi Arabia and has heightened the rhetoric against Israel. And despite the economic sanctions, Iran is accelerating its nuclear program. The Iranians are not afraid of America anymore.
Which makes Israelis very afraid.
As the pillars of his failed policy come crashing down around him, what can Netanyahu do? He cannot repudiate Trump, he is well aware that he better not antagonise the mercurial, immature - and vindictive - American president.
Moral issues and the Kurdish right to self-determination aside, Trump’s withdrawal, which has enabled the Turkish offensive against the Kurds, is bad for Israel. Israel has long supported the Kurds, knowing that it is in Israel’s interests to have a modern, western-oriented Muslim state in the vicinity. Moreover, the pull-out will lay the groundwork for a revival of ISIS, with all the attendant femicide, ethnocide, regional destabilisation, and threat to Israel. It also hands a diplomatic and military victory to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
As the pillars of his failed policy come crashing down around him, what can Netanyahu do? He certainly cannot repudiate Trump, and not only because that would make him look like a fool. Furthermore, it takes one to know one, and so Netanyahu, who has elevated vindictiveness to a political art form, is well aware that he better not antagonise the mercurial, immature - and vindictive - American president.
For example, after days of cyber silence, which is very unusual for media-savvy Netanyahu, he offered only a feeble condemnation of the Turkish attack in which he made no mention of the US abandonment of northern Syria.
Moreover, Trump, busy with Ukrainegate, an impending impeachment process, and the anger of the evangelicals over his abandonment of the Kurds, might be losing his grip, too. And then what? After all, having burned his relationships with the Democratic camp, Netanyahu has no other allies in the US.
As for the rest of the authoritarian world – it is unlikely that these leaders will continue to support a weakened Netanyahu. Putin has already proven to be unreliable, refusing to provide Netanyahu with a political gesture that he could really use just about now.
Because Israel has refused to turn Russian hacker Aleksey Burkov over to the Russians, the Russians have sentenced a young Israeli woman, Naama Issachar, an American-Israeli citizen, to seven and a half years in prison after a conviction on drug possession and smuggling charges.
Never mind that; once Israel’s Supreme court ruled approved Burkov’s extradition to the US, where he is wanted for embezzlement charges, Netanyahu really can’t intervene. And never mind that it isn’t clear why the Russians are so keen to bring him home. Or that the charges against Issachar are clearly little more than tit-for-tat diplomacy.
In April, only four days before the first round of elections, Putin told Netanyahu that the Russian army had found the bod of a long-missing Israeli soldier, which reinforced Netanyahu’s stature as a world leader. But now, Putin doesn’t seem to feel the need to offer Netanyahu anything.
By turning foreign policy into a personal strategy, Netanyahu has put Israel’s highest interests at risk. His ostensible foreign policy hasn’t merely failed – it has been, and will continue to be, a disaster for Israel.
Illustration: Avi Katz
