Just before Thanksgiving, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued an unusual set of arrest warrants: one for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, one for his former defense minister Yoav Gallant and one for the deceased Hamas military chief Muhammad Deif. Each man is accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes related to the ongoing conflict in Gaza.
The warrant for Mr. Netanyahu calls for any of the 124 countries that are signatories to the I.C.C. to arrest the Israeli leader should he arrive on their soil. And yet in Israel, the threat has made only the barest ripple on the domestic front. Israelis seemed far more concerned by how, more than two weeks earlier, on the night of the American election, Mr. Netanyahu took advantage of a distracted Washington and fired Mr. Gallant, the last remaining political centrist in his cabinet. Thousands of Israeli protesters took to the streets over the dismissal, blocking a major highway in Tel Aviv with bonfires and shouting, “Bibi is a traitor!”
The protests weren’t just about Mr. Gallant, or even the kind of war he led as defense minister. They were about Mr. Netanyahu himself, a man who has overtly put his own political survival above his nation again and again. Over the past year, Mr. Netanyahu has risen, phoenixlike, from the political ashes of the nation’s greatest security failure on Oct. 7, 2023, to become a bolder, more aggressive version of himself — a man willing to ignore longtime allies, including many American Jews, brush off international opprobrium and shed a long history of war skepticism in favor of a full-blown, multifront regional war. Hamas, Hezbollah and Syria are now badly damaged. The last (original) man standing is Mr. Netanyahu, something few would have predicted one year ago.
Mr. Netanyahu managed to wait out the Biden administration’s unsuccessful efforts to bring an end to the war in Gaza, bring home the hostages and curtail civilians’ bloodshed. With Donald Trump poised to re-enter the White House, ushering in a slate of new regional envoys who show no interest in limiting Israel, it seems Mr. Netanyahu’s gamble has paid off. Even finally being forced to take the witness stand in his trial for corruption, which began this month, does not seem to have dimmed his political power — as shown in recent polls.
The Israeli prime minister’s endurance can be traced back to several political factors, including a decade of echo-chamber building within Israeli media and Bibi’s own sophisticated and cynical exploitation of Israelis’ deep yearning for unity after Oct. 7. But perhaps the strongest force keeping Mr. Netanyahu in power is the most basic: his fractured, increasingly nonexistent opposition. The vast majority of those who loathe him as a leader do not oppose the war itself, nor the way it has been conducted. They want him out of power but they have no coherent alternative vision. For the past year, all Mr. Netanyahu has had to do was hold on to power — and pass the blame.
Since Oct. 7, Mr. Netanyahu and his inner circle of advisers, ministers and supporters have successfully deflected their own responsibility and culpability for the nation’s worst security breach in its 76-year history. A day after the Hamas attacks, some Netanyahu supporters started planting the idea within his political base that the catastrophic security failure that led to Hamas’s murder of more than 1,200 people was the fault of his opponents. Over the course of the year before, tens of thousands of protesters had taken to the streets to reject the prime minister’s efforts to meddle with the independence of the judiciary and threaten to stop volunteering for military reserve duty if the judicial overhaul bills he was proposing were approved. Social media users floated gross conspiracies about anti-Netanyahu military officials assisting Hamas.
This message was dispersed on several media outlets that are part of a new digital Netanyahu-sympathetic ecosystem, including Channel 14, a would-be version of Fox News. As Israeli society has swung ever rightward, it has developed a media world that reflects back to itself the messages it would like to promote. These messages appear on pro-Netanyahu social media accounts, like-minded Telegram channels and closed WhatsApp groups — and are then rebroadcast on TV and radio.
All the while, Mr. Netanyahu has been openly blaming the rest of the media for being biased against him. Two of his corruption and criminal cases are about the prime minister’s alleged attempts to receive favorable coverage in the media. (He has denied wrongdoing.) His cabinet has made moves to privatize and potentially shut down the public broadcaster’s television and radio departments. And in late November, as punishment for coverage of Oct. 7 deemed too critical, as well as for comments made by the publisher of Ha’aretz, my newspaper, at an event, his cabinet approved a slate of sanctions against Ha’aretz, forbidding any government advertising and canceling subscriptions for state workers.
Pro-Netanyahu propaganda efforts were quickly referred to as the “poison machine” by the Israeli opposition — both political parties and civil society. But, as I have written for Ha’aretz, there was a “honey machine” at work at the same time. One after another, coordinated initiatives and petitions emerged in Israel with a mission to promote ideas of “unity,” “reconciliation” and preventing “division” within society. The seemingly disparate agendas — the undercurrent of blatant propaganda and the tide of false optimism — shared the thesis that the political rift in the months leading up to Oct. 7 had weakened the country and gave Hamas an opening. Absent from both story lines was the profound failure of Mr. Netanyahu to protect the border.
After Mr. Netanyahu’s corruption indictments in 2019, political parties across the political spectrum boycotted his leadership and refused to join his coalition. So Mr. Netanyahu simply turned to the far-right and ultra-Orthodox parties. Now he depends more than ever on the whims of his extremist political partners, and consistently bows to them. The result of this power shift is that Israel’s national balancing act — a country always striving to be both Jewish and democratic — has teetered ever more toward the Jewish nature of the state. Now governed by its most extreme far-right and religious components, Israel continues its rightward shift, a tilt that can be seen in growing support to annex the West Bank, increasing calls for Israelis to resettle Gaza and the government’s clampdown on Israeli Arab citizens’ freedom of speech.
Complicating matters is the peculiarity of a popular opposition that strongly opposes Mr. Netanyahu, the man, but not his policies. The masses that came out against his plans to overhaul the judiciary shrank after Oct. 7 and then re-formed, some weeks later, to support the hostages’ families’ calls for Mr. Netanyahu to end the war in Gaza and bring the hostages home. But for many, the war itself is not what they object to. Much of Mr. Netanyahu’s opposition supports his core political narrative that there is no Palestinian partner for peace. In Hebrew, this camp has earned the mocking nickname “R.L.B.,” which stands for “Rak lo Bibi,” which means “just not Bibi.”
OK, not Bibi. Then who?
For now, the Jewish Israeli opposition in the Knesset is led by the left-centrist Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid party, together with the right-centrist Benny Gantz’s National Unity and the right-wing Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party. The ever-shrinking left wing — including members of Meretz, together with the Labor Party (in a reconstituted party now called the Democrats) — is now led by the former Israel Defense Forces deputy chief of staff Yair Golan. Following the prime minister’s decision to sack Mr. Gallant, the four party leaders met at the Knesset for a joint on-camera statement to denounce the firing. Pointedly excluded were the leaders of the Arab parties, Mansour Abbas of the United Arab List and Ahmad Tibi of Hadash-Ta’al. In other words: Even the opposition amplifies Mr. Netanyahu’s efforts to marginalize Israel’s Arab minority from the country’s political landscape.
Of course, the opposition’s problems long predate their current predicament. A lack of fresh and visionary leadership is partly to blame. But the failure to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s vision is also the result of a political shift that began around the violent surge of the Second Intifada, between 2000 and 2005, when the Israeli right wing’s argument about the failure of the Oslo accords to bring security grew stronger. Those voices became even louder after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, and the arguments that followed insisting returning land to Palestinians failed to enhance Israelis’ security. Meanwhile, as the general public has shifted to the right, the opposition has begun to adopt some of the language of the right-wing establishment on peace and security. Today liberal-leaning voters, such as the anti-government protesters, often describe themselves as “centrist.” Being called a “lefty” in the Netanyahu era has become a popular curse, synonymous with words like “unpatriotic” or “traitorous.”
Into this fractious political landscape returns Mr. Trump. Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Trump did not always personally get along. There’s nothing more frightening for Mr. Netanyahu than unpredictable behavior. In his previous term, Mr. Trump embarrassed the Israeli prime minister in front of cameras with a spontaneous statement that he actually prefers the two-state solution, and surprised Mr. Netanyahu by objecting to his plan to officially annex parts of the West Bank, something he had already promised voters.
On a political level, the two leaders are well matched. Mr. Trump went further than any other recent American president in supporting Mr. Netanyahu’s increasingly far-right vision for Israel. During his first term, he moved the American embassy to Jerusalem, recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and normalized relations with neighbors in the wider Middle East, despite Mr. Netanyahu’s refusal to budge on the Palestinian cause.
Reactions in Israel to Mr. Trump’s win last month ranged from those who believe this is an excellent turn for Mr. Netanyahu to wishful thinking that the strain in their personal relations might bring some positive pressure on Mr. Netanyahu to calm his regional escalation. But to counter Mr. Netanyahu’s anti-Palestinian agenda, the new administration cannot be the answer. Israel needs a more robust opposition.
The fundamental vision of both leaders is to dismantle the old liberal order and its institutions within their own countries. Both want to see the decline of that liberal order, and, apparently, international law, on a multilateral level. Both are nationalist and xenophobic. Both hate media outlets that still insist there is such a thing as a clear fact; in their view, democracy seems to mean complete submission and subordination to the elected leader. Even if Mr. Trump helps stop the war in Gaza, the details of whatever deal he might negotiate may prove painful. After his administration declared during his previous term that settlements in the West Bank aren’t illegal and the new administration has nominated an ambassador to the region who denies there is an occupation, it is not impossible to imagine Mr. Trump effectively allowing Israel to create settlements in northern Gaza once again.
The prospect of an emboldened Bibi, beholden to a religious far-right coalition and working together with a second, more extreme Trump administration is bad news. In this part of the world, cease-fires will always be temporary. Only an Israeli government led by a true ideological opposition — one that does not fear Jewish-Arab political partnership and supports a two-state solution — can take Israel off its current path and steer it toward a lasting, sustainable peace in the Middle East.
The post Benjamin Netanyahu’s Unlikely Hold on Power appeared first on New York Times.
