-Analysis-
CAIRO — The Israeli war of extermination in Gaza — which expanded to Lebanon and is likely to eventually reach elsewhere in the region — has raised wholly new questions to political debate about the future of the Middle East.
The most important question is the centrality of Israel’s role, not only in the region, but in the world. And at its heart is thus also the question of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And that requires first that we go backwards in time.
About 30 years ago, the influential young politician and leader of the Likud Party, Benjamin Netanyahu, became Israel’s Prime Minister for the first time, much to the chagrin of the international community and the then Democratic administration in the White House. At the time, the Democrats viewed Netanyahu as a threat to the peace process that had been launched under its auspices three years earlier.
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Two weeks after he assumed the premiership, a meeting was held in the White House, bringing together “Bibi,” as he had recently been dubbed the Israeli media, and U.S. President Bill Clinton.
The meeting was described as “tense,” with the two leaders failing to find a common language, especially as the young, motivated Netanyahu treated the American president like a student who needed Netanyahu’s guidance on the best way to deal with the Palestinians and Arabs, according to people attended the meeting.
After the meeting, Clinton turned to his aides and asked them with his usual sarcasm: “Who’s the f**king superpower here?”
At the time, Clinton and the rest of the American and perhaps even Israeli political class, most likely believed that Netanyahu was nothing more than a transitory interruption along the path of global dominance of American liberalism, which had just won the Cold War, and was laden by promises of global peace and prosperity. And that included the Middle East.
That was before it became clear to American-led globalization and liberalism was saddled with fatal flaws. Indeed, Clinton did not realize that his sarcastic one-liner was a prophecy that Netanyahu would continue to prove true, tracing from his first visit to the White House through to Donald Trump’s coming return to the Oval Office on January 20. For Trump has become the symbolic and representative heir to everything that Netanyahu has championed over the past three decades.
A perfect Zionist
From a purely Israeli perspective, devoid of any emotional and value biases, reading Benjamin Netanyahu’s personal file and political biography places us before a political creature with an impressive personal and military record. But there is also always his ideology.
Bibi was born to a fanatical Zionist historian, Professor Benzion Netanyahu, who left Israel with his wife and three children, including Benjamin, to work in the United States as a professor at the prestigious Cornell University. Netanyahu, father, said was forced to do so because the newly emerging Israeli state was not sufficiently devoted to the idea of “real Zionism.”
In the United States, Bibi and his brothers grew up as upper-middle-class Americans, absorbing American cultural values, along with the strict Zionist teachings of their father.
This made him and his brothers not hesitate, on the eve of the 1967 war, to join the Israeli army. He was selected for the elite 269th unit, or “Sayeret Matkal,” which at the time was considered the greatest military honor for an Israeli soldier.
This group was entrusted with one of the most famous and complex hostage rescue operations in military history in 1972, when an armed Palestinian group hijacked an Israeli passenger plane and landed it at Lod Airport.
Netanyahu was in command of the raiding group to free the hostages, and was wounded during the operation and became an Israeli national hero. His brother, Yonathan, became a “martyr” and national hero as well when he was killed while leading another raid by an Israeli special force to free Israeli hostages in Entebbe, Uganda.
Israeli cowboy
He joined the diplomatic corps, and Netanyahu managed to consolidate his network of personal and political connections inside the U.S. ruling class for five decades. He has effectively become an extraordinary “American politician,” who has managed to attribute to himself the status of representative of American Jews.
Even when he disappears, his ghosts appear and prepare the stage for his inevitable return.
All of this preceded his arrival at the heart of the public sphere as Prime Minister of Israel in the 1990s, which coincided with the end of an entire generation of historical leaders and politicians in the Middle East and the world.
Since then and for 30 years, any political official occupying any Mideast-related position has found Netanyahu as the most powerful political leader in the region, and the cornerstone of Israel’s partisan map. Even when he disappears, his ghosts appear and prepare the stage for his inevitable return.
Today, “Bibi” reigns over the throne of Israel as the necessary king, who now enjoys historically unparalleled domestic support — mostly consensual, but also coercive. He projects power to the Israeli electorate with his status as global leader. And he projects power in the world as popular leader of Israel, which is becoming ever more influential globally.
His achievement can be attributed in part to his personal qualities and competence, and a long professional resume spent in leadership positions. As the longest serving premier in Israel’s history, all intelligence his agencies exchange with their most important Western and international counterparts, ends up in his hands.
Leader of necessity
Netanyahu’s presence over the past three decades at the heart of the Israeli political scene represented the most decisive and qualified response to the requirements of Israel’s internal reality that began to take shape in the 1970s, due to the demographic upheaval in the ethnic composition of its Jewish society. This upheaval reduced the numerical representation and historical gains of Ashkenazi Jews, the founding component of the state, in favor of the other components that came to constitute the majority at all levels and in most positions.
This reality and other factors necessitated the gradual wrapping of the page of the liberal phase that founded the state of Israel and its historical political and partisan carriers. It opened the door to a process of shifting the social bloc toward the right.
Then the Israeli political entity moved internally to a hybrid phase that combined distorted liberal characteristics from the previous stage, and other explicit authoritarian and fascist ones produced by the merger of the Zionist ideology that established the state, with other right-wing ideological currents that accompanied the social ascent of the largest segment of the waves of new migrants to Israel.
Within this internal upheaval, Netanyahu’s basic political commodity traded both internally and externally was that he is the most rational option that the process of democratic representative rotation of power in Israel can produce. He argues that he is best able to represent the current hybrid phase of Israel.
He is also able to preserve – even if formally – liberal features of his political presence on one hand and to adopt a complete and solid fascist ideological system on the other. He has been aware of this system’s goals and the necessary tools to achieve them.
A different Europe
A few months ago, international media was abuzz with details of the stormy meeting between Netanyahu and German Foreign Minister and Green Party leader Annalena Baerbock in Tel Aviv, which were leaked by Israeli media. Despite the German Foreign Ministry’s flimsy denial, Bibi did not hesitate to describe his guest and her country in the most horrific terms and to accuse her of having Nazi ancestors, simply because she referred to the catastrophic humanitarian situation and the famine caused by the current war of extermination in Gaza.
Netanyahu still maintains that Israel is part of Western culture.
Netanyahu has repeatedly shown contempt for the EU countries and what he believes is the hypocrisy that characterizes their policies and relations with Israel. Netanyahu himself explains this to officials in Eastern Europe when he urges them to ignore the positions of their counterparts Western Europe, regarding these countries’ ties with Israel.
Western Europe urges their counterparts in Eastern Europe to link developing ties with Israel to reducing Israel’s violations in the West Bank. Netanyahu claims that Western European countries do not even comply with what they preach to others.
Netanyahu still maintains that Israel is part of Western culture, but that the future belongs to capitalism in its authoritarian phase, which will produce leaders who impose their visions on their societies and the world with a mix of expansionist nationalist and ethnic beliefs and strong technology-driven economies. And Israel has become, per capita, the leading model for this.
Modi connection’s meaning
Outside the Western countries and in relations with major powers, specifically China, Russia and India, Netanyahu’s behavior is characterized by political and even behavioral discipline that is free from the usual childish games of arrogance and pampering in Israel’s relations with the West.
Netanyahu knows the limits of mutual trust and tolerance in relations with both China and Russia, given that Israel’s relationship with either of these countries is governed primarily by considerations of American policy and the latter’s positions toward each of the two major countries.
Within the limits of the space available to America, Israel can record local points of convergence in terms of enhancing cooperation and trade exchange in the sectors it loves most, military and technological, without any parties to this relationship having goals or plans that go beyond that.
In the case of India, the strategic Asian ally of the United States, whose close ties with Israel have become of particular interest for countless reasons, Netanyahu is credited with being clever in dealing with the country’s current fascist leadership, the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and identifying his shortcomings. Both men do not miss any opportunity in any communication to show and exchange a kind of vulgar affection as an expression of the special “friendship” that unites them.
This relationship resulted in security and military cooperation that was free from any political or moral restraint. It also built a field for Indian-Israeli cooperation in various vital industrial and innovative sectors, based primarily on granting Israel access to unlimited resources and endless investment opportunities.
The common denominator that characterizes Netanyahu’s personal behavior in his communication with all Asian parties is that he acts as a sales representative whose concern is to promote market partnership contracts between Israel and these markets, without any political or rhetorical cover.
Learning the Bibi lesson
There are of course risks in reducing the current state of Israel to the person of Netanyahu. Still, it is worth reflecting on the fact that Netanyahu represents historically and ideologically on a global level, beyond just Israel and the U.S., a position of prominence that exceeds any other individual in the West.
Also, one of the most difficult questions now, is the inability of all parties, including the Israelis themselves, to imagine the future nature of the Jewish State, which has been recreated since October 7, 2023, and its role and position in the region and the world if Netanyahu leaves the political scene.
Without a complete break from everything the Israeli prime minister represents, man will have for his fellow man nothing but violence.
Israel has reached the climax of Netanyahu’s mobilization of all its resources and foundational doctrines, whether the current hardline version of Zionism, or the remaining ideological and demographic traces of Western liberalism in its settler society. And most importantly, it reached the climax of the military, financial and technological resources it possesses, or has unlimited access to in the U.S.
And globally, this moment that Netanyahu is dominating is open to the completion of a historical cycle of the growth of the fascist and authoritarian right everywhere in the world, especially in the West. That too is bound to expire, and we do not know where its repercussions will take us.
But it does appear clear to us today that without a complete break from everything the Israeli prime minister represents, man will have for his fellow man nothing but violence and wars of racial and class extermination, and scenarios of technological annihilation. For this reason, learning the “Benjamin Netanyahu” lesson sooner rather than later is of utmost importance for the whole world.
