Netanyahu ceases to be a prophet of power in Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at a ceremony in Tel Aviv on Wednesday.JACK GUEZ / AFP

A video spread virally on social media on Friday, shortly before the start of the Sabbath, showed Benjamin Netanyahu, who is usually poised, sending a desperate message. "If [Naftali] Bennett joins a leftist government, he will endanger Israel when we find ourselves cornered by the sea," he cried from his private summer residence in Caesarea, with a placid Mediterranean at his back. The longest-ruling prime minister in the Jewish state - 15 years in two phases, uninterrupted since 2009 - fears that a turn by Bennett, a former ally of the nationalist right, will eventually dislodge him from power.

Netanyahu, who brought his country to full employment with a state-of-the-art economy and consolidated it as a regional military power, now faces the foreseeable end of more than two years of tribulations, in which he has had to undergo four elections without results. conclusive. Not even his successful management of the pandemic - which Israel overcame in a year after an accelerated vaccination campaign - has saved him from losing popularity.

Prosecuted for three causes of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, Netanyahu has also been the first head of government to sit on the bench for corruption in office in Israeli history. As prime minister (even acting) the law shields him and does not require his resignation until a final judgment is issued. Hence, he continues to cling to power and politically maneuvers to prevent the birth of an alternative Executive supported by almost the entire opposition before Thursday, when the term granted to the centrist Yair Lapid to form a Cabinet expires after the March elections. Forcing the convocation of a consecutive legislative fifths is the only option that remains for him to continue being a prophet with power in the land of prophets.

"Netanyahu is now only the unconditional prophet of 25% of the electorate," says political analyst Daniel Kupervaser, "since he has managed to convince a wide sector that his image is much more important than ideology." "The paradox is that, if Netanyahu departs, the right wing gets 60% of the votes," Kupervaser points out. "It is difficult to understand," he adds, "to what extent his personal ambitions have dragged the country into the blockade."

In the heat of the struggle for political survival, Netanyahu has had to face in the last month some of the most violent episodes in his three decades in office. The conjunction last Ramadan of the largest Palestinian protests in Jerusalem in years - Al Aqsa Mosque, Old City, Seij Yarrah district, from which several families were to be expelled - with an outbreak of unprecedented clashes between Jews and Arabs (21% of the Israeli population) conditioned their political strategy.

"He has paid any price in order to keep the ultra-Orthodox parties by his side, which contribute another 12% of the electorate, and the extreme right, which obtains around 10% of the vote," argues analyst Kupervaser. “In conclusion, the [center-left] opposition cannot form a government without the support of Arab parties,” highlights the difficulty of forging an alternative amid sectarian violence between Jews and Israeli Arabs in cities with mixed populations, such as Lod ( Tel Aviv suburb) or Acre (north coast).

When his former ministers Lapid and Bennet were preparing three weeks ago to close an unprecedented government pact - with conservative formations split from the orbit of the Likud (Netanyahu's party), Labor, pacifists and Arabs - a war escalation with Hamas in Gaza without precedents in seven years, put the political negotiation on hold.

The prime minister was confident that a forceful military response in the Strip, in the face of the rocket fire on Jerusalem, would strengthen his options to reestablish alliances with right-wing forces that had turned their back on him.

Passage marked by the United States

In his long career he has had to deal with four US presidents Bill Clinton forced him in his first term to maintain the Oslo Accords against his political will.

The also democrat Barack Obama brought him back to the negotiating table with the Palestinians, until the failure of the dialogue in 2014.

The arrival to power of Republican Donald Trump turned the paradigms about the Middle East in favor of Israel, beginning with the recognition of Jerusalem as its capital and ending with the exit of the nuclear agreement with Iran signed by Obama.

With Democrat Joe Biden there is a return to the two-state solution.

In the recent Gaza escalation, Biden has ushered in Netanyahu with increasing pressure to impose a ceasefire.

As his biographer Anshel Pfeffer recalls, Netanyahu already bet in his book

A place among the nations

(1993), for a strong Israel before the rest of the world to "remove the Palestinian question from the agenda."

After a long month of tension in the Holy Land, exactly the opposite has happened.

Struggle for political control

Benjamin Netanyahu, 71, was Israel's youngest head of government in 1996 and the first born after the creation of the state. As the teacher of journalists Miguel Ángel Bastenier underlined more than two decades ago in EL PAÍS, Netanyahu “the only thing that interests him is power”. He caught up with it after the assassination of Prime Minister Isaac Rabin, but three years later another Labor member, Ehud Barak, defeated him at the polls. Since then, he has often blamed the press, and a "deep state" that he considers infested with leftists, the failure of his first conservative political project. He had to wait a decade before returning to the prime minister's official residence in Jerusalem, which he is now reluctant to leave.

Heir to revisionist (right-wing) Zionism that was relegated to the founding era of Israel (of socialist ideology), in his last long decade as president he has contributed to consolidate the country's conservative turnaround, which began after the Yom Kippur war (1973). , which awakened the Jewish State from its slumber of the overwhelming victory over the Arab countries in the Six Day War (1967).

Netanyahu participated in both as a young soldier.

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As a command officer, he was wounded during the rescue of passengers from a hijacked plane at the Tel Aviv airport in 1972. Six years ago, he recalled the events at an event in Jerusalem together with two figures of Israeli politics - former President Simon Peres ( died in 2016) and former Prime Minister Ehud Barak (retired from the political scene) -, who participated in the operation.

From the power he has ordered three war campaigns in the Gaza Strip - 2012, 2014 and the one that just concluded last week - but prefers to wage more discreet battles, such as the one that confronts Iran, with covert actions and cyberattacks, already its satellite militias in Syria.

The grandson of a rabbi and the son of a conservative historian, Netanyahu performs the same in colloquial Hebrew, with the

chutzpah

(daring) of the Israeli street, as in English on the east coast of the United States, where he was educated, in the diplomatic halls.

In the eighties he became a key figure in his country's embassies in Washington and the United Nations.

As a master of

hasbara

(public diplomacy), he emerged before the world at the Madrid Conference in 1991. Deputy from 1988, minister in successive portfolios —from Foreign Affairs to Defense through Finance—, the head of the Hebrew Government has traveled almost the entire echelon of power in Israel.