Who is the most successful leader of a democracy in the world today? The President of the United States would surely nominate himself, but polls suggest that the majority of his countrymen would disagree. Prime Minister Theresa May of Great Britain has a precarious hold on her office as she tries to find a formula for leaving the European Union acceptable to her Conservative Party, the House of Commons as a whole, the British people, and EU member states. French President Emmanuel Macron has put forward a bold program of reform but his popularity has plummeted since his election in 2017. For most of the last decade Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany would have been the obvious nominee, but the wave of immigration that she welcomed in 2015 and her Christian Democratic Party’s poor performance in the 2017 elections have weakened her substantially. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has held power in Japan since 2012 but the Japanese political system affords him less power than his Western counterparts have. Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, combines electoral strength with the passage of some major legislation. But the leading candidate for the heavyweight championship of the democracies is Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, widely known as Bibi.
He has achieved political longevity: Next year, if he remains in office, he will become his country’s longest-serving Prime Minister, surpassing the record of the first and greatest of his predecessors, David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father. Since he assumed the position for the second time in 2009, in the midst of the global recession triggered by the 2008 financial crisis in the United States, his country has registered the best economic performance of all the democracies; and for this he deserves some credit, both for his stewardship as Prime Minister and for the reforms he implemented during his tenure as Finance Minister from 2003 to 2005. He has managed the difficult diplomatic feat of forging effective working relationships with both Donald Trump and Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. He strenuously opposed the Obama Administration’s 2015 deal with Iran concerning its nuclear program, and this year President Trump withdrew the United States from it.
Located as they are in a region filled with people, organizations, and governments that at best do not want them there and in many cases are actively trying to kill them, Israelis value security above all else. This the Prime Minister has delivered. As Anshell Pfeffer notes in his new biography Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu, “Netanyahu has had by far the lowest number of deaths annually from warfare and terrorist attacks, on average, during his premiership than any other elected Israeli prime minister.”
Yet for all his accomplishments he is unusually unpopular. In Israel the political party that he leads, the Likud, has won less than one-quarter of the popular vote in the last three general elections, forcing him to assemble parliamentary coalitions in order to govern. Even many who vote for him, as anyone with a circle of Israeli acquaintances can attest, express serious reservations about him personally. Those on the Left of the country’s political spectrum despise him.
Pfeffer, a reporter for Ha’aretz, the flagship newspaper of the Israeli Left, reports that during the writing of the book its subject said that he, Pfeffer, “doesn’t know anything about me” and that what he produced would be “a cartoon.” That prediction has turned out to be inaccurate: Pfeffer has not written a partisan assault and indeed defends Netanyahu against the charge that he incited the 1995 assassination of his political rival, the then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Bibi does make clear, however, that, like most of the readers of his newspaper, Pfeffer does not count himself a political supporter of the Prime Minister.
Beyond Israel, Netanyahu’s unpopularity soars. Other democratic leaders dislike him. In 2011 French President Nicolas Sarkozy was overheard saying of him to the American President Barack Obama, “I cannot bear him, he’s a liar,” to which Obama replied “You’re fed up with him? I have to deal with him every day.” Obama’s administration, and that of his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton, worked actively to promote Netanyahu’s political opponents and keep him from winning elections.
The career of Israel’s Prime Minister thus presents a paradox: He is a very successful statesman who is nonetheless widely disliked. What accounts for this?
The sources of Netanyahu’s mastery of policy are not difficult to trace. He is exceptionally intelligent, widely read, has a firm grasp of the issues with which he has to deal and a large capacity for hard work. He has also proven himself to be a skillful political operator. Part of his skill stems from his long experience in the United States, where he received his education and where he spent several years representing Israel at the United Nations. There he became an accomplished television performer, learned approaches to campaigning that served him well in Israel, and established friendships with wealthy American Jews who later helped to subsidize his political career. He also possesses a personal quality closely tied to political success: resilience. After his first term as Prime Minister, between 1996 and 1999, he suffered several major political setbacks. Yet he persevered, regained the office in 2009, and has held it ever since.
He has won elections through a now-familiar populist tactic, by mobilizing a coalition of Israelis who feel themselves to be outsiders: Jews who had to flee from Arab countries and their descendants, religiously observant Jews, and immigrants from the former Soviet Union, all of whom have resented the largely secular Israelis of Eastern European origin descent who controlled the government for the country’s first three decades of independence. That coalition was first assembled long before populism emerged as a political force in the United States and Europe. It was Menachem Begin, the founder of Likud, who rode it to victory in 1977. It is a testimony to Netanyahu’s skills as well as to the enduring cleavages in Israeli society that, four decades later, he is still able to rely on it.
Further evidence of his political shrewdness is the bill his coalition recently passed declaring Israel the nation-state of the Jewish people—as it is and always has been. The bill changes nothing and endangers the rights of no Israeli, Jew or non-Jew. Yet members of the main left-wing opposition party voted against it in the Israeli parliament. They thereby put themselves on record as opposing the basic principle of Zionism, a misstep that Netanyahu will surely exploit in the next national election.
Why, then, has someone with such achievements in both policy and politics earned the scorn, indeed, the hatred, of so many? Part of the answer lies in his longevity. Anyone in office, especially at the highest level, accumulates adversaries over the years: That is an occupational hazard of the political trade.
In addition, Netanyahu and his wife Sara have a displayed a penchant for luxurious living in a country founded on spartan ideals. They both stand accused, moreover, of using political power and trading political favors for financial reward—that is, of corruption. Mrs. Netanyahu has been indicted for misusing public funds and her husband is the subject of several investigations for similar misdeeds, which in the worst case scenario could put an end to his political career.
While important to Israelis, these personal matters do not explain the low regard in which the Prime Minister is held in other countries. For this there is one major reason, which also has a great deal to do with the dislike Israelis on the Left have for him as well as the willingness of their non-left-wing compatriots to keep him in office: the peace process.
In the quarter-century since Yitzhak Rabin and the leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Yasir Arafat, signed the Oslo Accords that were supposed to lead to a settlement between them, Israelis and Palestinians have failed to make peace. The responsibility for that failure belongs to the Palestinians. The Palestinian entity in control of Gaza, the Islamic fundamentalist group Hamas, says explicitly that it will never accept Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East and devotes its resources not to promoting the welfare of those it governs but to terrorism against Israel. Its putatively moderate counterpart in the West Bank of the Jordan River, the Palestinian Authority headed by Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas, has refused all offers to settle the conflict, which have included substantial territorial concessions, that Israeli governments have made. It has never put forward a counteroffer of its own or indicated the kind of settlement it envisions. It has done nothing to build the institutions of statehood other than deploying multiple police forces that repress political opposition. It has generated vile anti-Jewish propaganda that harks back to Europe in the 1930s and has sponsored the murder of Jews by publicly praising and paying the murderers.
The Palestinians have thus clearly demonstrated that they are not, to use the common phrase, “a partner for peace.” Pfeffer acknowledges this in a backhanded way when he writes that “While nearly all the other Israeli prime ministers over the past three decades—Rabin, Peres, Barack, Sharon, and Olmert—had looked for ways to achieve a breakthrough with the Palestinians, Netanyahu . . . is intent on preserving the status quo.” If the efforts of his predecessors came to naught, it is odd, to say the least, to blame Netanyahu for not following in their footsteps. Yet the Israeli Left and Western governments do blame him; and from that blame comes their disdain for him.
The wider Israeli public, however, living as it does next to the Palestinians and well aware of their 25-year record, knows where the responsibility for the persistence of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies. It also knows that, whatever his shortcomings, Netanyahu understands this basic fact of Middle Eastern life while his opponents at home and abroad do not. The public has confidence that he will not launch naive and perhaps dangerous initiatives in an effort to please his domestic and foreign critics. That is why it has voted to keep him in power.
The evidence that the Palestinians, or at least their leaders, do not aspire to their own state living peacefully side-by-side with the Jewish state compares favorably, in volume and credibility, with the evidence that the Earth is round. Just why so many in the West have become the equivalents, for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, of flat-Earthers, and why they remain obsessed with a dispute that now has no significance for the world beyond the two parties to it, are questions that would require a separate book to answer. (Adam Garfinkle’s 2009 classic Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Just About Everything offers some useful clues, especially in Part Three.)
The fact that this belief is widely and tenaciously held, however, has had two consequences. First, it has helped to perpetuate the conflict by assuring the Palestinians that they will pay no price—indeed that they will continue to receive generous Western political and financial support—for their unyielding and indeed violent refusal to accept the legitimacy and permanence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. Second, it has underwritten the career of the Israeli politician who has most forcefully and consistently opposed the fantasy that Israeli concessions will bring peace, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.