Only one man can stop the world plunging into full-scale war
Geraldine Brooks The Age April 19, 2024
With all the blood and terror since last October, it is easy to forget that it took five back-to-back elections to put Bibi Netanyahu in the position he now occupies: the leader whose next decision might plunge his region, and maybe the world, into full-scale war.
This power rests in the hands of a man who, at home, has become widely despised, with only 15 per cent of Israelis now saying they support him.
It is worth recalling how arduous his path to power was, and how tenuously he holds it. In December 2018, with a one-seat majority, facing indictment on corruption charges, Netanyahu called a snap election, but instead of strengthening his position, he weakened it. With Netanyahu unable to form a government, a second election was called, and then a third, also inconclusive. With the coronavirus raging, Netanyahu’s rival Benny Gantz agreed to form a unity government. When Netanyahu reneged on their power-sharing agreement, a fourth election brought the centrist Yair Lapid to power, but his fragile coalition collapsed within a year.
At this fifth election in four years, in November 2022, voters of the left and centre proved more exhausted than the far-right and the ultra-Orthodox, who turned out in slightly greater numbers. By accommodating hate-mongers and fanatics, Netanyahu was narrowly able to form the most right-wing government in the country’s history. Its extremist policies provoked unprecedented demonstrations that shut down cities and had reservists threatening to decline military service.
And then came the intelligence failures that left Israelis vulnerable to carnage on October 7. Since then, Netanyahu’s cobweb-thin backing has disintegrated. Netanyahu knows that as soon as war ends, his political career will be over.
That is what makes him so dangerous. With civilian deaths soaring in Gaza and Israeli hostages languishing, he chose the most volatile moment to provoke Iran by bombing its consulate in Damascus. This violation of international law would have met global opprobrium had the perpetrator and victim been any other nation. There is a good reason that diplomatic premises are considered off limits. Foreign relations can barely function without this norm and by breaching it, Israel lowered the bar for such attacks by bad actors everywhere. The US still hasn’t gotten over Iran’s seizure of its Tehran embassy in 1980. Two died in that shameful episode; 16 were killed in Israel’s recent strike. Israeli and US diplomatic premises are already bristling fortresses, making the delicate work of diplomacy difficult. Now they will need to be fortified even further.
When Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the US and Israel provided Saddam Hussein with targeting intelligence that allowed strikes on Iranian cities. At that time, Iran had no missiles with which to respond. When I visited the southern Iranian city of Khorramshahr, it was a scene of devastation, of rubble and despair, that resembles Gaza at this moment. I was in Tehran in the aftermath of strikes that landed in the civilian neighbourhoods. The Islamic Republic’s dangerous militarisation since then was likely born of its helplessness in the face of the unholy trinity of Israel, the US and Saddam.
Last weekend, as Israelis waited in dread for the impact of the Iranian missiles, I re-watched the 2005 movie, Munich, a fictionalised account of the very real clandestine mission ordered by Golda Meir to kill those responsible for the murder of Israel’s athletes at the 1972 Olympics. The movie makes much of the assassins’ scruples about sparing innocents. One innocent did die in the actual operation, but in 1988, when an assassination squad went to Tunis to kill PLO number two, Abu Jihad, they spared his wife, who was in the same room. Now, in Gaza, no one is spared. Not shirtless Israeli hostages pleading in Hebrew, or foreign aid workers delivering food, and not Palestinian civilians, many of whom despised Hamas before October 7, but had no escape from the regime, due to Israeli and Egyptian blockades of the enclave.
Netanyahu, who fought hijackers hand-to-hand on an El Al plane in 1972, blew up civilian aircraft on a night raid into Beirut in 1968, and fought in several wars, has never exhibited a jot of compassion towards Palestinians. I interviewed him over several days 1992, at the very beginning of his rise to power within Israel. He was 42, a mere deputy minister, with a gift for putting the hardline Israeli positions of then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir into telegenic soundbites. His ambition to be prime minister was clear: his chances, at the time, less so. When I interviewed his colleagues, I learned he had alienated many – the foreign minister under whom he served hated him, his former mentor, Moshe Arens, belittled his abilities, his relations with the US state department were awful (as they have mostly continued to be, with brief exceptions during the administrations of George W. Bush and Donald Trump). But his Manichean world view turned out to suit the times, as Israel’s two competing ideologies underwent a power-shift.
The first ideology, that of the left-leaning Labor movement, created the Israel with which the West fell in love – the Exodus land of egalitarian, Paul Newman-esque sabras and Holocaust survivors, tilling soil, beset by enemies, yet dreaming of peace. The other ideology, the Revisionists, believed that Jews were entitled to all the land of the former British ruled Palestine, including what is now Jordan. In 1946, they blew up the British headquarters in the King David hotel, and in 1948 they assassinated a UN peace negotiator and massacred Palestinian civilians in the village of Deir Yassin. They found a home in the Likud party and came to power in 1977 under Menachem Begin. Since then, Israeli public opinion has moved right to meet them, accelerated by Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles, the suicide bombings of the Second Intifada and, until recently, the world’s – including the Gulf Arabs’ – seeming willingness to forget the Palestinians and the issues of a half-century’s immiserating occupation.
Hamas’s blood-soaked attack exposed the cost of that amnesia, at its own horrific price. Just as Hamas knew the attack on Israeli civilians would provoke a hellacious response, so Netanyahu knew that Iran would respond to its lethal and lawless consulate strike. And just as Hamas had no regard for the Palestinian suffering that would ensue, so Netanyahu took an unconscionable risk with the lives of Israelis. Now, he seems deaf to the world’s entreaties against escalation. And we wait, helplessly, to see what risk he will take next.
Geraldine Brooks is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist.