My first close-up glimpse of Benjamin Netanyahu shortly before last year’s elections fixed parameters for all that has followed.
In a campaign rally in a Jerusalem home, the then-candidate declared that people were afraid to leave their homes since the suicide bus bombings earlier in the year. In a few weeks, he said, when he was elected, residents would be able to walk freely on the streets of Jerusalem again.
The bombings had already been halted two months before by the Palestinians without Netanyahu’s help, and they could resume whenever the Palestinians felt it to be in their interest. But Netanyahu wore a look of absolute confidence, as if convinced by his own rhetoric that terrorists might defy previous prime ministers but not him.
The fact that he talked such nonsense was less disturbing than that he seemed to believe it. Propelled by a mixture of arrogance, power and bad judgment, it seemed even then, there was no telling where he would drag the country. And so it has been. His ordering of an assassination in Jordan, a critical partner in the peace process, is another skid mark on his perilous passage through history.
Netanyahu is one of the most persuasive public speakers Israel has ever known and at the same time the least credible national figure it has ever known. To many, nothing Netanyahu says can be taken at face value. He is a man of transparent artifice, a spinmeister masterful at manipulating tomorrow morning’s headline under the impression that he is shaping history.
He is a man who pledges to make peace with Syria while rejecting any territorial concessions on the Golan, a man who acts as if he can make peace by bullying the Palestinians into accepting his terms. Instead of offering vision or hope to his own people, instead of seeking creative solutions, he is constantly blaming others.
There is an immaturity about the man, an inappropriate swagger. What can one make of someone who brags “I always get what I want,” as Netanyahu said in a newspaper interview last week? “I like challenges,” he declared with a make-my-day bravado during a previous scandal concerning his aborted appointment of a political hack as attorney-general. Yet he is intimidated by peace, and the concessions it demands, and he clings to the terrorism issue like a lifesaver.
At a time when a deeply divided nation cries out for leadership and direction, it has a prime minister without the moral weight needed to offer solace. The joylessness with which the nation’s 50th anniversary celebrations next year are being anticipated reflects the stewardship of a public relations slickster with an empty bag of slogans. Netanyahu ridicules the notion of a New Middle East conjured up by former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, even though it touched a powerful longing in the hearts of Jews and Arabs alike. But he has nothing else to offer beyond slogans that appeal to the nationalist fringe.
When the Arabs protested the opening of an archeological tunnel in Jerusalem’s Moslem Quarter last year, he said he had been elected by the Israelis, not the Palestinians. The same attitude would produce the rancorous Jewish housing development of Har Homa in a largely Arab part of East Jerusalem. Against this background, Netanyahu’s denunciations of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat as not being a partner for peace have the authenticity of a tin shekel.
He is impervious to the notion that partnerships are built of respect from which grows trust, and not by one side manipulating the other. He refused for months after his election to talk to Arafat, leaving that task to underlings. Only when Arab violence erupted in the wake of the tunnel opening did he hasten to Gaza to grasp both Arafat’s hands for the cameras. He has treated the Palestinians as if they were some native tribe that could be cajoled, smart talked and humiliated into accepting the role he has assigned them in his grand design, which calls for “lowering Arab expectations.”
What is needed is an elevation, not a lowering, of expectations and a striving for an honorable solution, not a clever one. Nothing else will last.
