Distrust of the ever-dissembling Netanyahu is becoming a problem
On the surface, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stubborn positions in the Gaza talks, risking a last-ditch chance to save scores of hostages held by Hamas, are not indefensible. A normal leader might have been able to persuade that he’s simply bargaining hard, in a version of good faith. But in the case of Netanyahu, too many people just won’t believe a word he says.
That’s a problem when you’re asking people for huge sacrifices. An overpowering assumption of mendacity would be bad for a political leader even at the best of times: Voters can be fooled by liars but rarely appreciate being taken for fools. And these are much closer to the worst of times: The collapse of the talks could spark a regional war that would be destructive to all sides and threaten to draw in the US and affect other conflicts far afield.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been frantically trying to work something out, and if his last-ditch mediations succeed perhaps Netanyahu will regain some legitimacy in the eyes of some people. But it won’t change the essence: There is crisis of confidence between Netanyahu and his public — and also most world leaders — that is hard to overstate and fascinating to observe. It stems from both his long years at the helm and the shock of Israel’s abject failures on (and since) Oct. 7, the day of the Hamas invasion and massacre that ignited the Gaza war and its offshoots.
Netanyahu, of course, did not invent the wheel — he only perfected a certain way of applying it in a developed democracy. Lying in public life is as old as civilization itself, and influential figures have often using deception to maintain power, manipulate public perception, or justify controversial actions. From ancient rulers to modern politicians, the act of lying has shaped the course of history — sometimes with devastating consequences, and sometimes to reasonably positive effect.
In ancient times, deception was often considered a strategic tool of governance. Even Julius Caesar, generally seen in a favorable light, cleverly manipulated public opinion during his rise to power in Rome. His “Commentaries on the Gallic War” portrayed his military campaigns in an outlandishly favorable light, omitting defeats and exaggerating victories. That helped cement his reputation and, for a time, a historical legacy.
Modern mass communication took the power of bullshit to another level. Adolf Hitler, bolstered by his Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, perfected the “big lie” technique, rendered interesting by the paradoxical-seeming idea that the more ridiculous the whopper the more it will find acceptance. Through endless repetition of falsehoods about Jewish conspiracies and Germany’s supposed victimhood after World War I, the Nazi regime mobilized a nation for war and genocide.
It’s obvious that authoritarians and despots from Benito Mussolini to Pol Pot to Kim Jong Un — and Vladimir Putin have used our era’s potential for digital to master the twisted art of lying to the people of other countries.
But even in true Western democracies, politicians frequently use lies to justify policy decisions or gain electoral advantage. It doesn’t always work: Richard Nixon’s attempts to cover up his administration’s involvement in a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters (a surprisingly feeble felony by subsequent presidential standards) led to his downfall. And, of course, no consideration of claptrap can ignore the curious case of Donald Trump, whose continuous stream of nonsense, from the size of his inauguration crowd to the baseless claims of election fraud in 2020, have set a standard for the cartoonish end of the scale.
Netanyahu is at the other end of the scale. There is nothing cartoonish about him (though his Frankenstein family is another matter); his is the dark end of the scale, where hogwash is married to an almost supernational cocktail of intelligence, grievance, eloquence, and egomania.
In my first interview with Netanyahu, in 1988, I had to struggle not to be mesmerized by the supreme confidence with which he delivered his gibberish. The issue was the demographic reality of Israel, and the idea — as obvious to me then as it is now — that it had to get rid of the West Bank and Gaza to survive as a Jewish state. He explained that Israel’s Jewish majority would be forever secure even if it controlled the areas forever. Today, even after the arrival of over a million immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Jews are the minority in the combined territory. As was the obvious outcome.
In our second interview, during the 1996 election campaign, he told me that if elected he would successfully persuade the Palestinians to suffice with just autonomy instead of independence – presenting as evidence the acquiescence (at the time) of the Catalans of Spain. It was classic Netanyahu: It sounded not only persuasive and relevant but practically sophisticated — unless one knew some basic facts. When I noted that Catalans are also citizens who can vote in Spain’s national elections, which if applied to the Palestinians would end the Zionist project, he scowled in surprise and walked away. My point didn’t matter, because most voters wouldn’t have known.
By now, however, most people have caught on to the lying, and the confusion rests in the question of what to do about it. So it was no surprise Netanyahu was fact-checked and found wanting by Time Magazine after the U.S. publication interviewed him recently, in a separate article which stated laconically that “Netanyahu made a number of claims that lacked context, were not supported by facts, or were not true.” These included that he never allowed funding to Hamas because he calculated – as has been credibly substantiated – that this weakened the Palestinian Authority.
A poll from November, early on in the current war, showed that only 4% of Israeli Jews considered their prime minister a credible source of information on the war. And a survey last month showed that 54% believed the war was dragging on due to Netanyahu’s political needs – compared to about a third who cited operational considerations and 12% who couldn’t tell.
The second poll may be the more shocking. It means that the idea that Netanyahu has been causing tremendous loss of life, destruction and dislocation mainly (or purely) to stay in power is accepted by far more Israelis than those who give him credit for behaving responsibly – and their number includes about a third of those who voted for him in 2022.
Why would Netanyahu gain politically from prolonging the war? It is a quite simple logic that would only be rejected by a decent and ethical person.
Since Oct. 7, all polls showed some three-quarters of Israelis wanted Netanyahu to resign, blaming him both for policies that brought on the attack (including the funding of Hamas and the arrogant ignoring of intelligence) and for the genuinely daft decisions that left Israel so unable to defend the border. It was widely expected that he would have to resign — that would be the normal course of things in a parliamentary democracy.
But Netanyahu immediately declared war on Hamas, and has argued ever since, with very disciplined messaging consistency, that recriminations and politics must await the end of that war. I presume he would have abandoned that approach had the polls turn around, but they have not.
And because they have not, Netanyahu would then be in trouble if the war ended, because his ultranationalist coalition partners want it to continue. They want to reoccupy Gaza and start to settle it with Jews, and they credibly threaten to bring down the coalition – which they could do — if ignored. They certainly oppose the current framework being discussed for a cease-fire.
I have met too many politicians and world leaders over the years to be totally naïve – but I do assess that most of them would not have followed the logic of this situation to the point that they are continuing a ruinous war merely to cling to power. Yet that is not my assessment of Netanyahu; he may be that rare exception that most certainly would do just that.
The situation now is thus: President Biden on May 31 presented a supposed Israeli offer that amounted to an end to the war and a pullout from Gaza in exchange for all the hostages – in effect, sufficing with the severe degrading of Hamas in order to end the hostage crisis, which is what the military wants. Israelis overwhelmingly agree: A July 10 poll by the respected Israel Democracy Institute showed a whopping 85.5% wanting a cease-fire and 56% agreeing to a full end to the war.
But Netanyahu appears to have reneged, insisting that Israel should keep the Philadelphi corridor, a road along the Gaza border with Egypt. he says this is needed to prevent Hamas from rearming through cross-border smuggling. While this sounds logical, in fact the border is fortified and the tunnels used for smuggling went beneath this area, not through it. The military says it has alternatives to occupation. Hamas won’t hear of it – and the mediators as well as Israel’s own negotiators (according to persistent reports) are at wits’ end.
This is the knot that Blinken’s current shuttle hopes to somehow untie. America would appear to have leverage. It is the U.S.-led Western (and Arab) coalition that Israel is depending on to help repel the attack that Iran has been threatening for weeks as revenge for the assassination of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran. Indeed, Biden has told Iran that he expected it to hold off on an attack if the hostage deal is reached – a strange formulation that not only legitimizes the linkage but even seems to suggest that the attack is otherwise understandable.
Meir Shitreet, a former justice and finance minister from Netanyahu’s Likud, said this weekend (on a panel we both appeared at in the new I24 all-news Hebrew TV channel) that he expected the negotiating team, which includes a prominent retired general and the heads of the Mossad spy agency and the Shin Bet security agency, to “go public and tell the people the truth” if they considered that Netanyahu was scuttling the deal.
The respected defense analyst Amir Oren wrote in Haaretz on Sunday that this is the first time Israel’s leadership was deliberately trying to prolong a war – which violates the country’s longstanding doctrine of speedy operations with realistic goals. “This calculus has been upended because for one man only prolonging and not shortening the time is an achievement,” he wrote. “Never has Israel been ruled by a person whose private interest is so opposed to that of the country’s.”
Whatever happens, such toxic levels of distrust are contributing to the broader despair from all the death and destruction that Israel has absorbed – and has caused. Whenever the war does end, and even if this happens soon, such trauma, I fear, will be very hard to heal.
Netanyahu Is Paying in Others’ Blood to Buy Himself More Time
