Last week, the American Interest published its list of “the eight great powers of 2017,” one of which was the Jewish state. To much of the Israeli left, accustomed to lamenting their country’s allegedly sorry condition at the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party, this judgment of Israel’s success might come as a surprise. To Amnon Lord, it is a vindication of Likud policies:
Benjamin Netanyahu achieved [a great deal] while in a state of constant conflict, primarily with Israel’s American ally. He got the keys [to the government] eight years ago, when the economy was in a tailspin in the wake of the most serious financial crisis since 1929. Growth was negative at the end of the Ehud Olmert administration. Netanyahu and Yuval Steinitz, his first finance minister, turned things around with budget cuts and the removal of [regulatory] barriers to the extent possible in the Israeli reality, and brought back investments and growth. The economy moved within months to a growth-rate of between 4 and 5 percent. Netanyahu saved Israel’s economy from the doldrums that characterized the economies of Europe, and especially the southern countries along the Mediterranean. Even the U.S. itself, under Barack Obama, failed to recover from the blow of September 2008. . . .
To the political, economic, and security accomplishments, we could add the way in which Israel has, on the one hand, preserved its ability to harm Hizballah’s arms buildup while, on the other hand, managing to stay out of involvement in the war in Syria and an unnecessary flare-up on that front. Netanyahu’s ability to keep Israel out of the area affected by the Middle Eastern earthquake, at least partially, is a great achievement, and those who see it simply as the result of passivity and luck are wrong. We can easily imagine other persons [in power] among those who envisaged all sorts of dark scenarios of what was about to happen and who would have gotten Israel into serious trouble. . . .
The political opposition in Israel is not enthusiastic about Israel becoming a rising power. . . . Israel has many ideologues who don’t think Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion were aiming for a state with global or regional influence in the realms of security or economics. Many varied thinkers today prefer a smaller Israel, . . . an Israel in the pre-1967 borders that would be negotiating for its very existence [or] an Israel trying to survive thanks to security guarantees of the “powers” and UN peacekeeping forces. Ask the children of Aleppo—how did that work out?
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The Right’s Policy Works: Israel Has Joined the Big Eight
This piece was first published on the Hebrew-language website Mida on January 29, 2017 rendered into English by Avi Woolf, and republished here with permission.
In contrast to the constant attacks by the left-wing media, Netanyahu’s policies have been successful, big time: the American Interest has included Israel in its annual list of the world’s biggest players for the first time. Thanks to natural gas, cybersecurity, and diplomatic independence.
Alan Dershowitz’s article in Haaretz from a few days ago reflects a strategic problem regarding relations between the public and the media. Dershowitz wrote what should be obvious in a democratic society: police investigations of people in the media regarding their motives, as well as of politicians regarding their motives in passing laws, is very dangerous. In his words, it’s a slippery slope.
Indeed, the impression is that there is no end to the investigations. Every investigation of Prime Minister Netanyahu leads to even more investigations; the Israeli public is entangled in the legal cobwebs. But the fact is that no more than one or two reporters have acknowledged these fundamental arguments regarding the investigations of Netanyahu over the last month. To the contrary: the media pushed the cart down the slope to see Bibi crash, to force the attorney general to expand the investigations, and especially to lead him to file an indictment of the prime minister.
This is the same blindness which the corrupt Israeli media has displayed regarding the most basic achievements under Netanyahu’s leadership. It seems that in recent days, a number of media people are snapping out of it, maybe even panicking, because of the actions of a group of politicians, most of them retired. What justification can there be for bringing down a good prime minister because of artificial scandals from the past, when no one really understands what the crime is?
Someone described Benjamin Netanyahu as the best prime minister Israel has ever had in an interview for Razi Barkai on Army Radio. The interviewee was not the present author, and his last name was also not Sagiv or Misgav. I don’t tend to think in terms of best or worst. But there is no doubt that in the last few decades, the country has seen its share of prime ministers whose failures are measured by the number of bodies in the streets. Israel paid a very heavy price for elevating people to the premiership who were very limited in their abilities. This is a list that starts with Yitzḥak Rabin, if you don’t want to go even further back, and ends with Ehud Olmert.
Much as there is a basic democratic and constitutional norm prohibiting the police from policing journalists and elected officials while they’re doing their jobs, the media seems to act as if there’s a strict ban on any serious assessment of the actions of Prime Minister Netanyahu. The only one, by the way, who violated this ban (if only partially) was [the investigative reporter] Raviv Drucker, [himself responsible for digging up much the dirt on Netnayahu that contributed to the current rounds of investigations]. It was Drucker, of all people, who wrote that Netanyahu has had certain economic achievements; aside from that, he deems Netanyahu as having a poor record of accomplishment.
Skilled Piggybacking on Regional Opportunities
Walter Russell Mead, an American expert on international relations, policy, and strategy, takes an approach that contrasts starkly with the conventional wisdom of people like Avi Gabai [a parliamentarian who very publicly broke with the government last year] or our super-star journalists, who say that at best Netanyahu’s extended tenure in office can be summed up in a single word: inaction. In a long article in the American Interest, Walter Mead and Sean Keeley list the eight most important powers in the world:
This year there’s a new name on our list of the Eight Greats: Israel. A small country in a chaotic part of the world, Israel is a rising power with a growing impact on world affairs; . . . overall the Jewish state continues to develop diplomatic, economic, and military power and to insert itself into the heart of regional politics.
Mead and Keeley attribute Israel’s rise to “original diplomatic initiatives.” These ties, cultivated with countries like India, China, Japan, and Russia, have allowed Israel to push the Palestinian issue to the margins, even though it was at the top of the agenda of the previous American administration. They don’t forget to mention luck, and Israel’s unique geographical location, but also state that Israel has made “smart choices.”
Maybe Avi Gabai and some of the opponents of the gas deal don’t like this, but Mead and Keeley write that the gas resources discovered along Israel’s shores and their proper exploitation grant Israel both a supply of energy for itself and the ability to leverage gas-drilling into an important tool to strengthen foreign relations.
That might explain why the political opposition to the deal made with the private companies that would extract the gas was so fierce. In other words, Israel under Netanyahu has added a new dimension to being a regional power—even beyond what was usually considered relevant. Israel has succeeded in recent years in forming close strategic, economic, and security ties with Greece, Cyprus, and recently Erdogan’s Turkey. Mead and Keeley note the Turkish need to weaken energy dependence on Russia as a motive for improving relations with Israel.
It may be that Israel’s rise is also due to the collapse of a number of Arab states, especially the weakening of Iraq and the collapse of Syria. At the same time, the rise of Iran as a hegemonic power in various parts of the Middle East—courtesy of former President Obama—has fundamentally changed the relationship between Israel and the Sunni Arab states.
Do we need to say that Netanyahu and [his former chief diplomat] Dore Gold spotted the opportunity and seized it wisely? This in contrast to all the opinion makers in Israel, who believed that the only political fuel that can promote Israeli relations with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and the Gulf States is the “Saudi Initiative” or the “Arab League Initiative” for Palestinian statehood. In fact, in the present situation, Mead and Keeley write, “Israel’s support is critical for the survival of Arab independence.”
“Israel has managed, uncharacteristically, to advance its global political agenda through effective and even subtle diplomacy,” they add. It seems that our political correspondents have not heard about this.
Cyber-Security: An Ongoing Revolution in Military Force
Another resource, the existence of which everyone admits to, is Israel’s decision to develop its cyber-security and information-technology market. Mead and Keeley, in contrast to the critics of the IDF, believe that Israel is undergoing an ongoing revolution in military force, which is based on the importance of control of information for 21st century states. “India, China, and Russia all want a piece of Israeli tech wizardry.”
In the past, people thought that nuclear development, including nuclear weaponry, was one of the prerequisites for a successful modern state; today, cyber-security and everything it involves has become the new big thing, without which serious states cannot exist. Fifteen years ago, Israel suffered from borderline panic due to a number of cyber-attacks which did quite a bit of damage, even if they did not reach the headlines. In the last decade, in a very big push by Prime Minister Netanyahu, Israel developed the field in all its economic and security aspects, for the sake of the state but also as a lever for foreign relations.
Mead and Keeley (who are not some sort of hardcore Zionists) ended the article on a slightly emotional note by involving the parents—that is, Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion. They believe that the two founding fathers of the Zionist political idea and the state itself would be amazed to see just how far their dreams and deeds led.
Benjamin Netanyahu achieved [a great deal] while in a state of constant conflict, primarily with Israel’s American ally. He got the keys [to the government] eight years ago, when the economy was in a tailspin in the wake of the most serious financial crisis since 1929. Growth was negative at the end of the Ehud Olmert administration. Netanyahu and Yuval Steinitz, his first finance minister, turned things around with budget cuts and the removal of [regulatory] barriers to the extent possible in the Israeli reality, and brought back investments and growth. The economy moved within months to a growth-rate of between 4 and 5 percent.
Netanyahu saved Israel’s economy from the doldrums that characterized the economies of Europe, and especially the southern countries along the Mediterranean. Even the U.S. itself, under Barack Obama, failed to recover from the blow of September 2008. Last year the economy returned to 4-percent growth, zero inflation, and an improved debt-to-GDP ratio of 60 percent. Only the distinguished economist Sever Plocker [of the newspaper Yediot Aḥronot] received permission from the thought-police to write that 2016 was perhaps the best year in the country’s history.
Independent Room for Maneuver with the Americans
To the political, economic, and security accomplishments, we could add the way in which Israel has, one the one hand, preserved its ability to harm Hizballah’s arms buildup while, on the other hand, managing to stay out of the war in Syria and an unnecessary flare-up on that front. Netanyahu’s ability to keep Israel out of the area affected by the Middle Eastern earthquake, at least partially, is a great achievement, and those who see it simply as the result of passivity and luck are wrong. We can easily imagine other persons [in power] among those who envisaged all sorts of dark scenarios of what was about to happen and who would have gotten Israel into serious trouble. These are primarily retired defense leaders who want Israel to stay close to the United States and its policy. But what might happen to such an Israel while the United States is withdrawing strategically from the Middle East?
The cultivation of Israel’s independent room for maneuver has allowed it to exploit opportunities and arrive at a good and beneficial level of coordination with Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin. One can attribute the rise of a friendly Republican administration in Washington to luck, but Trump and the Republicans became enthusiastic supporters of Israel primarily thanks to Netanyahu’s many years of work. Now, the slot machines are vomiting coins. The same is true with his diplomatic activity with President Putin, which began with Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009, which has revealed itself to be a successful investment during the Syrian crisis. Despite the problems which accompanied Operation Protective Edge in 2014, the results were a period of calm on the Gaza border which Israel has not known since the Six-Day War.
The political opposition in Israel is not enthusiastic about Israel becoming a rising power. In contrast to Walter Russell Mead and others—he’s not the only one who thinks so—Israel has many ideologues who don’t think Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion were aiming for a state with global or regional influence in the realms of security or economics. Many thinkers of various stripes today prefer a smaller Israel, as the Egyptians used to say: an Israel in the pre-1967 borders that would be negotiating for its very existence or an Israel trying to survive thanks to security guarantees of the “powers” and UN peacekeeping forces. Ask the children of Aleppo—how did that work out?
The policy conducted by Netanyahu, which is different than the policy Shimon Peres preached and Rabin practiced, is a 21st-century expansion of Ben-Gurion’s periphery policy. Peres in his last years spoke in favor of something less than an independent state, which has police forces on the border and collects taxes, but primarily tries to merge with multi-national corporations. By contrast, his spiritual father, Ben-Gurion, believed that Israel’s survival requires expanding its strategic outlook beyond reprisal raids close to the border, and that means a policy of alliances with countries on the outer rim surrounding the Arab world—Iran, Turkey, Yemen, Ethiopia, the Kurdish regions. These days, the periphery has expanded. It includes Azerbaijan, the Asian Muslim republics, Africa, East Asia, Eastern Europe, Greece, and more. This is to say nothing of unprecedented security cooperation with Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the core countries of the Arab world.
Sometimes it seems that the Palestinian problem, that piece of shrapnel in the rear that keeps hurting, is the be all and end all. Sometimes it seems that the MK Stav Shaffir and the former prime minister Ehud Barak offer the Zionist answer to Netanyahu’s policy. But the view of Israel as a “villa in a jungle” has proved itself to be limited. It was the elderly Henry Kissinger who, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, pointed to the fact that the possibility of a final settlement with the Palestinians doesn’t really exist for one simple reason: the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Egyptians, and the Palestinians themselves are prepared to have all sorts of ties with Israel—but they will never give up their fundamental belief that the entire land of Israel is Muslim land. If Israel has now gained an opportunity, it is the opportunity to convince the American government to change its own assumptions regarding the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The United States has been a friend for many years, but it is also responsible more than anyone for the fact that the international community sees Israel as the side which does the injustices and therefore the burden of making peace is on her. This approach is what prevents peace in the first place.
More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel & Zionism, Israeli economy, Israeli politics, Israeli Security, Likud
