No, Benjamin Netanyahu Will Not Fulfill the Nightmares of His Opponents

As Benjamin Netanyahu is poised to begin his sixth term as prime minister, Shany Mor and Einat Wilf consider some of the dire predictions about his premiership, and place them in historical perspective:

Since the electoral upheaval of 1977, in which the possibility of a change in government in Israel became real for the first time, every elected government has been received with utter shock by the defeated side, which conjured up scenarios of horror and failure to come in the immediate aftermath of electoral defeat. But only two governments since 1977 have justified the nightmare scenarios illustrated by the other side: the Menachem Begin government of 1981 and the Yitzḥak Rabin government of 1992. The Netanyahu governments have never justified the threat the defeated side attributed to them, especially after the 1996 and 2015 elections.

In all of his governments, including the one formed in 2015 that was considered extremely right-wing, Netanyahu—unlike any prime minister before him, except perhaps for [his fellow Likudnik] Yitzḥak Shamir—evinced a clear tendency to contain and to de-escalate violence. His terms of office stand out as years of relative security in which the number of Jewish and Arab casualties from violent conflict was one of the lowest in the history of the conflict. In domestic matters, the years of Netanyahu’s rule were generally characterized by economic prosperity, the expansion of the circle of participants in the Israeli economy, and the expansion of the secular liberal space.

For decades, the left has had alternating demons: Begin, Ariel Sharon, Avigdor Liberman, Naftali Bennett—the political success of each of whom was seen at the time as the end of Zionism. Today every one of them stars in one way or another in the gallery of heroes of the left. But Netanyahu remains a demon whose political victory instills an atmosphere of raging pessimism on the defeated side.

Read more at FDD

More about: Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli politics, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Shamir

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict