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 on FDD: https://www.fdd.org/analysis/2022/12/05/will-bibi-make-the-lefts-nightmares-come-true/