After Netanyahu

Could scandal really take down Netanyahu? The outcome is impossible to predict. There are multiple police investigations. One centers on a recorded conversation in which Netanyahu is alleged to have asked a prominent newspaper publisher for favorable coverage. Perhaps the recent American experience should have taught him it would be better to simply do this every day on Twitter. Another focuses on alleged “gifts” received, such as cigars and free services performed for his private residence, allegedly at his wife’s behest. More remote but possibly more dangerous is an investigation involving the state purchase of German submarines.

At this stage, it is worth bearing in mind that Netanyahu has been considered finished very often over the years: in 1999, ousted after a difficult first term at the hands of a Labor party led by Ehud Barak; in 2006, as the Likud party nearly crumbled after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon left it to form Kadima; most recently, in the days before the 2015 elections when his party badly trailed the center-left coalition Zionist Union. Time and again, Netanyahu has bounced back and more, managing to gain the upper hand in the brutal trials of Israeli politics, said to have been compared by George W. Bush to a “den of sharks.” Even if he does not achieve the feat of being the longest-serving Israeli prime minister—he is currently second on the list—Netanyahu already holds a pile of electoral records. He is the only prime minister to have led his party to four election victories (1996, 2009, 2013, and 2015) and to three in a row. In his ability to remain on top, Netanyahu most closely resembles Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, who led the pre-state Yishuv and then Israel proper through its foundation in 1948 until 1963, with only a short interregnum.

At home and abroad, Netanyahu inspires no small amount of strong passions. To his critics, he is an obstructionist cynic, a roadblock to peace and progress. To his greatest supporters, he has been seen as Israel’s first American-style conservative leader, a proponent of free markets and a strong national defense. After so many years, there is a sense that Israelis simply tolerate him as the safest and most acceptable choice among the plausible alternatives. Whatever one thinks of him, however, Netanyahu’s premiership has been one of the most consequential in Israeli history—and for a reason one might not expect. Compared with the tenures of almost of all his predecessors, Netanyahu’s premiership has seemed remarkably uneventful. The hallmarks of Israel under Netanyahu have been strength and stability. A poorly made film about the history of Israel that tormented Jewish day-school students throughout the 1990s was called Never a Dull Moment. Netanyahu’s premiership since the late 2000s has, uniquely in Israeli history, featured some dull moments.

Quietude in Israel cannot be measured by the standards of, say, Switzerland. There have been plenty of bumps: bursts of violent conflict with the Palestinians, tensions stemming from unresolved issues of religion and state such as the one currently bubbling about prayer at the Western Wall, difficult strategic questions about an expansionist Iran, and differing challenges with the United States, Europe, Russia, Turkey, and the Arab countries. Yet some historical perspective is in order. The biggest military engagement of Netanyahu’s time—the 2014 Gaza war—was small compared with previous wars and battles, including with Gaza. The reason it was small was that Netanyahu and the defense minister at the time, Moshe Ya’alon, did everything in their power to limit the war by setting modest strategic objectives. The still-ongoing spate of knife and car-ramming attacks—sometimes referred to as the “social media” Intifada—cannot compare in intensity or scale to the Second Intifada (2000-2005), in which over 1,100 Israelis were killed and more than 8,000 wounded.

Meanwhile, over the course of Netanyahu’s rule, the country has enjoyed either very strong or better than average economic growth. When other Western countries sputtered in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, Israel grew at 4 to 5 percent a year. A left-wing economic populist movement in the summer of 2011, motivated by high housing and food costs, has if not been diffused at least been limited.

In the realm of diplomacy, Israel seems to have weathered a particularly rough period in its relations with Washington. The Europe-Israel relationship continues to decline, though most Israelis have concluded there’s little that might be done on that front and that relations with the East are more significant. And Netanyahu’s “pivot to Asia” has been extremely well executed, the most recent sign of which was the visit of Narendra Modi to Israel this past July, the first by an Indian prime minister.

Netanyahu’s mastery of the political scene has made it difficult for friends—and detractors—to think concretely about a post-Bibi Israel. “It’s very hard to imagine Israel after Netanyahu,” a pro-Netanyahu state prosecutor recently told me. “He sees three steps ahead, and others don’t.” At 67, Netanyahu is still a spring chicken by Israeli political standards. The parliamentary system has no built-in term limits. If he beats the current corruption charges, it’s not impossible he could win a fourth straight term when the next election comes. Yet there are signs everywhere that he will be fighting an uphill battle. After electing the purported centrist Avi Gabbay in its July primaries, the long-moribund Labor party appears to have picked up some steam, and recent polls that include a Gabbay-led Labor imply that any election would be close. Meanwhile, there are rumors that some prominent figures in Likud have concluded that it’s time for Netanyahu to step aside.

More serious, perhaps, than the scandals is what might be called administration fatigue. The legacy of an extended run is not all happy. Having been in power for so long, Netanyahu has built up a list of “ex-friends” long enough to impress even Norman Podhoretz. Having run through many of the most competent ministers and administrators in his previous terms, Netanyahu increasingly has had to rely either on untested neophytes or apparatchiks who have weathered long years of power without distinguishing themselves. Case in point: Netanyahu has been unable to find a trustworthy defense minister since the resignation of the very sound Moshe Ya’alon in May 2016. And he has, again in the manner of David Ben-Gurion, had to hold multiple portfolios himself.

As Niall Ferguson shows in his recent biography of Henry Kissinger, exercising political power burns and consumes intellectual capital without replenishing it. Over time, the principles that initially serve a leader well can morph into implacability and political blindness. Netanyahu has not yet exhibited symptoms of these maladies—this is a great credit to him. But the disease has felled many statesmen. A worrying parallel for Netanyahu might be Margaret Thatcher’s final years in office. Having been so adroit previously, she became rigid and distant. And her ability to manage her cabinet and move her voters was seriously hampered. Having vanquished so many political foes over the years, Netanyahu might rightly believe that he does not currently face a challenge from an adequately competent or charismatic rival. But of course John Major was neither of these things himself—and yet the British Conservative party went with him (and went down with him) anyway.

While it’s far too soon to close the book on Netanyahu, we are now in a position to offer some preliminary reflections on his time in office and what might be coming next. Doing so, I believe, points to the unique character of Netanyahu’s approach to politics, his strong record, and the difficulty of predicting what might follow.

It is hard to think of Netanyahu as anything but a man of the Likud party. Indeed, the Revisionist Zionism that once stood as the basis of the Likud party was in a way the birthright of Netanyahu. His father Benzion, who died in 2012 at 102, had been for a time the secretary of the Revisionist leader Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Benzion Netanyahu was not just an ordinary Revisionist (if such a thing could exist): He was one of the deepest and most interesting theorists of Revisionist Zionist thought, penning important books on Jewish history and underappreciated essays on Zionist intellectual history, which should themselves be viewed as important texts in the history of Zionism. This was the faith in which the Netanyahu children were all raised. Yet there are major differences between these ideas, Netanyahu’s politics and ideas, and the typical Likud politics today. The principles of what one might call Netanyahuism are as follows: a strong, though cautious; policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians and foreign policy more generally; economic neo-liberalism where possible and practicable; and the middle ground and compromises on social questions, particularly religion and state. They are a politics of moderation that fit well with what Jabotinsky called hadar (literally “magisterialism”), a kind of enlightened or princely statesmanship.

To wit, to the extent that they have recognized Netanyahu’s approach, his sharpest (and it must be admitted most perceptive) critics have often deemed it to be overly cautious and lacking in Israeli chutzpah. The most ardent free marketers complain that his reforms have been too slow and too few and that his economic reform agenda lost steam following 2011. National security hawks can complain that his words have been much louder than his actions, especially toward Iran. These claims are not without merit. But an honest assessment of Netanyahu’s record would have to admit that his caution bespeaks a kind of common sense and moderation sorely lacking in many countries these days and often absent from Israeli history.

This combination of moderation and common sense has run through most of Netanyahu’s major decisions. In military affairs, Netanyahu has been willing to act decisively but has always set limited, concrete objectives. In the 2014 Gaza war, he resisted calls from hawkish members of his coalition to continue fighting until Israel had completely eviscerated Gaza’s tunnel network and replaced its government, as if Israel would have had a plan for what to do next. As Syria began to collapse in 2011, Netanyahu articulated a clear policy: reserving the right to intervene when Israel’s vital interests are threatened by weapons transfers or otherwise but avoiding direct political involvement. He has stuck with this policy throughout. On the Palestinian front, while paying mandatory attention to international efforts towards the creation of a Palestinian state, he has mostly opted to build up the Palestinian economy, ease tensions where possible, and avoid the birth of a second state that would be dominated by Israel’s enemies as Gaza is today. Iranian aggression has prompted tough rhetoric. Indeed, Netanyahu vociferously lobbied against the Iran deal, not so much because he thought he could stop it as in the belief that when the deal inevitably fails, Israel will have maintained credibility by having opposed it from the start. Still, to this point, Netanyahu has largely opted for diplomatic and clandestine efforts against the Iranian regime.

Netanyahuism has often sat uneasily with Likud voters—to say nothing of other right-leaning voters who are generally within the party’s orbit but support smaller parties like the national-religious Bayit Yehudi or Jewish-nationalist Yisrael Beitenu. On military matters, many Likudniks are inclined to favor a scorched-earth doctrine. This was most flagrantly and dangerously touted by the onetime Netanyahu ally Naftali Bennett in the 2014 Gaza war, during which he pushed for greater tactical action without a seeming strategic objective. There is an echo of this in the defense establishment’s view that Netanyahu needed either to accept the Obama administration’s Iran deal—or stage a massively risky strike against Iran, venturing as much as half of the air force and most of Israel’s modern aircraft in the process.

Similarly, many Likud members have sought to decide questions of foreign policy and alliance solely on the basis of national pride, even if doing so would be to Israel’s disadvantage. This has included calls from the right to refuse to renew relations with Turkey in 2016 even as Turkey changed its policy and found itself in need of better relations with Israel (and open to importing Israeli natural gas). Similarly, it has included a desire to poison a potential opening with the Gulf states by voicing criticisms of their religious customs and rules. Netanyahu has largely kept these tendencies bottled up.

Finally, many Likud coalition members have spent their time attempting to ignite various culture wars on religious and social questions. There have been efforts to censor the theater, regulate the news industry, and ever-present initiatives to inflame secular-religious tensions over education subsidies. Whatever the merits of such cultural battles, this is bait that Netanyahu has studiously avoided taking.

On economic issues, Netanyahu has been the country’s foremost advocate for liberalization, undoing socialist-era regulations that stifle growth and innovation. He has scored some successes in this domain, though admittedly most came when he was finance minister under Ariel Sharon from 2003 to 2005. This liberalization has not been libertarian, though. Israel depends on massive state subsidies and state-brokered R&D in many sectors, and Netanyahu has only cautiously dialed these back, if at all. Moreover, he has often pointed out that he can push liberalization only so far because the core constituencies of Likud and the Israeli right are by no means partisans of free markets. For instance, current finance minister Moshe Kahlon spun out of Likud a party called Kulanu that promises lower consumer prices via increased state regulation of banking, housing, and supermarkets. As with all other political parties in Israel, regulation remains the reflexive impulse on the right. Often seen in the West as a kind of Orthodox neoconservative, Naftali Bennett fits the statist mold as well and has supported a high minimum wage and what would amount to byzantine price controls.

A common charge against Netanyahu is that he lacks the courage to act decisively and then claims afterwards that there was no alternative. In yielding to the ultra-Orthodox religious authorities’ desire that there be no non-Orthodox prayer space near the Western Wall, he claimed he either had to accede to the ultra-Orthodox position or see his government, which relies on ultra-Orthodox coalition partners, tumble. If this was an excuse, it happens to be a true one. It is no different from his concessions to Kahlon’s Kulanu party on any number of their misguided economic schemes. Or his willingness to continue to pay into the education systems managed by the ultra-Orthodox parties. Or his acceptance of the populist Yesh Atid party’s demand to enforce the conscription of Orthodox men in 2014—and his reversal on this issue in 2015 as coalition dynamics changed.

Is this conciliatory tendency a flaw? In general, one can say that Netanyahu has managed the difficult feat of avoiding and defusing the extremes that always threaten to tear democracies apart. Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was, or at least claimed to be, a great reader of Thucydides. I do not know if Netanyahu has read him. What that great depicter of democracy shows is that popular governments wildly vacillate between the desire to turn inward and abandon all responsibilities or else conduct various holy wars at home and abroad. From these dual temptations, Israel, as close to a pure democracy as there is anywhere in the world, has been far from immune. Netanyahu has managed to temper fanaticism of all kinds, secular, religious, and military. This can be seen by the fact that his main rivals are not from the center or left but from the far right: populists in the Likud party and the splinter parties whose bases they seek to capture.

At the same time, Israel has quietly prospered. Anyone who visits today will find the average Israeli—Jewish and non-Jewish—richer, more cultivated, worldly, and religiously literate than he or she was a generation ago. The country is still a long way from becoming the truly liberal polity envisioned by the elder Netanyahu’s mentor, Jabotinsky. In a subtle but clear way, Netanyahu has helped push the country in this direction.

Will Netanyahuism survive beyond the man’s tenure in office? This question is murky as he has few if any real disciples. Reagan had Reaganites; Thatcher had Thatcherites; even Tony Blair had Blairites. It’s hard to conceive that Netanyahu will have such followers. This, however, is not necessarily a bad thing, as the question of the merits of disciples is as vexed in politics as in the world of ideas. Do not disciples corrupt as much as carry the flame? Disciples can sustain the example of a character worthy of emulation, yet they can also lack the ability to adapt to new circumstances. As in so many other things, the example of Abraham Lincoln is perhaps the happiest one. He did not produce political disciples who carried his platform forward after his death, but his example inspired the wisest stewards of American government for decades.

There are people with potential political futures in Israel who embody something of Netanyahu’s moderation. Though he recently fell out with Netanyahu himself, Moshe Ya’alon has consistently shown excellent judgment in matters of war and peace. Yet his competence in other areas is in doubt and his rhetoric since his split from Netanyahu has been extremely grave—perhaps too much so to garner meaningful popular support. In Likud circles, Gideon Sa’ar is frequently invoked as a possible successor to Netanyahu. While projecting an air of strength, however, he has not exhibited the breadth of diplomatic and policy substance that Netanyahu exhibited prior to his ascent. Yisrael Katz, the Knesset member who most closely resembles an American “machine politician,” might actually present an attractive option given the alternatives.

As for the current opposition, both the “Macron-like” businessman Avi Gabbay and the former television host Yair Lapid have some virtues. Neither inspires much confidence as a potential prime minister. The Likud party has some other colorful figures, but many are more reminiscent of ideologically committed party activists than of statesmen in waiting. As a scholar of Israeli history and sometime resident, I find little comfort in thinking about the figures that may be waiting in the wings.

The true record of Netanyahu’s tenure is beginning to come into view. It is one of economic growth, diplomatic moderation, and relative social cohesion amidst a fanatical age, both in the Middle East but also elsewhere in the world. Netanyahu will likely leave behind the strongest and most firmly rooted Jewish state ever to appear in the world. This would give him a claim, however improbable it may sound, to be counted along with Ben-Gurion as one of Israel’s great statesmen. But historical reputation also depends on what comes after. And no one can yet say whether he will one day look back on his political career and have to conclude, Après moi, le déluge.

Neil Rogachevsky teaches at Yeshiva University’s Straus Center.