Roger Cohen
The leader is worried. He grows tetchy. Investigations are closing in on him. Former aides, even a family member, are suspected of corrupt dealings with a foreign company. He gets irritable, lashes out at “the left” and the “fake news media.” He claims there is a “witch hunt,” and raves about “a coup.” His tolerance for dissent is zero.
He takes to social media to lash out at detractors and exalt his brilliance. That gives him a rush. Then nagging doubt takes hold again. What has he achieved? Nothing really. He’s kept up the volume to disguise his ineptness but that will hardly secure his place in history. The leader has exploited fear, cultivated friends in the media prepared to genuflect, smeared with vulgarity an office once occupied by giants. He has shown a great love of walls.
Of course, he evades the truth. This is important because the truth is ugly. Nothing is going to change, least of all for those most oppressed. The point is the insidious corruption of society from above. Accuse the media of brainwashing while doing the brainwashing yourself. Power is showmanship. It’s about winning, nothing more. He’s kept his wife in the style to which she’s accustomed, and that does not come cheap. Losing is for losers.
His name, of course, is not Donald Trump. The name of our leader is Benjamin Netanyahu, the embattled fourth-term prime minister of Israel and consistent proponent of the no-state solution, a kick-the-can ruse under which Palestinians do not get a state and the existing Israeli state is undermined by corruption, intolerance and the corrosive habits of a 50-year occupation. This occupation has sapped the Zionist founders’ commitment to a democratic state governed by laws. Under the no-state solution, not so-called by its chief proponent (some solutions are best kept quiet), anything goes, a perfect setup for Netanyahu.
Well, not quite anything goes. There are those criminal investigations of possible bribery and fraud in which Netanyahu is a suspect. One is a favors-for-pink-Champagne-and-cigars affair involving wealthy friends, including an Israeli Hollywood producer. Another involves an apparent attempt to secure favorable coverage in one newspaper in exchange for curtailing the circulation of another.
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Both these may pale beside the submarine affair, an investigation in which Netanyahu is not a suspect but his former chief of staff, and his second cousin, and a former deputy head of Israel’s National Security Council are. At the center of the affair lie submarine and missile ships from a German company. Netanyahu has dismissed the whole thing as “foam.” It’s sure bubbling up and just might wash him away.
The prime minister, a survivor, is friendly with Trump but is wary. Best not to dwell on those anti-Semitic outbursts by the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville about whom Trump could not make up his mind. And then there’s Jared Kushner, who seems bewildered by his peacemaking mission. The Jared-Jason jitney — Trump’s son-in-law and Jason Greenblatt, his former chief legal officer now charged with resolving the world’s most intractable conflict in their spare time — rolls into town but its drivers don’t say much. They listen. They nod. They take notes.
It’s hard not to pity the pale son-in-law. Netanyahu’s pursuit of the no-state solution has shed some camouflage. Last month in the West Bank, he said, “We are here to stay forever. There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the land of Israel. This is the inheritance of our ancestors. This is our land.” This was after he declared in the White House that Israel intends to “retain the overriding security control over the entire area west of the Jordan River.” Even the demilitarized Palestinian state to which Netanyahu gave a very conditional nod in 2009 has floated off into the ether. It had its uses: a decoy to cement the status quo.
As with Trump, taboos crumble. Members of Netanyahu’s right-wing government outdo each other with obscene schemes for annexation of large areas of the West Bank, or the expulsion of Arabs from Israel proper. Attacks multiply on a free press and pro-peace nongovernmental organizations and the “left” in general. The Knesset voted this year to legalize settlement outposts on private Palestinian land in what was called the application of Israeli sovereignty. The Supreme Court’s independencehas been targeted, without success so far.
The no-state solution advances. This is unsurprising. No democracy can be immune to running an undemocratic system of oppression for a half-century in territory under its control. Israel was conceived as a state of laws. If it is not, it betrays its 1948 founding charter. This commits the nascent state to “freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel.”
James Baker, as United States secretary of state, once gave the number of the White House switchboard and told the Israelis: “When you’re serious about peace, call us.” Trump should give his alter ego the same treatment — and wait for those investigations to run their course.
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