Elliott Abrams
I’ve visited Israel three times since October 7, but this visit was the most sobering—even somber.
Of course, the sense of shock and dislocation from normality was greatest in my visit last November. The most commonplace experiences—from crowded hotel lobbies to traffic jams—were absent. The country was still quite visibly shaken.
But the most recent visit, in June, was equally striking in a different way. In too many conversations, what I found was a deep uncertainty about the country’s future. In many cases these feelings were blamed on the country’s political leadership, which is to say on Prime Minister Netanyahu. The accusations were many: corruption, narcissism, incompetence, unwillingness to accept any blame for October 7, and failure to push back against extremists in his coalition. No surprise here, I suppose: if things are thought to be going wrong, the man who has been prime minister for most of the last decade is of course going to be blamed. Ten years in power seems to be about the limit for maintaining popularity in many democracies: John Howard (11), Margaret Thatcher (11) Tony Blair (10)-- and now Emmanuel Macron (7) has been defeated in the parliamentary election in France last weekend. In the U.S. we avoid this by presidential term limits of eight years; in France it’s ten, and the recent election suggests the French now think that’s too long. Netanyahu has served (discontinuously) for 16 years, longer than anyone in Israel’s history.
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