Angry Planet - Israel's New Coalition from Hell

Episode Date: January 9, 2023

Benjamin Netanyahu is back and he's brought a right-wing coalition like nothing Israel has seen.Dan Perry knows the game and all the players and and he joins Angry Planet to talk about what might be the end of democracy in the Jewish State and what it means for the Palestinians and relations with the U.S.Angry Planet has a Substack! Join to get weekly insights into our angry planet and hear more conversations about a world in conflict.https://angryplanet.substack.com/subscribeYou can listen to Angry Planet on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play or follow our RSS directly. Our website is angryplanetpod.com. You can reach us on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/angryplanetpodcast/; and on Twitter: @angryplanetpod.Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. People live in a world with their own making. Frankly, that seems to be the problem. Welcome to Angry Planet. Hello and welcome to Angry Planet. My name, as always, is Jason Field. unfortunately, is under the weather. Israel is approaching its 75th anniversary, which is actually somewhat unlikely, considering its origin in the Holocaust and the war that followed in its foundation.

And the governments that have followed have ranged from socialist to, well, what exactly is the current government? It's just recently elected and has its fourth or fourth, fifth in five years, Dan? It depends if you count temporary governments, but it's the result of the fifth election in three years. Joining me to help understand all of this is Dan Perry, who is a former bureau chief for the

Associated Press in Israel and Palestine, and also director of covering the Middle East and former chairman of the Foreign Press Association in Jerusalem. So he's a man who knows what he's talking about. can we start with a real basic because now it's Benjamin Netanyahu who's back in control of the Israeli government or at least as much as anybody is. Who is Benjamin Netanyahu? And where did he come from? He's a fascinating figure. He is in cumulative terms over several different periods. He's the longest serving prime minister in Israel's history, those 75 years of history that you mentioned. by Whisker. He just bested David Ben-Gurion. He is a sort of a sion of a respected family and a revisionist movement. They were the opponents of the original socialists who set up

Israel, so they were more right-wing and more capitalistic, slightly more nationalistic, but not with all religious. That was a revisionist movement. And his dad was a historian, who was a part of them. And that became the original version of Lycud. could, Manafam Begansley could, in recent decades, has gone through a transformation unique in its own way to Israel's circumstances, but in another way, not unlike what happened to the Republican Party in the U.S. It obviously is close to unrecognizable from the days of Gerald Ford. And something similar has happened to LeCood, where they have morphed into a party that is

at the head of an alliance that can be seen as quite extremely nationalistic and raleworthy. religious, which takes us in all kinds of other directions that are sometimes difficult to explain to a foreign audience, but there, but because of things going on in Israeli society and a birth rate among the ultra-orthodox hyper-religious people, Israel may become eventually a version of Iran, very far from both the original socialist vision and also rather far from the original revisionist vision, which is where Netanyahu comes from. I would also add that he is easily, easily, one of the most articulate, eloquent, Machiavellian, intelligent, erudite and educated leaders on the face of the planet. And you mentioned a bit of my AP history before, but I was also the head of AP in Europe in Africa and the Middle East. And I mean, I've seen a lot of the world,

and I've never seen anything with Nathan Young. He is a political machine that, that is so rare in terms of intensity and quality and determination about the only parallel I can think of is maybe Bill Clinton. But Clinton was constrained by a two-term limit. That's how it was not. And I remember when he was ambassador to the UN, if I remember right, and not the U.S., I think he was ambassador to the U.N., I think he was ambassador to the U.N. one thing that struck me was he was also quite handsome, which is a little bit unusual from what I've seen of Israeli leaders. It's just interesting because he has a telegenic quality to him as well.

He's telegenic for sure. I mean, I won't quibble about the handsomeness. And of course, now he's in his mid-70s. But, yeah, he was an impressive figure. He has a nice baritone. And as I say, what tended to overpower the listener was his intellect. Unfortunately, that is married up to other qualities which are less positive and which have been, which have come into full bloom in his latter years. I mean, his cynicism, his economy with the truth, his ability to get himself mixed up in cartoonish corruption scandals in a past decade is almost as under.

equaled as are his, you know, positive qualities. And look, and today he's for, he's a, he's under, he's facing trial ongoing for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. There's at least a fourth case that somehow he's escaped indictment on, which is in some ways more spectacular involving corruption that has sent others already to jail in the context of the purchase of nuclear submarines. And so he's really, like, ensnared in some legal difficulties, which have placed them at the mercy of his extreme right allies and his religious allies.

And this has changed everything about Israeli politics in a way that I think is important to explain. In the past, for about 45 years, Israel has had something close to effectively a two-party system. There's a multiplicity parties, but it amounted to two camps. He had the center left, moderate, inclined to make compromises, wanting to end the occupation, West Bank, and before that Gaza, in alliance with the Arabs. So the center left Arabs, that was like the Democrats. And he had the Republicans, or the equivalent. And that was Lecold and the extreme right, the fanatical extremist people who want to burn down the house.

And the religious parties, and they're very striped. of them were mainstream religious, others were ultra-Orthodox, what Americans call Hasidim, somewhat inaccurately, what an Israel is called Hiratim. But they're quite distinct in their appearance and behavior and politics. So that was the two blocks. Now, whenever the right wing won, the Likud religious extremist block won, the Likud leader could sort of control the demands coming from the French parties in this block by saying, look, I'll do an alliance with the center-left parties. And historically, they've proven acquiescent because so desperate were they to minimize the effect

of the lunatics that they, and by the way, and so grasping were they for a share of power, that they tended to agree. So Israel's had more than its share of so-called unity governments. In fact, I think it might have even invented the term, which was then perfected by Angela Merkel in Germany, where she also had centrist governments for some reason. to avoid having to do a coalition with the, with the far-right alliance for Deutsche. So the, you know, the social democrats agreed to go with the Christian Democrats. That tended to happen in Israel.

Today, Netanyahu, because of the corruption scandals and some other things, including his overall behavior over the past two decades, which is seen as cynically inciting the different types of Israelis against each other, he's become a symbol of something negative for the other side, a little bit like Trump in the U.S. He's now being boycotted. And the center-left leadership has more or less placed its entire personal and political credibility on the boycott of Netanyahu. And the press smelled blood here.

So they asked them like a thousand times, would you ever, ever do a coalition with him? Is there any such scenario? Is it even remotely conceivable? And you can always go back on election promises, but they went so far. in assuring the public they never would that the boycott is Syrians. It prevents, therefore, Netanyahu from doing a centrist's coalition. And that places him totally at the mercy of religious and extremist parties. And the result is what we see before us, the first ever government in Israel that is genuinely

describable as extreme right and truly dangerous to the region, to the country, certainly to the opposition, and also in a way to itself. You already see them ripping each other to shreds in a variety of seemingly trivial issues, but they're doing it already in the first week. You bring up a very interesting point, the unity governments. Actually, in order to avoid the worst case scenario,

do you really think that, okay, I guess it's two questions. One, will the left just be so stubborn that they leave themselves in this marginalized or extremely marginalized situation, or would even Netanyahu at this point be interested in creating a unity government instead of the allies that he has now? Netanyahu was secular and Netanyahu is intelligent,

and Nathaniel is a Zionist. And he currently finds himself at the head of a government that is, in the view of many Israelis, none of those things, including not Zionists. because by insisting on melding the West Bank in a way that is irreversible via uncontrolled settlement to Israel, that creates it by a national state. They will either not be a Jewish state or will not be democratic because a third of the population of Palestinians of what is effectively the country. He won't be able to vote. That's not designed its vision. Netanyahu may have other ideas about what Israel needs to consider as its primary goals. for example, he wants, historically has wanted to find ways to hold on in the West Bank for security purposes.

It is strategic territory. So the issue is complicated, but at the end of the day, I have little doubt that he would prefer a centrist coalition. That would enable him to, you know, play all sides against each other and carry out what is this genuinely conservative instinct of doing nothing too radical. neither too much to settle the West Bank nor take any gambles on, you know, risky peace deals that involve giving up the strategic highland that is the West Bank, doing nothing. That's his inclination. And that can't happen with the extreme right wing as his ally.

And I also have to think, because he can do the math, he knows that his alliance with a Hiratim and a dynamic that has created in terms of subsidizing their phenomenally high birth rate and allowing them to not teach their kids math and science and English thereby making them unemployable where they're already a fifth of the Jews in his country this is heading Israel, leading Israel towards a place

that is economically unsustainable and everything that you know of and socially devise of to a degree that is itself unsustainable. This is bringing about the end of the miracle that is Israel's economy and Israel is high-tech prowess and so forth.

So I think he knows all this and he would prefer his centrist government. How to bring that about is where I believe his Machiavillian instant comes in. I think Netanyahu is eager to have his allies right now create the impression that they're perfectly willing to burn down the house in order to freak out the left, which probably is what's necessary to get them to abandon their promises to not join him. And there's another little thing in the background. The Tanyaz coalition openly states that it wants to do various reforms to the legal system and pretty much to the governing edifice of Israel that will take it a long way towards the sort of fake democracies that we see in Turkey and Hungary and Poland that we used to see in Russia before it became a full non-democracy. That was not the original vision of Israel.

That was not where people thought it was headed 20 years ago, and wouldn't seem to be part of the West in every way. For Nathaniel, this is actually rather important, because if he's convicted of the crimes of which is accused, it's very difficult to see how he avoids jail time. He has to dismantle the legal system and discredit it. And for the last three years, he is engaged in a degree of agitation against the legal system in Israel across the board,

the police, the prosecution, the attorney general, the judges, the Supreme Court, he claims all of them are part of a deep state plot against them, including key officials who put him on trial, who are ideologically right-wingers whom he appointed. The agitation Netanyahu has carried out against the legal system in Israel, and in effect Israel's democracy, was so extreme. as to make Trumpism look polite. And he sort of needs to see that through. Specifically, he needs his existing coalition to make good on promises, threats, plans

to enact a so-called override clause, which would enable the parliament by a simple majority to overturn decisions of the Supreme Court. For example, the conviction of a prime minister. Or, for example, the allowing of the sitting prime minister, to be put on trial. Or, for example, the very existence of the breach of trust crime in Israel, which they want to have canceled. That's one of the threes accused them. And so there's no way, no way, the opposition would ever go along with that. And yet he has to see that through. So a reasonable bet would be that they do some of this damage for the next

year or two. And with the flames reaching the attic by that point and probably an intifada raging and the Palestinian Authority having collapsed, at that point, it will feel like such a national emergency that the left will, you know, maybe change its position and be compelled under the pressures of a national emergency and with this other anti-democratic stuff already done to join him then. That's a possible scenario. It's fascinating to think about how in the United States we're having a legitimacy crisis in the government because of our Supreme Court and of feeling on the left that it is so far to the right that the decisions that are coming from it are illegitimate. And in Israel, you have the concept of actually overriding the Supreme Court, which I don't know. how that would even happen here in the United States.

Oh, 51 senators. Is that all it would take? The version of the override clause that they want to enact would enable any majority to decide. Now, Israel has no constitution. So it's interesting because you could argue what is democracy, and I think most people would tell you democracy is a majority rule. Very few people on the street, even in America, would go very far and insisting on other nice like minority rights. So under this version of majority rule,

51 senators, or in Israel's case, 61 Knesset members, could decide, let's say, to cancel democracy. And the fanatical devotees of majoritarianism would then tell you that that's okay, because the majority decided.

It's interesting to look at the differences between the U.S. system and the Israeli system. In America, the Supreme Court is completely politicized. It is sort of amusing to see the Americans running around the planet telling other people how not to politicize their judiciary. Israel has many things about it that are imperfect, but one of the things they kind of got right is that the judiciary was independent. And the judiciary did stand up for minority rights. And for example, despite the failure of democracy that has brought about 55 years of occupation of West Bank and oppression of Palestinians, to the extent that the Supreme Court could, they were the,

the last recourse for Palestinian rights, even non-citizens. The Supreme Court has protected the Palestinians within reason, not fully, but they have stood and still stand for something liberal about Israel, for something progressive and decent about Israel. I'm afraid the American Supreme Court has gone in a very different direction as a result of politics. So Israel's court is not yet right when. When it becomes that way, and this is one of the problems, of the Israeli right wing, which, as I say, is quite analogous to the Trumpist project. They're just a few years behind. They want, in addition to the override clause, to politicize the choosing of judges and to use that different type of process to bring about a right-wing Supreme Court,

at which point it will become less necessary to override their decisions. I am afraid that there's so many threads that there's no way. way that we can talk about everything in time. Yeah. One of the extremists who's becoming famous, even in the United States, is Itamar Ben-Givir. And I at least wanted to touch on him, who he is, what he wants, before we get out, before this conversation ends. He just seems like, I don't know if he's actually important, but I know he's controversial

as hell. Can you tell us a little bit about him and whether he is important? Yeah. I mean, he comes from, I believe, a working class family. He became religious in his late teens or early 20s, I think late teens. And ever since those late teens, he's been won in Israel because he was part of the hysterical agitation against the Oslo Accords and Izhak Rabin's mid-190 efforts to partition a country, basically. That is where the autonomy government comes from of the Palestinians. The early steps that didn't bring peace, but did bring about a version of Palestinian self-roll,

he was opposed to that as a kid. He first came to public prominence in Israel when TV filmed him, showing he had stolen the insignia off Rabin's car and saying, we got to his car, we can get to him. And the riots were really violent. And of course, one of his buddies did get to him and killed him, on November 4th, 1995, and that was the beginning of the end, really, of the genuine peace process in Israel. Now, Ben-Vir is an acolyte of the late Rabbi Meir Kahana, who favored expulsion of Arabs from land of Israel.

He is also an accolite of Dr. Baruch-Gulstein, known to history as the Jewish terrorist, who killed 30-some Palestinians. in the Tomb of the Patriarchs in 1994 in Hebron, he had a picture of Goldstein on his wall. Okay, and this is a mass murderer. So extremist was Ben-Gvier that as late as two years ago, Netanyahu, when he was trying to somehow appeal to the left a little bit in one of the previous elections, made a promise on TV that Ben-Gir would never be a minister in his government,

no matter what, even if he got into the Pnessin. Over the years, Ben-Gvier is phase. dozens of charges according to Wikipedia over 50 he has been slapped with quite a few convictions including for support for terror and that this person is currently in charge of an expanded national security ministry is so preposterous that I think if you have to point to one thing as symbolic of what has happened in Israel it is that but you know there's more I mean the final I asked minister who's also the health minister, and this sits on a lot of money here.

I'm sorry, the interior minister, who's also the health minister, which sits on a lot of money and a lot of control. It's Ariadari, who served a prison sentence for bribery 20 years ago. He's a head of a Sephardic ultra-Orthox party shot, and he was convicted again in a plea bargain two years ago of tax evasion, where he wasn't sent to jail because of a promise, promise that he was. he would leave politics. And now he's one of the most powerful ministers and he's really government. They have to pass a law to enable a person who is

thusly convicted to be a minister and he passed that law. And that law has now been taken to the Supreme Court, which in coming days is going to have to vote on this issue. And the Attorney General, inherited from the previous government, has just said she cannot defend this appointment for Supreme Court. I'd be interested to see if she could defend

the Itemar Bing Vier appointment or the appointment of another religious extremist but Salel Smutrich who's the finance minister this is a guy who calls himself in front of the media a proud homophobe who in front of the media lamented

that his wife had to give birth in a maternity ward where there were Arabs and whose vision for the finance ministry of a top country in the OECD with a per capita income higher than France's and Italy's at this point, is to abandon notions of capitalism versus socialism and run the economy by the principles of the Torah.

So you look at this whole thing, not just Ben-Givir, and it is a five-alarm fire. I mean, I have never seen a country that is democratic facing this level of a schism and a situation that logically, logically leads to a civil war, not against the Arabs, internally among the Jews. Putting aside the fact that I absolutely would not be surprised by a civil war in the form of an intifada, not exactly civil because the Palestinians aren't citizens, with the Palestinians caused by this government, which is about to deepen the settlement deep into West Bank.

So I don't even know what to say because when you analyze the situation here objectively, it kind of sounds like you're an alarmist. It is Americans who remember what the atmosphere was like in January 2017 after the election of Trump, get a sense of this, a taste of this. But even the most radical anti-Trumpist, probably knew in their heart of hearts that he didn't have the Trumpist movement didn't have within it the power or the context

to destroy America as we know it. I mean, I have to admit to some surprise that he took it as far as he did with his stolen election scenario in January 6th. I mean, I didn't, I'm not that surprised, but didn't expect it to go quite so far. And even that was survivable, clearly survivable. um where the current dynamic is taking israel is not surviving i died it would reach its 100th birthday now things can change uh and i think after nathaniaahu leaves we will see and maybe and maybe before

we will see the lukud um and the israeli center uh come together in in in the last minute rush to save the country uh i suspect that to be so because Because even though I called it initially a two-party system effectively, Likud is not yet insane. They're just confused. And a few years of, as I say, the flames engulfing the house might clarify their mind. And they may understand, the voters may understand, who they've allied with. And pretty much at a minute to midnight, I could see scenarios that salvage the situation sometime.

Israel's military is one of the most important, if not the most important element of the society in a way. What I mean by that is everyone serves, except for the religious exemptions and the Arabs. Not the Palestinians. 20% of Israeli citizens are Arabs in Israel's proper, not the West Bank. Most of them do not serve. Some Bedouin serve and the Drew serves, but 90% of the Arabs don't serve. And the Hiratim don't serve. And a lot of others find ways to weasel out of it.

So about half the people serve. Okay. So even with that being the case, I've never heard anyone mention an independent military that might step in, which is interesting. I only mention this because in the United States even, there was concerned that the military would align itself. one way or the other with either the Republicans or the Democrats. Mark Millie, our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said a lot of very vague things about whether he would have obeyed orders from Trump. But in Turkey, another example that really pops into my mind, there had been various

elected governments that the military had stepped in and quashed until we got to Erdogan. Is there such a thing as an independent entity that could step in in Israeli society? I mentioned before scenarios. I mean, I could see many scenarios. I think the most benign scenario was the Lakuda and the center left joining up and destroying the two blocks system. You're talking now to a person who, 35 years ago, as a political report of the Jerusalem Post and the previous incarnation of mine in Israel, wrote an op-head. speculating about a military coup because the military was the elite of society back then, certainly the leadership of it. And the elite of society then is now is firmly behind the center

left. Not all of them, their exceptions, but essentially 90% of the educated people, of the journalists, of the business people, of the diplomats, and of the heads of the security branches understand that the right is leading to oblivion and they've been very reluctant to do much about it. Things have changed since then because the army has become to such a horrifying degree, an occupation, imposition, militia, and the West Bank that this has driven away good people, and it's turned the military more and more into a more balanced organization where much of the leadership is right wing. But even now, with a few exceptions, including one of the recent Shinbet heads and one of the

recent major generals, both of whom were Netanyahu's government and who are two of the most plausible people in his government, it remains the case that almost all former heads of the police, the shin bet, which is like the FBI, the Mossad, which is the CIA, and the military are clearly left wing. there was a movie in 2012 called The Gatekeepers and that included the then interviews with the then six living former heads of the shinbet. The organization in charge of imposing the occupation in a way

of the West Bank in Gaza, all of them, all of them, articulated the position that said the occupation, which we worked to perpetuate because we had to is a catastrophe for Israel in terms of long-term strategy. They were all center left. Um, will salvation come from that? I do not think so. I can't see the military stepping in because to many of the soldiers are right wing.

Um, and I'm not sure I can see another, you know, another entity that I could do such a thing. And in any case, arguing for a military coup, uh, is, is never a way to appear reasonable on podcasts. Fair enough. I recently wrote a piece in the times of Israel that generated a lot of discussion about how maybe the only way to sort of get out of this mess is to partition the country further. The two-state solution, but not Israel and Palestine, maybe also that, but two different Israel's, Israel and Judea. and the idea was this, you can have a pretty clean territorial division, because if you simply took the Tel Aviv area and carved out 10-kilometer wide, a 10-kilary wide strip all the way to Haifa area, that's about half the population in the country. And 90% of it would be center-left, secular. There would be relatively few hours, but those that would live there would be embraced and equal.

and it would be kind of a version of, if not heaven on earth, at least Herzl's Atsnoy land, this utopian novel about what he thought the Jewish state would look like. That would be this. And the rest of Israel would be everyone else. And they would have a lot of Arabs and they could take all the settlements and see and fight it out among themselves. And without any of the recent senior people and any of the security branches of Israel to protect them, let's see how far they get. That was the idea. And, you know, I mean, of course, I was widely ridiculed and many people thought it was not serious and, you know, some version of a Jonathan Swift proposal, modest proposal. And look, it's not really going to happen. But then again, there is no reasonable scenario that is going to happen. Something unreasonable is going to happen, including, you know, peace in our time. If the benign scenario comes out, that's also not so reasonable. Right now, I think if I were to sort of think philosophically about what needs to be for most in people's minds, there are no good options and people need to focus each in accordance with their own principles, thoughts, knowledge, intelligence, decency on what is from their perspective the least bad option.

And we are not wired as people to embrace the least bad option, right? Because our brains say, well, it's bad, but it's the least bad. Israel doesn't have a good option. I would just mention the whole concept of Israel, and Judah goes back about, what is it, 4,000 years? And it didn't work out so well the first time. And even then, Judea was a less liberal. Or whatever counted for liberalness in those days. Yeah, sure.

And, well, if you go that far back, you also have to conclude that the notion of Jewish sovereignty in the Holy Land has a very poor track record. There were several efforts, and none of them lasted over a century. And I myself predicting, if the right wing is allowed to. to remain in power and do what it's going to do and actually do it, Israel will not reach year 100, same as the previous two efforts. Not in this current incarnation. I think that we like to end this show, by the way, on a down note when we can. Dan Perry, thank you so much for joining us and helping us to understand at least a little

of what sounds like the most complicated situation there is out there. It's up there, man. Thanks for listening to another episode of AngryPont. The show is produced with love by Matthew Galt and Jason Fields with the assistance of Kevin this is the place where we ask you for money. If you subscribe to us on substack.angriplanet.com, it means the world to us. The show, which we've been doing for more than seven years now, means the world to us, and we hope it means a lot to you.

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