The Israeli Prime Minister’s bias in the US presidential election squares perfectly with his biases against both democracy and diplomacy.

Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump and Sara netanyahu at Mar-a-Lago, July 2024/IGPO

By Lisa Van Dusen

September 22, 2024

Among the most consistent themes of the past two decades in the Middle East conflict has been the betrayal of both Palestinians and Israelis by political leadership — first on one and now on both sides — addicted to war as a branding element and source of power. It’s the only interest shared by the principal belligerents in this dynamic, and it is a determinative one.

On September 19, The Wall Street Journal published a story that finally clarified the gap between the impact of Benjamin Netanyahu’s public actions in the escalation of hostilities catalyzed by last October’s Hamas rampage and the private choice architecture justifying those actions.

“After months of saying a cease-fire and hostage-release deal was close at hand,” per the Journal‘s national security reporter, Alexander Ward, “senior U.S. officials are now privately acknowledging they don’t expect Israel and Hamas to reach an agreement before the end of President Biden’s term.”

Indeed, it has long been clear that — all other factors being equal — Benjamin Netanyahu was not going to agree to a cease-fire before the US presidential election on November 5th, a fact that everyone avoided articulating in order to protect the same Gaza negotiations obstructed by it, and because Mr. Netanyahu has been making ironic use of the criticism-deterrence properties of his title as the leader of a key US ally and domestic diaspora constituency during a presidential election year.

That the cease-fire timeline at play throughout the last year of vehement cease-fire demands from North American protesters, among others, likely hinged not on the delivery of key tactical or strategic objectives in Israel’s military operation in Gaza — from Hamas degradation metrics to civilian casualties to the release of Israeli hostages — or even its plans for degrading Hezbollah and returning tens of thousands of Israelis to their homes along the northern border, but on the calendar of a US presidential election has been, since the weeks immediately following the events of October 7th, the subtext of this war. Now, it has graduated to the context of this war. Which underscores just two of the many elements of this narrative directly attributable to Netanyahu’s leadership; one political, the other geopolitical.

The first is that Netanyahu has a conflict of interest related to domestic US politics that makes any previous conflict of interest related to domestic US politics on the part of any previous Israeli prime minister — real or impugned, avowed or unconscious, partisan or not — seem like ambivalence: If Netanyahu had agreed to a cease-fire at any point in the past 11 months, it would have precluded the current, pre-November escalation toward a regional war — beginning with a spectacular covert operation of 3,000 exploding pagers and continuing with the escalating cross-border kinetic engagement with Hezbollah.

At this writing, we are closer to that regional war (potentially implicating Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran, for starters, in Israel, Lebanon, and, possibly, the West Bank…Gaza has been effectively scorched, though Israel is pondering depopulating what’s left of its north to flush out Hamas, who presumably don’t use pagers, and save the 30-35 hostages believed to be still alive) than at any previous point, with veteran NBC correspondent Richard Engel reporting from northern Israel that a ground invasion of southern Lebanon is a likelihood for the first time in decades. “The train toward war has left the station,” Engel tells Andrea Mitchell as I write this.

As Thomas Friedman predicted in The New York Times on September 3, Netanyahu’s placement of his thumb on the synchronization scale in favour of Donald Trump has been playing out in the last week of escalations in the region.

“I would not be surprised if he actually escalates in Gaza between now and Election Day to make life difficult for the Democrats running for office. (The murderous Islamo-fascist leader of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar, also wants to see the war continue because it is tearing Israel apart and isolating America in the region),” Friedman wrote three weeks ago. “Netanyahu may do this because, I believe, he wants Trump to win, and he wants to be able to tell Trump that he helped him win.” He also wants to remain in power himself, and given his history with war as a source of power, it seems safe to say the train toward the next Israeli election has also just left the station.

Netanyahu’s status as the bane of, in particular, Democratic US presidents dates back to his first election as prime minister of Israel in 1996 (not a typo…it really was nearly 30 years ago) and his relationship with Bill Clinton, to the extent that Netanyahu’s hawkishness was a drag on the latter’s Middle East Peace Process ambitions. Netanyahu’s relationship with Barack Obama was so notoriously noxious beyond any pretense of a mere clash of personalities that it marked an unprecedented low in the bilateral head-of-government dynamic but presaged the disrespect for President Joe Biden displayed by Netanyahu in the past year, irrespective of their long, pre-existing friendship.

The six-term Israeli prime minister belongs to a global club of autocrats and aspiring autocrats who specialize in the personality-rationalized obliteration of norms and the exploitation of democracy to degrade democracy.

This partisan theme has played out most dramatically in Netanyahu’s speeches to Congress. While the Israeli prime minister has addressed joint meetings four times (more than any other foreign leader), those speeches — famously flamboyant exercises in theatrical polarization — have all been delivered during the tenures of Democratic presidents; in 1996, 2011, 2015 and last July. He notably — during the tenure of a Republican tactical ally (notwithstanding their 2021 falling out over Netanyahu’s acknowledgement of Biden’s election victory) — eschewed the rostrum throughout Donald Trump’s presidency.

The second Netanyahu-specific characteristic of this story is that the six-term Israeli prime minister belongs to a global club of autocrats and aspiring autocrats who specialize in the personality-rationalized obliteration of norms and the exploitation of democracy to degrade democracy. If he did not — the overwhelming preponderance of other anecdotal calling cards aside, from his use of repeated elections to avoid the consequences of his corruption case to his assaults on his country’s judicial system — he would not be a six-term prime minister.

Netanyahu operates among that group of faux-populist leaders who’ve traded their utility to the global war on democracy for propaganda-protected, narrative warfare-secured power, including Nicolas Maduro, Viktor Orbán and the rest of the rogues’ gallery who populate Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc. Trump’s membership in that club, so undeniably evidenced in his first term as president, will – based on every indication from that first term and everything he has said about a possible second one — presumably be confirmed if he should prevail on November 5th.

To the extent that the war in Gaza and the absence of a cease-fire agreement might rationalize that otherwise absurdly anti-democracy democratic outcome, Netanyahu’s behaviour squares with both the benefits and requirements of membership in the autocracy club. The new autocrats, as Applebaum writes, “keep track of one another’s defeats and victories, timing their own moves to create maximum chaos.”

Twenty-first century autocrats also display a contempt for diplomacy that goes beyond neglect and routine obstruction to a form of geopolitical gaslighting I christened “catfish diplomacy” after the weeks and weeks of Vladimir Putin’s absurdly performative humouring of the negotiations that preceded his illegal invasion of Ukraine in February, 2022. It’s a tactic that goes beyond mere balkiness, commodifying instead the squandering of time and resources enabled by misdirectional amenability, and makes a mockery of the diplomatic adage that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.” It is always accompanied or followed by a disproportionate, unbiddable, use of force to drastically alter the facts on the ground. And it is part of a trend defining the evolution of 21st-century conflict resolution.

Autocrats also share a preference for prioritizing their own power consolidation over the interests of human beings, including their own citizens — both a motive for, and by-product of, the elimination of government by the people, for the people. That both Israelis and Palestinians have suffered the effects of that approach to power — invariably accompanied wherever it exists by a telltale, adolescent cynicism — to an unprecedented degree in the past year speaks volumes. Among terrorists, this is business as usual; as an element of leadership in a nominal democracy, it is both more exotic and more ominous.

I’ve covered this conflict as a Washington-based columnist and wire-service editor since before the collapse of Camp David II, written daily copy about it, among other international stories, for the late Peter Jennings at ABC World News Tonight in New York, worked for a Middle East peace building program based in Canada, Israel, Palestine and Jordan, and have continued writing about it as deputy editor and editor of Policy, all informed by a brazen, long-declared bias in favour of a two-state solution that secures peace and freedom for human beings on both sides.

I love Israel, not only as an idea, but as a place — the people, the spirit, the weather, the food, the arguing, the buzz of Tel Aviv and the awe-striking wonder of Jerusalem. And my sense of this conflict, especially after working with very smart people whose commitment to coexistence was so much braver than war, has always been based on the conviction that Israel cannot truly fulfill the promise of its destiny until it resolves its relationship with the Palestinians.

In the past year, for the first time since 1948, the greatest threat to Israel has been its own prime minister. It is Netanyahu’s behaviour that has eclipsed the horrifying Hamas origins of this bilateral escalation, abrogated Israel’s longstanding observance of pidyon shvuyim, or the sacred duty under Jewish law of “redemption of captives”, and put its defenders at home and abroad in the position of having to decouple their moral support for Israel from the behaviour of its leader.

In the story of a nation that exists always on a knife edge between a historic reservoir of global goodwill and the persistent scourge of antisemitism, that amounts to a form of existential malpractice — especially in the service of Donald Trump and Autocracy, Inc.

Policy Editor Lisa Van Dusen served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington. She was also communications director for the McGill Middle East Program in Civil Society and Peace Building.