Israel as Mirror

My only trip to Israel was as a teenaged boy… well where I went wasn’t Israel yet… it was part of Jordan then. Although eligible to cross into “real” Israel with my son-of-a-US-diplomat black passport, I was in the company of others with regular US passports who could not. I was forced to stay with them, but I craved a day or two on “the other side.” I was content to have visited the Jordanian town of Jerusalem and see the birthplace of my Christian roots.

I noticed how the Palestinians in Jordan were organized in barbed-wire-surrounded “refugee camps,” not allowed to leave their compounds to live anywhere else. The “camps,” where children lived on powdered milk and local charity, were situated with views of the inhabitants’ pre-1948 homes in what was then the relatively new state of Israel. It was a purposeful political manipulation. Arab politicians, not carrying a whit about the Palestinians, using hatred of Israel to rally rabid followers to their own political agendas. The children raised in those campus had a very rich diet of mandatory hatred of Israel, fans flamed for political power.

Palestinian refugee camps were also located with that view in Syria’s Golan Heights or from southern Lebanon. We lived in Beirut, a city with a small Jewish section. Many Lebanese wanted to open the border with Israel, but Egypt and particularly Syria would have crushed Lebanon in an instant had they tried. It took the Arab-initiated six-day war, in 1967, to annex the Jordanian land upon which I saw Israel. I was long gone by then, in college. We call that are the West Bank, the modern-day source of such violent confrontation. What’s left of Palestine. With a little Gaza down the road.

US policy for decades was to join the chorus of the vast majority of nations, the United Nations itself, to call for an eventual two state solution, one which declared Tel Aviv’s expansion of Jewish settlements in the heart of the West Bank, virtually entirely otherwise Palestinian, flatly illegal. Donald Trump moved our embassy to Jerusalem, accepted Israel’s permanent annexation of the Golan Heights, rejected the two-state solution and just a few days ago further reversed US policies by declaring those West Bank Jewish settlements legitimate and permanent. Arab states seethed.

Make no mistake, Israel is an essential ally. So much more than the scary evangelical commitment to Armageddon, a strong Israel able to foment the rapture and the Second Coming of Christ. Israel is a source of so much modern technology, reinventing agriculture in desert lands, giving us eyes and ears in a very hostile and volatile region. An educated people with so much to give to the rest of the world. Our friend through thick or thin. A parallel military force ready to defend US interests with her might.

But the world is experiencing climate change, forced migration as once fertile farms turn into dust – the factor that pushed Al Qaeda and ISIS to speak for those unrepresented and disenfranchised farmers and push their holy hell on the rest of us – political jockeying as the United States pulls away from her global relationships. With a couple of exceptions. Autocrats and diplomatic ties based on constituent demands. All that intellectual richness, creativity, is subservient to political aspirations of amoral and self-aggrandizing leaders.

With Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, Israel’s longest reigning monarch… er… prime minister, sharing right wing autocratic aspirations with our President… another bromance… well the destruction to both nations’ ability to deal with the rest of the world by unilateral arrogance is staggering. Indeed, leaders in both countries have gone out of their way to suborn conspiracy theories, force a “your either for me or against me” dichotomy among the electorate, and legitimize their core constituencies – traditional and politically conservative Jews in one nation and lily white multigenerational traditionalists in the other – at the expense of “others” – Arabs or immigrants, take your pick. Divide and conquer. 

Both countries have become virtually ungovernable, unable to find compromise, by amplifying and encouraging severe polarization. Leaders who have manipulated their followers, whipping them into a frenzy. Trump has brought the United States to an explosive divide that we last witnessed during the road to our Civil War.

Netanyahu, sitting on the doorstep of an imminent criminal indictment for corruption (which was actually filed against him on November 21^st), could not do enough to denigrate Palestinians, now officially and legally second-class citizens, and goad neighboring Arab neighbors with inflammatory speech and threats. Flaunting international rules. It made him wildly popular with his right-wing constituency. Purposely poking at Arab nations who, sooner or later, will buy or develop powerful weapons of mass destruction that could easily be deployed, directly or via well-supplied terrorists, to decimate Israel. 

Both countries have so split their countries into uncompromising factions that the normal course of legislative democracy borders on impossible. The divide, evidenced by the Trump impeachment hearings, speaks for itself. But many of us are unaware of the parallel paralysis that divides Israel today. In two elections earlier this year, Bibi’s Likud coalition failed to muster a majority of the Knesset to maintain his post as prime minister. 

Even though political opponent Benny Gantz’ centrist Blue and White party secured more parliamentary seats than did Likud in the last, September vote, because Netanyahu was closer to forming a coalition that was Gantz, he was given the first shot at forming a coalition to support his continue leadership as prime minister. He failed for a second time on one year. So, the opportunity to form a coalition was handed to Gantz.

“Embattled Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday [11/20] won at least a temporary political respite after his main rival to lead the country failed in a weeks-long bid to form a coalition government — a task Netanyahu also could not accomplish.

“But the prime minister is still expected to be indicted on corruption charges [the indictment was formalized on 11/21] any day and the country now faces the likelihood of new elections, which would be an unprecedented third national vote in less than a year… After centrist politician Benny Gantz announced Wednesday that he could not muster the parliamentary backing for a new government — a task at which Netanyahu had failed twice — the country was again thrown into political limbo.

“There will be a three-week period during which any lawmaker — Gantz and Netanyahu included — can try to build a governing coalition. Failing that, new elections will take place, probably in March 2020.

“Staying in office has been Netanyahu’s overriding goal since corruption scandals began closing in on him. He could fight the accusations while in office — Israeli law does not require prime ministers to resign if charged, although no sitting leader has been — and try to use his leadership post to engineer legal immunity.

“Gantz, leader of the centrist Blue and White party, gave up his bid late Wednesday to assemble a majority in the 120-seat Knesset, informing President Reuven Rivlin he would not make a midnight deadline. Rivlin, who had given Gantz the mandate to try to cobble together a coalition, said he would notify the parliament speaker Thursday.

“As the final hours ticked down to Wednesday’s deadline, Rivlin pressured Gantz and Netanyahu to form a ‘national unity’ government to break the deadlock and avoid yet another election. Rivlin suggested that Gantz and Netanyahu could alternate serving as prime minister, with Netanyahu promising to step aside if indicted.” Los Angeles Times, November 21^st. In the unlikely event that a “national unity” government is formed, the only certainty is that it simply will not work. Picture the United States being governed by a combination of Senate GOP Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell and Dem Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer.

As I look at all the instability the world over, from Bolivia and Venezuela to Ukraine and Russia, from Hong Kong to Western China, the entire Middle East, the struggles over Brexit, a partial list at best, it is equally sad to watch the great democratic experiments in both the United States and Israel simply unravel under the helm of corrupt and self-indulgent autocrat wannabes.

              I’m Peter Dekom, and history teaches us that if nations cannot bridge severe polarization, they also cannot sustain democracy itself.