The ‘political thuggery’ of Israel’s right wing and a lack of a persuasive centre-left alternative have pushed the country to the brink... Netanyahu’s vicious brand of hard-right identity politics has become a familiar blister on the face of Israel’s democracy.
Netanyahu’s unprecedented indictment on Thursday on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust has intensified pressure on him to quit. With typical grandiosity, he denounced it as an “attempted coup”. When set alongside his failure to win a clear mandate in both of this year’s elections, this new humiliation would surely persuade any normal politician to stand down.
But Netanyahu is not normal. Despite his
“divisive rhetoric, lavish lifestyle and entanglement in corruption scandals”, he stands for something, which cannot always be said of his opponents, Assaf Sharon, a Tel Aviv university professor, wrote recently. The principal reason why Netanyahu had become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister was the lack of a persuasive centre-left alternative in the years following the 1995 assassination of Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin, he argued.
“Israeli liberals are cowed by the right’s political thuggery, demoralised by decades of failure, and weakened by mediocre leadership. Afraid to articulate their values and terrified of challenging Netanyahu’s nationalism, many on the left have reverted to a meaningless centrism, assuming that the only way to defeat him is by offering a more civilised, non-corrupt version of his politics,” Sharon wrote.