The Worst in Our History

With the dissolution of the Knesset and the end of an especially terrible term, it is necessary to also assess the legacy of the terrible man who led it. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Benjamin Netanyahu is the worst leader Israel has had since its founding. The tests I propose here also allow granting him a further distinction, placing him among the worst leaders of the Jewish people throughout its generations, if not the worst of them. This is not an angry statement, though the man deserves every measure of anger and resentment. A claim of this magnitude requires some standard of measurement. For example, the gap between the potentials handed to him upon his election and the reality he left behind on his way out. Between the power he received and the use he made of it. It is by these tests that I wish to measure him.

The Americans, celebrating this year 250 years of independence, have turned the ranking of their presidents into a national sport. Many of them say it is easier to rank the worst presidents than the best. Judaism has an ancient and even more demanding version of that public scrutiny. It knew power up close and developed toward it a deep and healthy tradition of suspicion and restraint. Already in scripture the king appears as someone whose power and desires must be limited. Since then every generation has put its failed leaders on trial before the tribunal of memory, because as the poet Natan Alterman put it, “evil must be seen in order to be fought”. Three historical figures set three different tests of rule, and together the three sketch the outline of Netanyahu’s failures.

The first is Rehoboam son of Solomon, by whom the test of social responsibility is set. He inherited from his father a wealthy kingdom that lacked no internal tensions; tribal, religious, and economic. Heavy taxation and forced labor that were not distributed equally required wisdom and restraint. These the arrogant heir sorely lacked. To the people’s complaints he responded with haughty condescension, and quickly discovered that the peace of his kingdom depended on sensitivity rather than on “whips and scorpions”. The immediate split became unavoidable, and Rehoboam is etched in Jewish memory as the man who inherited a whole kingdom and divided it with his own hands. The first king of half the people.

The second is Abba Sikra, head of the zealots in besieged Jerusalem. Tradition and its legends chose to tell the story of the Temple’s destruction as an event of internal ruin more than an accusation against Rome the destroyer, “Because of our own sin we were exiled from our land”. The zealots within the city burned the grain storehouses, slaughtered and murdered one another in an attempt to force the war, internal and external, upon the whole public, including those who did not belong to their circle of supporters. When Abba Sikra was confronted by Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, who wanted to know: “until when will you go on doing this and killing people by starvation”, he answered, “what can I do, if I say a word to them they will kill me”. The test of Abba Sikra the murderer, is simple and harsh, can a leader restrain the extremists at the base of his support, or has he become the enslaved servant of the very base he cultivated, a camp thirsty for blood.

The test of Herod is the third. It is the test of the ruler’s own personality. His building projects were immense, from the renewed Temple to Caesarea and Masada, but the fear of losing his crown gradually consumed even his loyalists and those closest to him. He drew his legitimacy from Rome, he was of a ‘different league’. But the hearts of his subjects, even his wife and household, became suspected victims of endless paranoia and whims. Members of his own family paid with their lives for his anxieties and his toxic lack of confidence. From Herod onward the test of personality accompanies Jewish leadership, the moment when preserving the throne becomes far more important than the people and subjects for whose sake the rule was meant to exist.

So much for history. The State of Israel returned the Jewish people to these tests in modern dress. After generations of dependence on others a state arose, we have independent sovereignty and the ability to defend ourselves. These immense achievements carry within them the oldest challenge of all, restraining power and conquering the urge to use it. In plain Hebrew, how can a people who were hurt by the hatred of others avoid becoming, itself, that which it hated most. Israel’s leaders across the generations were tested on this question, and even those who bore responsibility for grave failures knew, in moments of trial, how to rise above and decide. Begin, who was a terrorist before Israel’s founding and who led Israel into an unnecessary war in Lebanon, also knew how to sign peace with Egypt. Israel’s principal military enemy, and within that framework evacuated the holy land of Sinai down to the last grain of sand. Rabin, who bears responsibility for founding the cursed settlement enterprise, for long years of occupation and for the policy of breaking bones. Dared, in his final days, to change course. One can argue about their paths, but both understood, at the decisive moment, that power exists to allow historical change, even at heavy personal and political cost.

And Netanyahu. He received a state with power, capabilities and opportunities that no Jewish leader before him had ever held together. Rehoboam had a young kingdom, Abba Sikra a besieged city, and Herod Roman patronage. Netanyahu received a strong state, a creative society, broad international support and a deep American alliance. He held power longer than any other prime minister in Israel’s history. From that power an unprecedented responsibility should have followed. But Netanyahu, like Rehoboam, Abba Sikra and Herod, failed every one of his tests. He used Israeli power for the sake of his own political survival. From that narcissistic opportunism grew his security policy, his attitude toward the state’s institutions, the tearing of society and the choice of his partners.

His security policy is the first chapter in his magnificent, and terrifying, book of failures. Netanyahu saw the open conflict as a situation that could be managed indefinitely, all the way to full annexation and the prevention of any settlement with an independent Palestinian state at its center. From this grew his view that a strong Hamas was an Israeli asset. Suitcases of cash from Qatar sustained not only Hamas rule but also Netanyahu’s own rule. Everything was permitted for the sake of the systematic weakening of the Palestinian Authority. The deliberate separation between Gaza and the West Bank, and the burial of every possibility of a settlement. Even though other forces were also at work in the disaster of October 23. This was his policy in all its components, and it was the central factor in preparing the ground. The disaster of October 7 grew in the very garden beds Netanyahu himself cultivated. The most terrible massacre in the history of the State of Israel occurred on his watch, the very man who marketed himself for decades as the guardian of Israel. To this day he refuses to say the words that the tradition of responsibility demands of him, I am responsible. That is how it is with fugitive offenders.

The second failure was revealed at home. Like Rehoboam, Netanyahu inherited a society full of tensions, and instead of preserving the shared framework he turned the rift into a conception. The right’s struggle against the judiciary began many years before his trials, but Netanyahu gave it a new shape, when his criminal trial and personal needs met the ideology of his partners. Chiefly the two Immature demolition twins, Smotrich and Ben Gvir. Thus a legitimate constitutional dispute turned into an assault on the very balances of the regime. The result tore Israeli society apart and pushed millions into the streets and toward emigration.

The third failure, the deepest of all, is the loss of the ability to restrain his own camp. The ideological heirs of the sicarii of Jerusalem, the zealots of Otzma Yehudit and religious Zionism, sit today around the government table holding both the daggers and the keys to his survival. He knows their incitement well. He always stands on the balcony and watches the violence on the ground and the undermining of state institutions. Yet time and again he avoids drawing a line lest his coalition fall apart. The leader who presented himself as the responsible adult gradually became a hostage of his own extremists.

Alongside this his dependence on outside support deepened. He turned himself into a vassal of Trump, the great boss. His alliance with the American religious fundamentlism as well as with evangelical movements, who see us as supporting players in their drama of the end of days, blurred the line between Israel’s good and the political needs of his ally’s leader. Growing reliance on eschatological sympathy from the outside and on mobilizing fear from within replaced, for him, the most essential source of democratic legitimacy. The trust of citizens in their government.

The subordination of the state to his personal survival revealed itself most hideously in his treatment of the hostages. Until his time, the redemption of captives expressed, within Jewish tradition, the priority of the actual human being over abstract goals. A government that saw their return as its primary duty would have weighed every military and diplomatic move by whether it advanced their release. That was true for everyone else, but it did not hold for Netanyahu. For him the fate of the hostages was only part of the coalition ledger, and since prolonging the war prolonged the government’s life, Netanyahu sentenced their fate, again and again, to death and captivity. The goal of his own survival sanctified all his means.

This subordination of the state to his political needs also exacted a price in relations with world Jewry. Israel was meant to be an answer to Jewish insecurity, and under Netanyahu it became, for many, the focus of the greatest danger to Jewish existence in our generation. A painful moral question. Growing segments of liberal world Jewry experience Israel as a source of ethical embarrassment that demands distance. Young Jews who wish to live a Judaism of justice find it hard to recognize themselves in a state that speaks in their name while betraying their values and ignoring the suffering of human beings under its control.

Now it is possible to return to the claim with which I opened and sharpen it. History is always larger than a single person, and Netanyahu alone did not create all of Israel’s ills. The severity of his legacy stems from a combination that is full of malice and without precedent. A leader who stood for so long at the head of a strong state, and left behind a deep security failure. A torn society and people whose institutions and faith were worn down by his rough hands. In every one of the tests set by these ancient figures he failed. He deepened the divide and became dependent on the extremists of his own camp, and above these two failures hovered the ongoing decision to place the continuation of his own rule above the state’s most basic obligations. A leader is measured, as noted, by the gap between the opportunity placed in his hands and the reality he leaves behind, between the power he received and the use he made of it. By this test he deserves the harshest place in the history of Israeli leadership, and perhaps also in the history of Jewish leadership.

After Netanyahu, Israel will require a repair far deeper than a change of government. It will need to return to the ancient Jewish suspicion of power, to the understanding that sovereignty needs restraint in order to remain humane, and to rebuild the covenant between security and responsibility. Until it becomes clear that a Judaism with an army can also be a Judaism with a conscience.

The day after Netanyahu will begin with a simple recognition, Jewish power was meant to save lives, not to save, again and again, the very man who holds it.

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