Netanyahu’s Israel

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

A year ago, protests began to rock Israel. For months, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets to protest Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken the country’s Supreme Court. Then came Hamas’s attack on October 7, and everything changed. “The war has caught Israel at perhaps its most divided moment in history,” writes Aluf Benn in a new piece for Foreign Affairs. Benn, the editor of Haaretz, an Israeli newspaper, argues that Netanyahu worked to divide Israeli society with policies that put the country on track for disaster. He spoke to my colleague Justin Vogt on February 27.

JUSTIN VOGT

Hello, Aluf. Thank you so much for joining me today.

ALUF BENN

Thank you for the invitation to write.

JUSTIN VOGT

I want to start our conversation where you start your article: in April 1956. That month saw the murder of an Israeli kibbutznik named Roi Rotberg, who was killed by a group of Palestinians while he was patrolling on horseback near the border with the Gaza Strip, which at that time was controlled by Egypt. Now, this was a major news story in Israel. The country was shocked and angered by his killing, and his funeral was something of a national event. In attendance was the IDF Chief of Staff, Moshe Dayan. Can you tell us a little bit about Dayan? Who was he?

ALUF BENN

Dayan was, I would say—he created the IDF fighting spirit. He was one of the founders of the military, and very early on was very close to David Ben-Gurion, the founding father of Israel; and he was the chief of staff in the second half of the 1950s, which saw the buildup of the IDF from its post-war of independence and pre-state, underground days to a regular fighting force. And Dayan was very much the activist. He wanted to push Israel toward an aggressive foreign and military policy, and security policy.

What happened was, he was very much endeared by Roi Rotberg. He visited that kibbutz, that was established very recently, and he came to the kibbutz. And he was very much fascinated by the motivation and character of Roi Rotberg. So, a couple days later when he found out that this young man was killed, he decided to go to the funeral and deliver a eulogy. That eulogy in many ways has been equated to Israel’s Gettysburg Address.

JUSTIN VOGT

Can I ask you to read a short passage of that, that you start your article with? Would you mind reading that for us?

ALUF BENN

Sure. I think this is the heart of the speech: “Let us not cast blame on the murderers. For eight years, they have been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages where they and their fathers dwelt into our estate. Let us not be deterred from seeing the loathing that is inflaming and filling the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs living around us. This is our life’s choice—to be prepared and armed, strong and determined, lest the sword be stricken from our fist and our lives cut down.”

JUSTIN VOGT

Tell me why you chose to start your article on what’s happening in Israel today, with that passage, and also why it’s so important in Israel.

ALUF BENN

What Dayan said was the gist of understanding that, on one hand, we should realize that there is another people on the other side of the border, and some of them within Israel as well; and that they have their own story of defeat, that they want revenge. And that we should realize it, and we should come to terms with that. Dayan’s answer was just to be strong and prepared, and never turn away from watching the other side. And if you do that, then our life will be cut.

JUSTIN VOGT

Is it your sense that the vision he sort of lays out, that knowledge or that awareness of the other people—I think it’s your argument really that today’s Israeli leadership has lost sight of that, and that maybe more broadly, Israeli society has. Is that fair to say?

ALUF BENN

Of course. I think that Dayan was right in both his arguments. First of all, that we need to pay attention to the Palestinians, even though at that time they were not called by that name. But that doesn’t matter. We should realize their story, we should know it. We should learn how to live with them.

On the other hand, we should be prepared that there are some bad people out there who want to transform that loathing and anger into attacks on Israel. And if we forget that, then we lose twice. And I think this is what happened in Israeli society in the past 15 years or so, and especially since Benjamin Netanyahu’s return to power in 2009.

Look, what most of the time Israelis cared about was prosperity. Real estate prices that were going up like crazy. Huge economic success, both in high-tech and in natural gas discoveries offshore, that turned Israel into an economic tiger. And the conflict was seen as something that exists—but Netanyahu time and again argued that Israel could prosper without peace, could prosper without dealing with the Palestinians, that we should not really pay attention to them. And at best, we should manage the conflict.

JUSTIN VOGT

Yet your sense is that this sense of security, prosperity, safety, sort of normality or Western-style comfort and progress, was illusory, in a sense, and that was proven on October 7.

ALUF BENN

That’s obvious. But you know, even before October 7, since early last year, the formation of the new Netanyahu government is a second comeback, leading a very strong far-right coalition aiming at reforming Israeli society and especially weakening the judiciary and weakening other democratic institutions. Throughout that period, there were repeated warnings of an imminent war, because the argument laid out by the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and by several of the intelligence chiefs was that the enemies—Iran, and its several proxies and supporters around Israel; Hezbollah in Lebanon; Hamas and Islamic Jihad in Gaza, and to a lesser extent in the West Bank—are reading these signs as signs of weakness, and that they’re preparing to hit Israel when it’s torn apart, when there is disquiet in the military over the threat of some of the reservist pilots and special operations officers not to serve if Israel becomes an autocracy and loses its democracy.

But even those intelligence chiefs and the military warnings—they were not focused on Hamas. Hamas was seen as a tamed, quieted organization that runs Gaza and wants to live, not in peace, but in kind of mutual deterrence with Israel. And Israelis saw Gaza and they saw themselves in the mirror: that the focus of Hamas was to turn Gaza into a more economically developed area and to improve the standard of living for the Gazans—which was apparently not the case, but they were able to fool us. If we go back to Dayan, they were able to hide their loathing and animosity toward Israel and prepare this attack, which they did at least for two years. And there are signs that it went back even longer because they dug hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath Gaza. That takes a long time. But Israel ignored it.

And for Netanyahu, Hamas was a counterbalance to the idea which he loathes, which is the Palestinian state, the two-state solution. And he argued that by strengthening Hamas, and allowing Hamas more economic development, and to get funding (with Israeli approval) to get funding from Qatar, to run its operations, to run its social services—now we know that it was to run its military buildup as well, although that was less known at the time—but Netanyahu argued even publicly that strengthening Hamas is good for the Israeli right-wing cause because it prevents the two-state solution.

JUSTIN VOGT

How would you describe Netanyahu’s political standing now? You’ve written recently that what he’s running is becoming less a government and more a regime. What do you mean by that?

ALUF BENN

Netanyahu, years ago, laid out a vision of not only preventing a Palestinian state, or improving Israel’s global stance while ignoring the Palestinians or preventing war. He was never keen on going to war or using force. He’s always had a very tense relationship with the brass. He doesn’t like them, and they never liked him. His main political opponents were former military chiefs like Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. And even today, Benny Gantz was in the cabinet, but he appears to be his main rival. So that was one aspect.

But I think what was more important to Netanyahu was reforming Israeli society, in two ways. One, which succeeded, was to turn Israel from a semi-socialist culture. That was how Israel was built, when many things were nationalized, workforce unionized. When Netanyahu arrived to the scene in the mid-nineties, it was already changed—but still, Netanyahu pushed Israel to be a more capitalistic, American-oriented kind of society. And I think he pretty much succeeded in that.

The other aspect was to change the social and intellectual conversation, to be more nationalist, more conservative and less liberal. And he argued for years that the way to do that was to have right-wing media, which he succeeded in establishing over the years, and in changing the academic discourse, and what he called replacing the elites.

JUSTIN VOGT

What would it mean to replace the elites, and what sort of effect would that have on governance? What’s the sort of plan there?

ALUF BENN

What the Netanyahu government has been trying to achieve is to silence critics. They don’t like to be criticized. They don’t like the protest. They blame the October 7 massacre on the protesters, rather than on themselves—and, you know, the Supreme Court in Israel, which has been the target of right-wing criticism for many years.

In Israel, we don’t have a constitution, and the Supreme Court was the only custodian of human and civil rights in Israel. And this was anathema to the right wing, because first of all, they allowed the right of hearing to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. And although most of their appeals have been rejected—the vast majority—still, they gave some relief to Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. But even more so—look, Israel is by no means an equal society between Jews and Arabs. But whatever equality the Arab society has been able to achieve was supported by Supreme Court decisions.

And the same is true about upholding liberal values and secular lifestyle, as opposed to living by the Torah and by a more religious and conservative lifestyle dictated by rabbis. And this was anathema to the right wing, and they saw an opportunity to do away with Supreme Court independence once and for all. Now, this goes back also to the legal advisory system, and to the civil service, and the military establishment, and the police. And the idea was to overtake all of these institutions and turn them into more politically-oriented and politically-run organizations. That was the heart of the coup by Netanyahu.

Now, since the beginning of the war, the coup legislation was stopped. But now, with the war effort dwindling and most reservists out, they’re trying first to prevent the protests from being a mass protests by using police brutality against the protesters. They replaced the chief of police in Tel Aviv, the main protest hub, and appointed someone who is trying to please his political masters by using more force against the protesters to deter many people who don’t want to get hit by water cannons or by horses.

JUSTIN VOGT

Because they’re trying to prevent a revival of what was happening last year, where there were these mass protests.

ALUF BENN

Yeah, exactly.

The other thing is to show that this incident should be outlawed, or at least pushed away. So at first, the government—with the support of the legal advisory system and the attorney general—hit very hard on anti-war criticism in Arab society. There have been arrests, hundreds of indictments, shaming campaigns against these people, and prevention of protests and demonstrations in Arab society. And now, with the war effort slowing down a little bit, they turned against critics from the mainstream.

For example, the minister of education is in charge of the Israel Prize, the highest civilian award that is given in Israel every year. And usually it’s given, you know, to intellectuals, to academics, to writers, to people like that—to people with special contributions to society. A week ago or so, the minister declared that this year there will be no prizes for any intellectual achievement, only for social support and civilian courage during the war. This was weird. And after a couple of days, one of my competitors broke the story that one of the people who won, who was supposed to be given the prize, was Eyal Waldman, a high-tech entrepreneur who lost his daughter and his fiancée in the October 7 massacre. And he was chosen because of his huge achievements as an entrepreneur and industrialist in Israel. But he’s a very fierce critic of Netanyahu, and he blames Netanyahu for the murder of his daughter and his fiancée. And the minister decided, in order not to have Waldman given this honor, to call off the Israel Prize altogether. This is like, you know, you demolish the institution in order not to give the dissident any recognition. And there were several other incidents like that.

So clearly what they’re trying to do is to delegitimize and to push away from the public sphere anyone who’s critical of the prime minister, and make it into a kind of personal autocracy that is very much supported by the more conservative and religious parts of the Israeli Jewish society. This is replacing the elites. If the elites are against Netanyahu, we will not give them a prize because they’re against us. So you’re politicizing everything.

And my question is, when is the point when a legitimate government, democratically elected, becomes a regime, which is less legitimate? And I think that once it demolishes, one after another, the democratic institutions, the liberal institutions, the freedom of speech, and they say it publicly. They’re not trying to hide behind anything anymore, they’re saying it out loud. So that’s when they lose their legitimacy and become a Netanyahu regime rather than a democratically elected Israeli government.

JUSTIN VOGT

It sounds like the process that critics of the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban have described in Hungary over the years.

ALUF BENN

Oh, in Hungary, in India. I just read the piece in Foreign Affairs about the new election campaign, the coming election campaign in India, and just copied and pasted paragraph after paragraph and sent it to one of my colleagues to show that we could just change the name and describe the same process in Israel. Obviously it’s much, much smaller than India. But the process, the idea that the leader is more important than the institutions, is the heart and the core of the Netanyahu coup and the policy of this government in the past year.

JUSTIN VOGT

It’s been interesting to watch the way that the Biden administration has been occasionally critical of Israeli conduct, but it hasn’t really done anything to pressure or coerce Israel into changing its conduct in Gaza, which has been, you know, the subject of a lot of criticism, with a high level of civilian casualties. Has that surprised you? And what sort of leverage do you think the United States has? If Biden wanted to pressure or even coerce Netanyahu, do you think he could? What would be the pressure points?

ALUF BENN

Well, first of all, I was not surprised. Because if you go back to American-Israeli relations since 1948, even before the establishment of the state of Israel, I describe it as a gamut of interests that, for Israel, the key issue has been the Palestinian issue. And it goes back to President [Harry] Truman’s recognition of the nascent state of Israel 11 minutes after Ben-Gurion reads out this declaration of independence, against the policy of the State Department and the advice of his Secretary of State [George] Marshall.

And it goes on over the years: when Israel spoke to [Yasser] Arafat, he was invited to the White House; when Israel fought with Arafat, it was persona non grata; et cetera, et cetera. So, this is not different. And we go back—when Israel wants to do business with China, and the United States tells it to stop, it has to stop, because that’s the American paramount interest. Before that, it was the Soviet Union. And there’s an area in between, in which the Americans are willing to listen to Israeli concerns about Iran, about Syria, about the Houthis, and so on. But the final word is in Washington. And this is no exception.

Obviously, the Americans have influenced the Israeli conduct of the war. They pressured Israel into giving, or allowing, more humanitarian aid into Gaza. They stand at the back of the mediation efforts to release Israeli hostages and bring them back. And they’re pretty much involved in running the war day to day. But there are two important issues in which Israel is totally dependent on American support. One is diplomatically. The U.S. veto in the Security Council allows Israel to fight the war, because there was, in the last vote, there were 14 to zero, zero was the Americans’ support for—or it was, I think, 13 to zero, Britain abstained. But there was huge support all over the world for an immediate ceasefire. And the United States vetoed it, which means that it allows Israel to keep fighting.

And the other thing is that the United States has been the key supplier to Israel of munitions and weapon systems during the war—and took some of the burden, for example fighting the Houthis who are blockading the Israeli shipping, or shipping to and from Israel, in the Red Sea. This is unprecedented. There has never been such support from day one, and such close coordination and cooperation.

Where they differ is the “day after.” Biden wants to resume—or says he wants to resume—the peace process and the two-state solution, Netanyahu is against it. It serves both of them politically. Netanyahu wants to solidify the Israeli right-wing base behind him. Biden has issues with the Democratic Party’s progressive base—and specifically in the state of Michigan, that is crucial to reelection and where there is a strong Palestinian and pro-Palestinian community, as we know. So it serves both of them to fight each other over that. But it doesn’t really affect the daily conduct of the war.

JUSTIN VOGT

Let’s go back to some of the themes you were discussing earlier. I’m curious—what is it like to run a news outlet in Israel right now, especially one like Haaretz, which is often quite critical of the government?

ALUF BENN

First of all, it’s not the first time that we run a newspaper, a news organization, during war. It happens every several years here in Israel. I think this was different than previous rounds because Israel was attacked severely, which since the second intifada has not really happened. And also we felt it in the newsroom. One of our reporters was hiding with his family in their home in Nahal Oz, in the same kibbutz of Roi Rotberg, until his father, a former general, came to rescue them with some regular fighters. One other guy had to rescue his son from the music festival, where there was a massacre. We have several people here who grew up in the kibbutzim near Gaza, and although their immediate family members were saved, all of them lost friends, family members, as casualties or hostages. And we had a large contingent of the newsroom that was called to reserve.

So we felt it much closer than any round of conflict that I can recall; that was the first time. And also, like everybody else in Israel, we were shocked by the events of October 7. We did not—we wrote, some of us have written that Netanyahu’s policy is leading to disaster. But, you know, it’s one thing to write it, and the other thing is when the disaster comes.

We are the only ones in the Hebrew media that, you know, caters most to the Israeli public, that bothers to report on what’s happening in Gaza. The other media more or less relies on the IDF reports and describing it from an Israeli standpoint. And when they see videos from Gaza, it’s like Gazans saying nasty things about Hamas or robbing the humanitarian aid trucks and stuff like that.

You know, we’re the only ones who interview people in Gaza. It’s difficult to report from there. Obviously, we don’t have reporters on the ground, and not everyone in Gaza is willing to talk to an Israeli reporter, even if it’s an Arabic speaker or a Palestinian-Israeli reporter. So it’s challenging. We have to rely on the syndicated media that we have with The New York Times or The Guardian or wires. But we insist on publishing what’s happening on the other side. We’re the only ones who bother to report the number of Palestinian casualties as reported by the Hamas health ministry in Gaza every day. Most of the other media ignores it. They see it as only an Israeli story.

JUSTIN VOGT

And that really shapes the way the Israeli public sees this conflict.

ALUF BENN

Yes. It’s not the first time; but this time it’s really shocking, because the intensity of the fighting was—you know, the last time it was like that was 50 years ago, 40 years ago in Lebanon. And bear in mind that when northern Gaza was bombed from the air in Tel Aviv—that is, I don’t know, 50 miles to the north—we heard the bombing in Tel Aviv. So imagine what it was to hear it from Gaza. But people in Israel could not pay attention: “We were attacked, we were slaughtered, we were raped, we were invaded.” And that’s why there is very little pity or interest even in what’s happening to the Palestinians.

JUSTIN VOGT

And this of course is one reason why this idea of reviving land for peace, the two-state solution, is just not a message that that audience is going to be receptive to. We have, in the current issue of Foreign Affairs—the same one in which your article appears—there’s an essay by Martin Indyk, who’s a veteran U.S. diplomat, had been the ambassador to Israel, had been the envoy for the peace negotiations. One of the things he suggests is that Biden should try to address the Israeli public, sort of in a speech or some sort of media appearance, to try to go around Netanyahu and speak directly to the Israeli people—and not necessarily try to sell the two-state solution, but explain his vision of the day after: a revitalized Palestinian authority running Gaza and cooperation from the Arab states. What do you make of that idea? Is that something that’s conceivable? And would the Israelis listen?

ALUF BENN

Look, it’s not going to happen tomorrow. We have first to get the hostages back, and there has to be some proof that Hamas is not going to come back to rule Gaza, even with the diminished force, after the casualties that they’re suffering by the IDF.

Look, in the past, whenever Israel was attacked, the public shifted to the right and the immediate response was just to hit them as hard as possible. And then after a couple of years, people rethought the future and were willing to listen—or to be prodded into listening—to the ideas of a peace process. And it happened after the Yom Kippur war in 1973. That eventually led to peace with Egypt that is still holding. And then the first intifada leading to Oslo, and the second one leading to the Gaza disengagement. Clearly, today, the right-wing idea that Oslo and the Gaza disengagement were wrong, and that any territory given away by Israel has just been turned into the launchpad of the next attack on Israel—clearly that is the mainstream idea.

And the other problem is that unlike [Anwar] Sadat—the leader of Egypt in the 1970s, who had a big, organized, very old country behind him—we don’t have that kind of either a state to negotiate with or a leader who could speak on behalf of the entire Palestinian people and bring them to the table. What I think Biden and, in a different way, Netanyahu are trying to achieve is to make MBS, Mohammed bin Salman, the ruler of Saudi Arabia, as kind of a custodian, that he would play the role of Sadat, that he would make peace with Israel, and Israel would give something that would be negotiated to the Palestinians to justify it.

Now, two weeks before the October 7 attacks, Netanyahu was standing on the podium at the United Nations saying that we’re on the cusp of making peace with Saudi Arabia and the Palestinians don’t matter. And the Saudis did not deny it at the time. But now they’re saying that a Palestinian state is a precondition for their peace with Israel. So clearly the Palestinian state idea—and I think this is also the heart of Martin Indyk’s argument—the Palestinian state idea is back at the table after being absent for about a decade.

And clearly when you look forward, at least from my perspective, and obviously Martin’s, it’s the only solution that can be found to have better coexistence and more peaceful and prosperous lives for both Israelis and Palestinians.

There are many black swans here. Will Hamas remain the same after the war and still steadfastly refuse any accommodation with Israel? Or would different Hamas leadership have second thoughts? Would Israel have second thoughts after proving that it can defend itself? There are many, many questions out there—and clearly it’s all tied, from Biden’s perspective, it’s clearly tied with his own reelection campaign. Clearly that’s where his attention is focused now, and will be even more so as the year goes by. And clearly Netanyahu would like to wait him out and see if Donald Trump and the Republicans are back, or whether he would have to deal with a revitalized Biden administration after the election.

JUSTIN VOGT

Let me close by asking you a question. I don’t know, really, whether you’ll have an answer for it, but I’m going to ask anyway. You’ve painted a pretty grim portrait of what’s happening in Israel for someone with your point of view and your political values—the title of the article is “Israel’s Self-Destruction,” and that kind of captures the sentiment. Let’s say you’re a Foreign Affairs reader or a listener who broadly shares your vision of a more democratic, more liberal, more sustainable—maybe in the long term—Israeli democracy. Are there any signs that you could point to that would be reasons for hope or optimism? Or even if not, are there areas within Israeli society where one might look for those sort of green shoots in the future?

ALUF BENN

Well, I believe that, first and foremost, the protest movement that came from nothing since the beginning of last year was a big surprise, because many of the organizers of the protests were people like Eyal Waldman. People who were, you know, totally globalized and totally Americanized; were entrepreneurs, and their companies were on Nasdaq or just sold to some bigger companies, and they felt at home anywhere in the world. And they just turned back inwards and fought to preserve and sustain Israeli democracy.

And when the war began, and the government was totally dysfunctional, they just organized the entire welfare support and social support system for the evacuees from the border communities in the Gaza area and in the north. They organized equipment for the reservists. They became the de facto shadow government. And that’s warming, because it shows that people care, shows that people don’t say, “Okay, we’re on Nasdaq, so we could just live in Palo Alto.” And I think that that’s a kind of civil patriotism that was lacking, or was latent for many, many years. And we hope that the protests will resume and that a new government would turn back from destroying the liberal values and liberal institutions in Israel.

JUSTIN VOGT

Aluf, I think we should leave it there. Thank you so much. This has been a great conversation. I knew I would learn a lot, and I have. You’ve reminded me of a lot of things that I know, but I’ve forgotten, which is almost always the case with people who really know their stuff. Thank you so much.

ALUF BENN

Thank you.