Israel’s Netanyahu drops his mask and reveals ugliness: Burman

Benjamin Netanyahu has a Winston Churchill complex. When he stares into a mirror, the Israeli prime minister peers through the cigar smoke and sees a 21st-century incarnation of a swashbuckling world saviour. But his fantasy has taken a hit. Given his astonishing statements in recent days, I suspect that future historians, when they stare back, will not be so glowing.

In the context of Israel’s chaotic parliamentary democracy, Netanyahu’s election victory was far from a landslide. His party actually received fewer than 25 per cent of the overall votes. This means that more than three out of every four Israelis voted for someone else. You won’t hear that from his loyal acolytes and enablers in Israel, the U.S. Republican Congress or Canada’s Conservative government.

But what we are all hearing about is how the Israeli prime minister ultimately won. On election day, he played the race card by warning potential supporters that “the right-wing government is in danger. Arab voters are coming out in droves.” A day earlier, he abandoned his government’s solemn commitment to the United States and other Western allies by promising there would be no Palestinian state if he were re-elected. The result is that he will soon lead a government that is the most far right and extremist in Israeli history.

What was astonishing about these statements is not that he believes them. Any careful observer of Netanyahu over the years knows that he has never had the slightest intention of allowing a Palestinian state to be formed on his watch. Just look at his manic obsession to create new Israeli settlements in the occupied territories to create new “facts on the ground” that cannot be undone in any future agreement.

But what was unexpected about these remarks was that he actually said them. The mask dropped from Netanyahu’s face, if only for a moment, as he confronted the alarming prospect that he might lose the election. For the seemingly endless Israeli-Palestinian deadlock, I believe that Netanyahu’s statements — and the international response to them — will change the game completely, and perhaps for good.

But I don’t see the ghost of Winston Churchill in the Israeli prime minister’s future. I see two more likely possibilities, both fraught with momentous consequences:

The first one, which I believe will happen, is full of promise. However ironic, history may one day credit Netanyahu for actions that ultimately led to the creation, not prevention, of the new State of Palestine. His apparent determination to cling to the status quo has not only inflamed U.S. and European leaders, who feel betrayed. It has also provided new energy and credibility to the growing worldwide movement to resolve the Palestinian issue once and for all in a way that also ensures that Israel has the security it requires.

If this first possibility collapses, the second one is frightening. The continuing failure to end the Israeli occupation will cast Netanyahu in a far more sinister historical light. In the same way that South Africa’s apartheid regime was not allowed by the world to continue, a non-democratic Jewish state is also unsustainable. The certainty of growing violence and deaths as a consequence of this type of rogue state is too obvious to ignore. In this scenario, history would remember Netanyahu not as a Churchill, but as the Israeli leader who cowardly led his country into the abyss.

It is striking how this debate has changed in the few days since Netanyahu’s comments. Far more than in the recent past, the Israeli-Palestinian issue — which so many people want desperately to forget about — is front-of-mind. American journalists are now writing about the looming threat to Israel. Conservative voices keep trying to reduce it to a “Bibi vs. Barack” soap opera, but that is not ringing true. As President Obama put it last Tuesday: “This can’t be reduced to a matter of somehow, ‘Let’s all hold hands and sing Kumbaya.’”

It is time for Netanyahu’s acolytes and enablers from abroad — does the name Stephen Harper come to mind? — to awake from their sleep and try to protect Netanyahu’s Israel from itself. The clock is ticking.

Tony Burman, former head of CBC News and Al Jazeera English, teaches journalism at Ryerson University. Reach him @TonyBurman or at tony.burman@gmail.com .