Benjamin Netanyahu, the ever-present figure in Israeli politics for three decades is down and out.
“Bibi”, to give him his near-universal nickname, has been written off so many times, but now, the man they call “the magician” has run out of tricks and run out of road.
After four elections in just two years, 24 months of political stagnation, a new dawn has broken for Israeli politics. It heralds the beginning for a remarkable coalition and the end for an extraordinary political operator.
Image: Anshel Pfeffer, Netanyahu’s biographer, said Netanyahu ‘was Trump before Trump’
Trump before Trump
Benjamin Netanyahu has been Israel‘s prime minister for the last 12 years: the longest serving leader in the country’s history. That wasn’t the start though. He was also prime minister between 1996 and 1999. In opposition before then and between those two stints, he was in the wings, plotting and driving his form of populist nationalist politics.
Advertisement
Bibi, the secular Jewish populist, cast himself as the defender of the nation against Iran, the defender of the Jewish State against the Palestinians, and most recently, as the saviour of the nation against coronavirus.
He is a politician who was channelling Trump while the former American president was still building casinos.
More on Benjamin Netanyahu
“He was Trump before Trump,” Netanyahu’s unofficial biographer, Anshel Pfeffer told me.
“He is a constant campaigner, he’s basically running for re-election the whole time. He doesn’t take a break between elections. So many of the populist politicians we talk about today – Orban in Hungary, Boris Johnson; Netanyahu was doing a lot of what they are doing now long before they were on the scene.
“Probably the only politician who was doing this in the television era before Netanyahu is Silvio Berlusconi in Italy,” Pfeffer said.
A survivor not a winner
Curiously Netanyahu was never actually a landslide politician. While often compared, as a savvy political operator, to Blair or Clinton, he only ever scraped in, but he did it consistently and that’s what mattered.
Israel is a country that functions on coalitions and Bibi was always the man who managed to form them. Critics, though, say he did it through exploitation rather than consensus.
Ehud Olmert was Netanyahu’s predecessor as prime minister. The two men were once in the same party, Likud. But as it tacked to the right, Olmert remained a centrist.
Mr Olmert told Sky News: “We never we were never friends. I never liked him. I never felt close to him. I never felt that he is a genuine human being [but] I thought it was a highly talented performer, the greatest that I’ve met in modern politics… He’s a genius. I mean, there there will be no one that can compete with him in on television. Laurence Olivier?”
He continued: “He’s a great performer, but when you look at the substance of things, the divisions within the Israeli society today are greater than ever before.”
Image: Ehud Olmert, Netanyahu’s predecessor as prime minister, said ‘we were never friends’ but Netanyahu is ‘a genius’
Pfeffer agreed: “Netanyahu is the most divisive prime minister in history, he has exploited every divide in Israeli society between Jews and Arabs, religious and secular, left and right.
“All these all these divides have been exploited and the communities have been played off against each other to keep him in power. That’s something that Israeli society will be paying the price for for years to come.”
Danny Danon has been a close confidant of Netanyahu for decades. He is a former Likud party politician and a nationalist who doesn’t believe in a two-state solution with the Palestinians. Until last year he was Netanyahu’s ambassador to the United Nations.
He told Sky News: “Many Israelis were born knowing only Netanyahu as the prime minister of Israel.
“He is one of the greatest leaders in Israel’s history and his dedication to our security, I think that the most important thing in his legacy.”
Under Netanyahu, Israel enjoyed the longest period of economic growth in its history; an achievement only damaged by the coronavirus pandemic which ‘the magician’ managed still to turn to his advantage. From the beginning he was the consummate communicator.
Describing his early political years, Pfeffer, author of Bibi: The Turbulent Life & Times of Benjamin Netanyahu, said: “He had literally sat at home over weekends with a rented video camera and trained himself how to do sound bites, how to do have strong, strong interviews on television.
“And when he came along in the late 1980s, he literally blew everyone away and he’s kept that advantage ever since.”
Image: The lights have gone out on Netanyahu’s tenure as Israel’s prime minister
Bibi the peacemaker?
Despite his persona as a tough-man, the former captain in the Israeli special forces actually presided over a period of relative calm, in Israeli terms.
He has been risk-averse while building up the nation’s defences and moulding a stalemate with the Palestinians precisely because it played to his advantage.
Pfeffer said: “He has this warmongering image which he which he builds up himself, but he never pushed the button and he never launched the big attack on Iran… He didn’t launch another war with Hezbollah in Lebanon, as his predecessors did. So all these things have been talked about, but never actually happened. He’s been risk averse and that is to his credit.”
But it was all to the detriment of the Palestinian people. Netanyahu’s politics, combined with splits and failures in the Palestinians’ own leadership, have stalled the peace process.
Olmert believes the impact of this failure on the reputation of the Jewish State is huge: “The lack of political solution for the Palestinian issue is the greatest threat to the status of the State of Israel. We need to separate from the Palestinians. We need to end the occupation. We can’t be seen in the international community as occupiers because this will destroy the image of Israel, the status of Israel.”
The latest round of fighting in Gaza hinted at a consequence of the stalemate. The Palestinian cause seemed more united than ever before, but it was a street-level unity. The politicians on all sides remain intransigent.
Image: Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi said Netanyahu’s legacy was ‘one of the most, if not the most destructive legacy for Israel, for the whole region’
Hanan Ashrawi, a central figure over decades in the quest for Palestinian statehood has a scathing assessment of Netanyahu’s legacy.
She told Sky News: “I think Netanyahu’s legacy has been one of the most, if not the most destructive legacy for Israel, for the whole region, and I think in many ways, by legitimising fascism and violence and manipulation and control as well as corruption, he has created a situation where the chances of peace have become all that more difficult, if not impossible.”
Confronting Iran
After 12 years in power, Netanyahu as been central in reminding western nations of what he sees as the malign behaviour of Iran. Yet in that time, Iran has come closer and closer to obtaining a nuclear weapon. Mr Danon doesn’t see this as a failure.
He told me: “I think the fact that he put Iran on the spotlight in the last decade and everybody today sees the real threat coming from Tehran… maybe some people see different ways to deal with the threat, but he exposed it and he mobilised our intelligence agencies to bring information. And today the Iranians cannot work quietly, continue with their ideas. All the spotlights on them.”
The last few years of his premiership have been dominated by his corruption trial – three cases of fraud, bribery and breach of trust. The trial is ongoing.
Image: Netanyahu is said to have used Trump-style tactics long before the former US president came to power
The legacy?
Netanyahu presided over a prolonged period of peace within Israel, but even that was in doubt with recent sectarian violence between Arabs and Jews which he did nothing to calm.
He signed unprecedented and laudable diplomatic normalisation deals with Gulf Arab nations, but on that core issue which defines the land he’s ruled for so long, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, something which many Israelis seem oddly oblivious to, there are no solutions.
Netanyahu failed to bring about a lasting peace and chose instead the status quo which works for Israelis but does not for the Palestinians.
In his final interview before he died in 2016, former Israeli president and prime minister Shimon Peres was asked if he still thought there was a chance for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
He said: “I don’t think there [is] another alternative. Neither for the Palestinians, nor for us. The only alternative is an ongoing war. But contrary to what people think, in war there are no victories, only victims. No war is ever finished unless its being replaced by peace.”
Netanyahu and his supporters will claim he achieved many victories. But he did not replace war with peace.
An audacious Ukrainian drone attack against multiple airbases across Russia is a humiliating security breach for Vladimir Putin that will doubtless trigger a furious response.
Pro-Kremlin bloggers have described the drone assault – which Ukrainian security sources said hit more than 40 Russian warplanes – as “Russia’s Pearl Harbor” in reference to the Japanese attack against the US in 1941 that prompted Washington to enter the Second World War.
The Ukrainian operation – which used small drones smuggled into Russia, hidden in mobile sheds and launched off the back of trucks – also demonstrated how technology and imagination have transformed the battlefield, enabling Ukraine to seriously hurt its far more powerful opponent.
Moscow will have to retaliate, with speculation already appearing online about whether President Putin will again threaten the use of nuclear weapons.
“We hope that the response will be the same as the US response to the attack on their Pearl Harbor or even harsher,” military blogger Roman Alekhin wrote on his Telegram channel.
Codenamed ‘Spider’s Web’, the mission on Sunday was the culmination of one and a half years of planning, according to a security source.
More on Russia
Related Topics:
In that time, Ukraine’s secret service smuggled first-person view (FPV) drones into Russia, sources with knowledge of the operation said.
Flat-pack, garden-office style sheds were also secretly transported into the country.
Image: The drones were hidden in truck containers. Pic: SBU Security Service
The oblong sheds were then built and drones were hidden inside, before the containers were put on the back of trucks and driven to within range of their respective targets.
At a chosen time, doors on the roofs of the huts were opened remotely and the drones were flown out. Each was armed with a bomb that was flown into the airfields, with videos released by the security service that purportedly showed them blasting into Russian aircraft.
Image: These drones were used to destroy Russian bomber aircraft. Pic: SBU Security Service
Follow The World
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday
Among the targets were Tu-95 and Tu-22 bomber aircraft that can launch cruise missiles, according to the Ukrainian side. An A-50 airborne early warning aircraft was also allegedly hit. This is a valuable platform that is used to command and control operations.
The use of such simple technology to destroy multi-million-pound aircraft will be watched with concern by governments around the world.
Suddenly, every single military base, airfield and warship will appear that little bit more vulnerable if any truck nearby could be loaded with killer drones.
The most immediate focus, though, will be on how Mr Putin responds.
Previous attacks by Ukraine inside Russia have triggered retaliatory strikes and increasingly threatening rhetoric from the Kremlin.
But this latest operation is one of the biggest and most significant, and comes on the eve of a new round of peace talks between Moscow and Kyiv that are meant to take place in Turkey. It is not clear if that will still happen.
US President Donald Trump has been pushing for the two sides to make peace but Russia has only escalated its war.
Ukraine clearly felt it had nothing to lose but to also go on the attack.
Two people are dead and nearly 560 people were arrested after disorder broke out in France following Paris Saint-Germain’s victory in the Champions League final, the French interior ministry has said.
The ministry added 192 people were injured and there were 692 fires, including 264 involving vehicles.
A 17-year-old boy was stabbed to death in the city of Dax during a PSG street party after Saturday night’s final in Munich, the national police service said.
The second person killed was a man who was hit by a car while riding a scooter during PSG celebrations, the interior minister’s office said.
Paris police chief Laurent Nuñez has said the man was in his 20s and although the incident is still being investigated, it appears his death was linked to the disorder.
Meanwhile, French authorities have reported that a police officer is in a coma following the clashes.
Image: A burning bike on the Champs Elysees during the disorder. Pic: Reuters
The officer had been hit by a firecracker that emerged from a crowd of supporters in Coutances in the Manche department of northwestern France, according to reports in the country.
Initial investigations reportedly suggest the incident was accidental and the police officer was not deliberately targeted.
The perpetrator has not been identified.
Image: A man walks past teargas during incidents after the Champions League final soccer match between Paris Saint-Germain and Inter Milan. Pic: AP
Image: A burning bike on the Champs Elysees during the disorder. Pic: Reuters
The interior ministry earlier said 22 security forces workers were injured during the chaos – including 18 who were injured in Paris, along with seven firefighters.
In a news conference today, Mr Nuñez said only nine of the force’s officers had been injured in the French capital.
He added that fireworks were directed at police and firefighters were attacked while responding to car fires.
There were 559 arrests across the country during the disorder, including 491 in Paris. Of those detained across the country, 320 were taken into police custody – with 254 in the French capital.
Mr Nuñez said although most people wanted to celebrate PSG’s win, some only wanted to get involved in fights with police.
He also said the force is only at “half-time” in its response because the PSG team will be celebrating their Champions League victory on the Champs Élysées later today.
Image: Police in Paris during the disorder. Pic: Reuters
Image: Police in Paris during the disorder. Pic: Reuters
Mr Nuñez said that the police presence and military presence in Paris will be increased on the ground for the parade.
It comes after flares and fireworks were set off in the French capital after PSG beat Inter Milan 5-0 in Munich – the biggest ever victory in a Champions League final.
Around 5,400 police were deployed across Parisafter the game, with officers using tear gas and pepper spray on the Champs Élysées.
Image: Pic: AP
Image: Pic: AP
At the top of the Champs Élysées, a water cannon was used to protect the Place de l’Etoile, near the landmark Arc de Triomphe.
Police said a large crowd not watching the match tried to push through a barrier to make contact with officers.
Some 131 arrests were made, including 30 who broke into a shoe shop on the Champs Élysées.
Police have said a total of four shops, including a car dealership and a barbers, were targeted during the disorder in Paris.
Two cars were set alight close to Parc des Princes, police said.
PSG forward Ousmane Dembélé appealed for calm in a post-match interview with Canal+, saying: “Let’s celebrate this but not tear everything up in Paris.”
Image: Pics: AP
After the final played at the Allianz Arena in Munich, Germany, thousands of supporters also tried to rush the field.
Police lined up in front of the PSG end of the stadium at the final whistle, but struggled to contain the fans for several minutes when they came down from the stands following the trophy presentation.
Image: Pics: AP
Désiré Doué, the 19-year-old who scored two goals and assisted one in the final, said after the game: “I don’t have words. But what I can say is, ‘Thank you Paris,’ we did it.”
Despite being a supporter of PSG’s rivals Olympique de Marseille, French President Emmanuel Macron also said on social media: “A glorious day for PSG!
“Bravo, we are all proud. Paris, the capital of Europe this evening.”
Mr Macron’s office said the president would receive the players at the Elysee Palace on Sunday.
Follow The World
Listen to The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim every Wednesday