[Peace-discuss] Conclusion of lrb review of Netanyahu bio

[David Green]

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n16/adam-shatz/the-sea-is-the-same-sea

‘We’re just like you,’ Sara Netanyahu told Trump. ‘The media hate us but
the people love us.’ She is half-right: her husband remains popular among
Israeli Jews. But Trump’s ‘people’ include very few American Jews, and
Israel’s alliance with him has sharpened the divide between American Jews
and the Jewish state. Most American Jews, even some liberals, were willing
to ignore, or rationalise, Israel’s human rights violations against
Palestinians. But they are not willing to countenance the war against
immigrants, the Muslim ban or the erosion of American democracy. The
convergence of Trump’s authoritarian populism and Netanyahu’s
settler-Zionism has further exposed the contradictions between their
liberal convictions and contemporary Israel. The result has been a
re-energised, and increasingly radical, American Jewish left. Bernie
Sanders has spoken out eloquently against Israel’s killings in Gaza,
sparing his audiences the platitudes about Israel’s security, and the
movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions is being led, in part, by
Jewish Voices for Peace. Some Jewish Democrats remain devout supporters of
Israel, but they are increasingly embattled, and support for Israel among
young American Jews is declining.

Netanyahu is not concerned. As Dermer recently explained to the *New York
Times*, Evangelical Christians, who make up ‘a solid quarter of the
population, and are maybe ten, fifteen, twenty times the Jewish
population’, now constitute the ‘backbone’ of US support for Israel. Their
ideas about the Jews are not exactly tender. Reverend Robert Jeffress, who
delivered the first prayer at the opening of the embassy in Jerusalem, says
that ‘you can’t be saved by being a Jew.’ Reverend John C. Hagee, the
televangelist who gave the closing benediction, has described the Holocaust
as God’s way of getting Jews ‘to come back to the land of Israel’.
Netanyahu has yet to pronounce on this theory of the Holocaust, but he has
expressed the view that American Jews are destined to assimilate and
disappear, like the Spanish *conversos* his father disdained. Backed by
Trump and Evangelical Zionists, Netanyahu’s Israel doesn’t need the Jews,
at least not the politically unreliable ones in the diaspora.

Where all this is headed remains unclear. Netanyahu, for the moment, seems
exuberant, emboldened by his ties to Trump, the expansion of trade with
Asia, and the complicity of the Sunni Arab regimes. Israel’s strategic
position has never been stronger, or its neighbours weaker. But the scenes
of unarmed protesters killed by Israeli snipers in Gaza are a reminder of
the discontent that lies beneath the surface. Under Netanyahu, Israel has
run up a substantial bill in blood and tears. Unlike his wife’s credit
card, it will eventually have to be paid.
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