He pushed limits to protect his power. But he didn’t turn Israel into a dictatorship; he helped it become a modern, free, and prosperous society.
He pushed limits to protect his power. But he didn’t turn Israel into a dictatorship; he helped it become a modern, free, and prosperous society.
O ne of the lessons we can take away from Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent loss in Israel, writes former Obama strategist Ben Rhodes, is that “to defeat an autocrat who attacks democratic norms and institutions, oppositions need to unify under a big tent. In Israel’s case, that even led [Yair] Lapid to compromise on who would start as PM, but he understood the imperative of getting Bibi out first.”
It’s weird, is it not, that this “autocrat” lost his election in a nation that features an antagonistic press, an independent (and often zealously partisan) judiciary, full voting rights for all citizens, and numerous political parties — even some openly anti-Zionist ones? Like many contemporary progressives, Rhodes, antagonistic to individual liberty, economic freedom, and constitutional norms here at home, has a highly malleable definition of “democracy” and “autocrat.”
It’s actually a small miracle that Israel, despite dealing with constant external pressures that are alien to most free people and an insane parliamentary system, is capable of the peaceful transference of power. The corrupt Palestinian Authority, for example, didn’t hold an election during the entirety of Netanyahu’s twelve years in office. And yet, American progressives will campaign to create a state run by that very entity. And as far as I can tell, neither Rhodes nor any of his allies have referred to the leaders of Fatah or Hamas — or anyone in Iran, for that matter — as “autocrats.”
The demonization of Netanyahu by the American media and Democrats picked up with his open opposition to Barack Obama on the Iran Deal — an opposition, incidentally, shared by the leader of every major Israeli party at the time. It really took off after the election of Donald Trump. Yet it’s about more than that. Most contemporary progressives now talk about the Jewish State itself as an illegitimate colonialist Western project. It certainly doesn’t help that it has become a highly successful capitalistic state.
That is a relatively recent occurrence. For a long time, left-wingers romanticized and idealized Israel, not for its Jewish attributes or its liberalism, but for its socialistic institutions. When I was growing up in the late 1970s and 1980s, “kibbutzes,” communal rural communities populated by a small fraction of the country, were treated as exemplars of Israeli life by secular Jews. We celebrated leaders such as Ben Gurion, who was, by almost any standard, more “autocratic” than Netanyahu. If the classically liberal–minded Revisionists hadn’t been purged from government in 1948 by the socialists, sometimes violently, I suspect Israel would have been a lot less popular among American Jews.
One of Netanyahu’s sins was pushing through economic liberalization that transformed Israel into a nation that resembles the aspirations of Revisionists rather than Laborites — a far freer and more prosperous place. It is the kind of place that “democratic socialists” do not praise.
When Netanyahu took over the Finance Ministry for Ariel Sharon in 2003, Israel was in midst of its worst economic recession in history — though the nation’s brittle economy was often in trouble. Under Netanyahu — who is often incorrectly lumped in ideologically with economic populists of Europe — Israel went from a nation strangled by unions, bureaucracy, and corruption to one that ranks in the top 30 on world freedom economic indexes, typically above Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. In 2004, the public sector accounted for 55 percent of the economy; that dropped to 26 percent (though there has been an uptick in recent years). He cut the top individual tax rate from 64 percent to 44 percent and corporate taxes from 36 percent to 18 percent. He capped government spending for three years, raised the pension age, and stabilized the historically wobbly currency.
Shimon Peres, then leader of the opposition Labor Party and beloved by the American and European Left, famously denounced Netanyahu’s economic program as “swinish capitalism.”
The reforms sparked an economic and tech boom. During his twelve years as prime minister, Israel’s per capita GDP grew over 60 percent, from $27,000 to $43,000, putting it among the top 20 nations in the world, ahead of places such as France, Japan, New Zealand, and the U.K. And though this doesn’t mesh with the narrative, Israel’s Arab middle class also grew by over ten percentage points during his time in office. In the first half of the aughts, Israeli unemployment was regularly above 10 percent. It reached a record low of 3.4 percent right before COVID broke out.
Israel is also one of the world’s leading tech hubs. To put this in perspective, the country has around 77 million fewer people than either Turkey or Iran.
A hard-liner on foreign policy, a moderate on social issues, and a capitalist, Netanyahu was, like many others, also a flawed leader who pushed the limits to protect his power. Like many Israelis, he was a ruthless politician. Yet Netanyahu was also a far better champion of liberal values than Rhodes or Bernie Sanders or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or most of those who demonize him as a dictator.