Israel Matzav: Netanyahu learned the wrong lessons

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Netanyahu learned the wrong lessons

Prime Minister Netanyahu has (apparently) approved the appointment of General Nitzan Alon as the head of the IDF's Central Command after completing a term as the Commander of the Judea and Samaria division. Alon is a radical Leftist, and one has to wonder how and why Netanyahu approved this appointment.

Moreover, Caroline Glick wonders why Netanyahu has become the great protector of the Supreme Court, allowing the court to avoid any accountability to anyone.

Glick writes that Netanyahu has learned the lessons of his shortened first term too well, but those lessons are no longer applicable.

Both Netanyahu's own experience and that of Sharon apparently led the premier to the conclusion that he must preside over a broad coalition in which no single party has the ability to destabilize his government. He also decided that he has to govern from the center.

On the face of it, these are reasonable goals. The problem is the way Netanyahu is applying them. Netanyahu is implementing these lessons in a manner that would have made sense in 1999, or even 2005. But a lot has changed since then.

For instance, Netanyahu is ignoring the fact that Israeli society at the end of 2011 is far more right-wing than it was in 1999. In 1999, the peace process had yet to collapse. The Palestinian terror war had yet to begin. The notion that Netanyahu was responsible for the absence of peace still sounded credible to many Israelis in 1999.

This is not the case today.

Likewise, when Sharon was incapacitated, the public was still unaware of the dimensions of the strategic folly of his withdrawal from Gaza. This lack of awareness is what enabled Sharon to present Kadima as a centrist party and his Likud opponents as ideological extremists. Today Kadima is overwhelmingly recognized as just another leftist party. Sharon's opponents in Likud are led by Netanyahu, who is popularly perceived as pragmatic and responsible.

Moreover, the ideological right is not the same as it was in 1999. Likud's largest coalition partner is Israel Beitenu. Its leader, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, did not have a problem bringing his party into then prime minister Ehud Olmert's governing coalition in 2006. For better or for worse, Israel Beitenu's rise and the corresponding collapse of the national religious parties has brought about a situation where rightist parties' ideological commitment is now tempered by political opportunism.

All of these changes do not render Netanyahu's lessons from his failure and Sharon's success incorrect. But they do indicate strongly that Netanyahu's assessment of his own options for governing within the framework of those lessons is unnecessarily constrained.

With the political center far to the right of where it was in 1999 and 2006, Netanyahu does not have to embrace the Left's agenda in order to be perceived as a centrist. To the contrary, doing so harms him. The last twelve years have not been kind to the Left. The judicial excesses of the likes of Procaccia and her colleagues have soured much of the public on the Court. Public approval of the Court has been trending downward steeply for the past decade.

Unless, of course, Netanyahu has become a true believer of the Left. Well, Caroline, I warned you about this.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: Binyamin Netanyahu, Caroline Glick, Ehud Barak, Nitzan Alon, Supreme Court