Middle Israel: Netanyahu's real legacy is Israel's era of political decay - opinion

It was spring 1999, and Netanyahu’s premiership seemed to have come and gone, making way for the previous era’s swift return. It took hardly a year for all to see that Barak had picked up from where Netanyahu had left off, and so would the next two prime ministers, all of whom would share the Netanyahu era’s abandonment of the previous era’s values of national leadership.

Like Netanyahu, Barak was a soloist who took grand decisions with minimal consultation. His resolve to run things alone was hinted at thickly even before his disastrous premiership began, when he deliberately installed talented people in positions where they did not belong.

That is how, for instance, Barak exiled renowned historian and accomplished diplomat Shlomo Ben-Ami to the internal security ministry, an arena about which he knew precious little, rather than make him minister of education or welfare – positions where he might have starred.

Like Netanyahu, Barak believed he was a lot smarter than everyone else. Like Netanyahu’s staff, Barak’s aides never lasted, and like Netanyahu’s ministers, Barak’s were extras in a one-man show. That is why Barak, exactly like Netanyahu, quickly lost his foreign minister, David Levy.

Much more crucially, Barak fully shared the political era’s main feature – dishonesty. Like Netanyahu, who promised repeatedly that he would destroy Hamas while, in fact, he would cultivate it, Barak promised he would focus on social justice while, in fact, he busied himself with foreign affairs.

That is, of course, besides sharing the political era’s frivolity. Just like Netanyahu consciously tore apart Israeli society, an effort that brought us to the brink of civil war, Barak dived head-on into ambitious diplomatic negotiations, an art about which he understood nothing, and a fiasco that resulted in wholesale violence.

And so, like Netanyahu after his first term, the public unseated Barak prematurely and swiftly, handing him the worst electoral defeat ever seen here. The zeitgeist, however, had gone nowhere, and the new victor, Ariel Sharon, would be part of the epoch no less than Netanyahu and Barak.

Sharon did say much earlier, in 2001, that he would support the establishment of a Palestinian state. However, the man who had been Greater Israel’s most vocal enthusiast and most effective builder never explained when and why he made his grand ideological U-turn.

The previous era’s leaders were different.

With Ben-Gurion and his successors, what Israelis saw was what they got. That era’s leaders were consistent and sincere. Yes, Menachem Begin gave land for peace. But he never claimed the Sinai Desert was part of the Promised Land that he vowed to retain. He said that about the West Bank and Gaza, which he indeed clutched.

Sharon’s failure to be honest about his plans for Gaza – like Barak’s failure to deliver on his promise that his top priority would be “the old lady at the end of the hospital’s corridor” – was emulated by the Netanyahu era’s fourth prime minister, Ehud Olmert.

Never mind that Olmert did not consult any formal forum before promising to take the disengagement formula from Gaza to the West Bank. What matters for our discussion is that after the Second Lebanon War, Olmert quietly abandoned the plan that had been his main election promise. Why? Never throughout his premiership did he publicly explain.

Such was the political era that Bibi Netanyahu launched, shaped, and dominated; an epoch of dishonesty, shallowness, improvisation, and frivolity, and this is before discussing these four prime ministers’ problematic relations with the law.

Yes, there was a fifth prime minister in this era, Naftali Bennett, and nominally also a sixth, if one counts Yair Lapid’s six months as Bennett’s successor. But the pair’s stints were too brief to judge their personal place in the political epoch. Then again, their short-lived government’s rise and fall were indeed animated by the noise, stench, and evil of the Netanyahu era.

First, Netanyahu had his lawmakers heckle, holler, and jeer as Bennett tried to deliver his acceptance speech. Few moments evoked the Netanyahu epoch more powerfully, as his lackeys lied about the law – denying that an Israeli prime minister is to be elected by the Knesset, regardless of his faction’s size – and, while at it, behaved like a barbarian mob.

And then, in the spirit of the era’s unabashed cynicism, the political mob proceeded from lie to theft, buying one of Bennett’s lawmakers for a seat in Netanyahu’s cabinet.

Such, in brief, were the Netanyahu years – an epoch of political decay that began 30 years ago last week and, come next fall, will hopefully reach its long-overdue end.