Susan Walsh/AP Photo
In this January 28, 2020, photo, President Donald Trump speaks during an event with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the East Room of the White House in Washington.
Haaretz’s Amir Tibon notes that “Just as America forcefully rejects Trump, Israel doubles down on Trumpism,” and Isabel Kershner, writing in the Times, has a rundown of (just) some of what Tibon has in mind. For starters, even before his government is fully formed, Bibi Netanyahu has “agreed to hand control over Israel’s internal security to an ultranationalist. Then he pledged to give a party that opposes gay rights and liberal values wide powers over some programs taught in public schools. Finally, he promised a religious party that seeks to annex the West Bank authority over much of daily life in the occupied territories.” Naturally, just as it does with Trumpism, the Times is deploying language designed to downplay what ought to be appropriate small-d democratic alarmism over these developments. Netanyahu is doing much of this because he needs these parties to defenestrate Israel’s judiciary—otherwise, he’d likely be found guilty of multiple counts of corruption, would not be allowed to serve as prime minister, and could also be looking at slammer time. (Here is a rundown of some of those corruption charges.)
Does any of this sound familiar?
As I write in my awesome new book We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, of the time both Trump and Netanyahu led their respective nations:
While the Israeli leader did not indulge all of Trump’s most bizarre beliefs and personality quirks, the two men shared a remarkable number of both personal and political prejudices. Both politicians were profoundly corrupt, even compared to their respective colleagues and predecessors, and each sought desperately to cling to power while faced with the possibility of being imprisoned in the event of political defeat for the various crimes they appeared to have committed (in Netanyahu’s case, while in office, and in Trump’s both in and out of office). Both leaders also displayed degrees of racism, nativism, and ethnocentrism that were considered extreme even by the standards of the racist, nativist, and ethnocentric parties they led. Politically, both were aspiring authoritarians who were eager to forge alliances with fellow illiberal politicians consolidating power based on ethnonationalist appeals in places such as Russia, Turkey, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, the Philippines, Brazil, Egypt, Oman, Azerbaijan, the Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. Neither evinced any patience, much less respect, for democratic niceties such as freedom of speech, freedom of the press, or the separation of powers. The fact that so many of the regimes they courted engaged in the exploitation of antisemitism at home for political gain was, at least for Netanyahu, more than offset by their more intense focus on the Islamic threat they believed they faced from their own citizens, the refugees flooding their borders, and the fiery rhetoric emanating from Iran and elsewhere that led those regimes to wish to work with Israel. Common enemies bred friendships of convenience. Netanyahu repeatedly excused Trump’s antisemitism and that of his political allies. So did Trump’s Jewish Republican supporters, who were willing to make the same tradeoff that had appealed to the neoconservatives of a previous generation, when they had chosen to embrace antisemitic but pro-Zionist evangelical preachers beginning in the 1970s. As long as Trump was willing to indulge Netanyahu, they were willing to indulge Trump.
Something else the two leaders had in common was the incredible largesse of the late right-wing Republican funder and “pro-Israel” extremist billionaire Sheldon Adelson. Israel has tougher corruption laws than the U.S. does, and so he could not as easily just shower legal bribes on Netanyahu as he did with Trump. Among the many hundreds of those was apparently, as Maggie Haberman reported in her book (long after it happened), a straightforward promise of $20 million to Trump’s campaign if he would agree to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. (Man, I gave a talk in May of this year to what remained of the staff at the now mere consulate in Tel Aviv, and it was one sad place.) Adelson also went to the trouble of starting an entirely new newspaper in Israel for the express purpose of supporting Netanyahu’s career and made it free to readers, as Adelson was more than willing to lose what for him was chump change on it.
The paper, Israel Hayom, paid journalists so well that many good ones went to work for it, and people actually wanted to read it: an extremely rare occurrence in the history of newspaper giveaways. Its circulation skyrocketed and put many more legitimate publications either out of business or on the rocks. (One of the Bibi scandals noted above is a direct outgrowth of this relationship, though Bibi lucked out when Adelson died—because “dead men don’t testify.) Now, as just discussed in this Nikita Lalwani/Monkey Cage analysis and interview published by The Washington Post about a new paper in The Journal of Politics by the political scientists Guy Grossman, Yotam Margalit, and Tamar Mitts, we learn (as the Post puts it in its headline): “Rich people who own newspapers can shift elections. Israel shows how.”
Obviously, I need only say the words “Rupert Murdoch” or “Elon Musk” or “Mark Zuckerberg” or “John Malone” to see how nefariously this phenomenon has warped our politics and therefore our country, as I discussed here, back in June. Adelson got into this particular act as well, vastly overpaying (in secret) for the Las Vegas Review-Journal in order to try to play kingmaker in Nevada; though this represents an all-but-insignificant share of his contributions (in this case, de facto) to the Republican Party over the years.
If there’s an afterlife, Adelson is likely looking up from below with a sense of extreme satisfaction, at least as regards Israel. (I have pages and pages [and pages] on Adelson and his effect on the discourse in both Israel and the U.S. in the book.) For instance, he once told Jewish Week that “the two-state solution is a stepping stone for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.” And, as he said in a 2014 address, if “Israel won’t be a democratic state, [s]o what?”
Whether the United States, and more specifically American Jews, will go along with what looks to be a more and more illiberal, theocratic, aggressive, and oppressive Israel under Netanyahu’s new government is an open question. Antony Blinken played it coy on this question in his address to J Street on Sunday. But as this AP story made clear, and as I discussed with Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC last Sunday (much to the consternation of these folks), I think we’re just looking at a period of relative calm before what might just be an endless storm. I almost feel sorry for the folks at the large, donor-driven legacy Israel organizations as they try to pretend that all of this is somehow going to be OK.
Kudos to my friend Tom Edsall for asking what he calls “the larger question that supersedes all the ins and outs of the maneuvering over the [2024] Republican presidential nomination and the future of the party” in his recent Times column: “How, in a matter of less than a decade, could this once-proud country have evolved to the point that there is a serious debate over choosing a presidential candidate who is a lifelong opportunist, a pathological and malignant narcissist, a sociopath, a serial liar, a philanderer, a tax cheat who does not pay his bills and a man who socializes with Holocaust deniers, who has pardoned his criminal allies, who encouraged a violent insurrection, who, behind a wall of bodyguards, is a coward and who, without remorse, continually undermines American democracy?”
I listened to the audio version of Bono’s memoir and I really enjoyed it, but I also appreciated this excellent interview with him by the Times Magazine’s terrific interviewer David Marchese (especially for his footnotes). My favorite part was this question: “Isn’t citing Thomas Piketty a little dicey for you, given what he says about fairer taxation?” Its excellence notwithstanding, I don’t think the piece quite lives up to the standard set by this Encyclopedia Britannica entry on Bono by then-nine-year-old Eve Rose Alterman (and her co-author). It was weird, moreover, that this great mentioner, who impressed even Jann Wenner with his name-dropping cred, found barely a word for Bruce Springsteen. Hello, Bono, you ingrate, remember this? Or this? Or this? Or this? I mean, in a book that takes fully 20 hours and 25 minutes for you to read (and sing), you did not notice? I mean for goodness’ sake, George W. Bush gets like a whole hour to himself. Sheesh … I waited and waited but I still haven’t found what I was looking for.
Speaking of great questions, kudos also to Terry Gross for asking Steven Spielberg if he had seen the documentary about porn films entitled Shaving Ryan’s Privates.
Also, I’d never heard of James Austin Johnson before, but all Dylan fans will relish, if they have not already, this shtick he did on the Jimmy Fallon show.
Back to Bruce—wasn’t this a weirdly touching version of “Born to Run” he played at the genuinely moving and quite funny tribute to Jon Stewart at the Mark Twain awards?
Finally, finally, here’s my song for the man to whom Christian Walker offered this advice late Tuesday night: “Don’t beat women, hold guns to peoples heads, fund abortions then pretend your pro-life, stalk cheerleaders, leave your multiple minor children alone to chase more fame, lie, lie, lie, say stupid crap, and make a fool of your family … And then maybe you can win a senate seat.”
