SNAPSHOTFebruary 8, 2019Israel

Netanyahu’s
Foreign Policy Is
Bad for Israel
The Costs of Befriending Illiberal
Leaders
By Dahlia Scheindlin

The moment Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

called early elections last December, Israel’s political
parties sprang into action, reshuffling themselves at a
pace that was frenzied even by Israeli standards. All of
them hope to be next in line; after a decade of practically
unrivalled leadership, Netanyahu may finally be
vulnerable.
The long-serving prime minister faces a thicket of
corruption investigations. New political forces are
challenging one of his core claims to power, that he is the
exclusive defender of Israel’s security. A recent
poll showed that nearly half of Israelis do not want him
to serve another term, and just over one-third
do. Netanyahu will still be hard to beat, but he is clearly
rattled. In addition to wily campaign tactics, he is using
his stature as Israel's top statesman to boost his
popularity. He is aggressively marketing his foreign
policy achievements, and may be planning new ones
before the election.
NETANYAHU’S FIGHT TO SURVIVE
The most immediate threat to Netanyahu’s future comes
from a set of corruption investigations. Attorney General
Avichai Mandelblit has indicated that he might decide
whether to indict the prime minister even before the
election. An indictment would not legally obligate
Netanyahu to resign, but it could lead voters finally to
sour on him. Corruption, moreover, isn’t his only
problem. Many Israelis are disturbed by his longevity in
office. Others are fed up with his divisive populist
governing style.
Soon after Netanyahu announced that elections would be
held in April, Benny Gantz, a former chief of the general
staff of the Israeli Defense Forces, founded the Israeli
Resilience Party, which quickly climbed in the polls.
Some surveys now show Israeli Resilience winning
around 22 seats out of the 120 in the Knesset, second
only to the ruling Likud (which currently holds 30). If
Gantz’s party were to merge with another centrist party
led by Yair Lapid, the new block could pull ahead of
Likud, according to some polls.
So far, Netanyahu’s support remains solid. Since the
prime minister’s fourth electoral victory in 2015, Likud
has consistently polled at or close to its current Knesset
strength. In February 2018, when the police first
recommended that the Attorney General indict
Netanyahu in connection with two corruption cases (they
added a third recommendation in December), his
numbers actually rose slightly.
Likud voters are known for their party loyalty, which is
often passed down through families. And Netanyahu has
attracted a faithful constituency through his brand of
populist, personality-based leadership, which he has
honed over two and a half decades. But the prime
minister is not complacent about his political standing.
Over the last decade, he has pursued a bold foreign policy
vision that has proved controversial to outsiders, but
which is vaunted at home. Now he is hoping to cash in
politically. In a recent poll, fully 60 percent of Israelis
said Netanyahu was the best choice on foreign relations,
three times more than the proportion that chose Gantz
and far above the number who actually plan on voting for
him (about 25 percent). By contrast, the same poll shows
the Netanyahu and Gantz tied on security.
Hardly a week has gone by in the last four years without a
highly publicized foreign policy achievement attributable
to Netanyahu’s government. In recent months alone,
Netanyahu, who serves as foreign minister as well as
prime minister, has visited Chad, attended the
inauguration of the Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro,
hosted Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte and the
Italian foreign minister in Jerusalem, and staged a
surprise visit to Omani Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al Said in
Muscat.
Foreign policy may seem an unlikely campaign weapon.
Most voters pay little attention to it, and in Israel,
security from regional conflicts and terrorism ranks far
higher than other foreign relations issues on the agenda,
often topping even economic concerns. Indeed,
Netanyahu draws much of his support from his image as
“Mr. Security.” But Gantz’s military background makes
Netanyahu’s security image less distinctive. The former
IDF Chief has already absorbed another ex-general into
his party—former Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon—and
might add more. Some have nicknamed Israel Resilience
“the junta.”
With Gantz and his party encroaching on the prime
minister’s security territory, Netanyahu has shrewdly
exploited his energetic global efforts. Israelis were once
skeptical of Netanyahu’s overly American background,
but now they compliment his superb English and
diplomatic acumen. By holding the premiership and the
foreign ministry for the last four years, he towers above
all other Israeli politicians in foreign affairs. And while
his policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains
murky—he rarely names an endgame—Netanyahu loves
to discuss his foreign policy goals and achievements.
One of the most prominent of these has been convincing
the United States to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to
Jerusalem. Netanyahu expresses open contempt for the
Obama administration and lavishes praise on the current
U.S. president, Donald Trump. In February, Netanyahu’s
campaign posted giant billboards along with ads on
Instagram and Facebook, showing him shaking hands
with Trump and bearing the slogan “a different league.”
The Israeli media was thrilled to report that Trump
posted a photo of one of these billboards on his
Instagram account.
Netanyahu regularly drives home the idea that western
European governments’ focus on human rights and
criticism of Israeli settlements and occupation policy
makes them anti-Israel. He tends to ignore the EU’s
status as Israel’s top trading partner, and instead, bitterly
protested its requirement that manufacturers label
products made in Israeli settlements. (The labels are a
political irritant in Israel, but they have no real economic
consequences.) His message is that Israel will not
countenance outside criticism of its policy toward the
Palestinians.
But Netanyahu’s dismissive attitude toward western
Europe and his renewed intimacy with the United States
look like fine tuning compared to another of his major
foreign policy initiatives: shifting Israel’s diplomatic
center of gravity away from other democracies and
toward more illiberal leaders and countries. In addition
to attending Bolsonaro’s inauguration, he has maintained
a complex but largely cooperative relationship with
Russia and plans to meet Russian President Vladimir
Putin again later in February. He warmly hosted Indian
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, turned China into a
major trade partner, visited authoritarian Azerbaijan to
strike lucrative arms deals.
Netanyahu has even been willing to set aside core Israeli
commitments to win friends. He is famously warm
toward Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, despite
Orban’s disturbing anti-Semitic rhetoric. In 2018, in
order to maintain strong relations with Poland,
Netanyahu expressed approval of a new Polish law, which
stifles the history of Polish collaboration in the Holocaust
and has left historians aghast. In February, Israel will
host the Visegrád group, which is made up of the Czech
Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Netanyahu has
been working to strengthen relations with the Gulf
States, and there are even rumors of an impending
breakthrough with Saudi Arabia.
Befriending unsavory regimes is nothing new for Israel.
The country kept close ties with Romania under Nicolae
Ceausescu, helped Idi Amin plot and execute his coup in
Uganda (before he later turned against Israel), and gave
military and economic support to South Africa’s
apartheid regime. Generally, the Israeli governments
deemed these relationships necessary but kept ties quiet.
Netanyahu, by contrast, openly uses his new foreign
friendships to burnish his domestic political image and
advance his strategy for Israel. He tells close associates
that he is determined to reduce Israel’s international
isolation. And he regularly tells the public that Israel
need not move on the Palestinian issue in order to
maintain, or even improve, its international standing.
His strategy seems to be working. In a 2018 survey for
Mitvim, an Israeli foreign policy think tank, nearly 60
percent of respondents believed that Israel’s standing the
world was good or excellent and fully 86 percent said the
same about U.S.-Israeli relations; both figures have
improved steadily over the last three years. Russia
ranked as the most important country for Israel after the
United States, according to the survey, and a slight
plurality (42 percent) said Israel should not consider the
nature of a country’s government when cultivating allies,
while 40 percent preferred democratic allies.

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE

Netanyahu’s skillful global navigation may help him
maintain the public attitude expressed in voters’ oft-
repeated phrase: “there’s no one else.” Despite his
controversial leadership, Netanyahu stands a good
chance of winning a fifth term. If he does, he is sure to
move ahead with his brand of foreign relations. That will
be bad for Israel. Netanyahu’s friendships with the
current right-wing governments in Hungary and Poland
could legitimize anti-Semitism and Holocaust-
revisionism in those countries. Elsewhere, if
authoritarian regimes are overthrown, their successors
may not look kindly on Israel’s past role. Today, South
Africa is one of Israel’s harshest critics; it regularly votes
against Israel at the UN and recalled its ambassador for
several months in 2018 after Israel killed scores of
protesters in Gaza last May. Even the United States could
pose problems. Support for Israel is already becoming a
partisan issue. Once Trump is gone, the new generation
of left-wing Democrats may not easily forget Israel’s
coziness with his administration.
Netanyahu’s attempts to rebuff international pressure on
the Palestinian issue might work in the short term, as his
new friends are mostly uninterested in either peace or
Palestinian rights. But it’s hard to see how failure to
resolve the conflict is good for Israel. Without a solution,
Israel is heading towards becoming an openly unequal
single state or a land of permanent conflict.
By befriending a group of illiberal, semi-democratic, and
authoritarian countries, Israel also raises the question of
how its own democracy is likely to change. People are
known by the company they keep. The same may go for
states. Dore Gold, a stalwart Netanyahu ally and former
Israeli ambassador to the UN told the Hudson
Institute in November that in forging diplomatic
relations, “it’s important to give people an ideological
basis for talking to you, for building a new relationship.”
With Israel’s new eastern European allies, Netanyahu has
done just that. He and Orban share some uncanny
similarities, both in their populist rhetoric—the late
Arthur Finkelstein, a controversial political consultant,
advised both men—and in their policies, including their
tough anti-migrant measures. In Poland, the government
has sought to exercise political control over the justice
system, something Netanyahu’s government has also
attempted, although with more restraint. And like its
counterparts in Poland and Hungary, Netanyahu’s
government has targeted civil society, passing laws that
constrain and demonize groups that support civil
liberties and human rights.
Whether Netanyahu learns from foreign autocrats or
inspires them is not immediately clear. Either way,
Israel’s new friends aren’t likely to encourage the
country’s progressive, cosmopolitan elements. Rather,
such alliances will encourage a less liberal and,
ultimately, less democratic Israel. Netanyahu’s foreign
policy may win votes, but it did not start as an electoral
ploy. If he wins, he will continue apace. If he loses, his
successor should change course.