Thomas Friedman calls for a radical reappraisal of the U.S.-Israel alliance:
For the first time, the leader of Israel is an irrational actor, a danger not only to Israelis but also to important American interests and values.
This demands an immediate reassessment by both President Biden and the pro-Israel Jewish lobby in America. Netanyahu essentially told them all: "Trust the process," "Israel is a healthy democracy" and, in a whisper, "Don’t worry about the religious zealots and Jewish supremacists I brought into power to help block my trial for corruption. I will keep Israel within its traditional political and foreign policy boundaries. It’s me, your old pal, Bibi."
They wanted to trust him, and it all turned out to be a lie.
It's still a lie. Israel's ruling coalition has not shelved its legislation for "judicial reform," which would block Netanyahu's criminal trial. It has only delayed it. Most observers, including the protesters, see this as merely a stalling action. The proposal will return.
Suspecting this, President Biden said yesterday that the Israeli government "cannot continue down this road." To this, Netanyahu peremptorily replied: "[Israel] makes its decisions by the will of its people and not based on pressures from abroad, including from the best of friends." In short: Stuff it, Mr. President, and "stuff it" to the best friend, closest ally and largest financial and military supporter that Israel has ever had.
Friedman goes on to write that "it has been obvious to many of us that this Israeli government would go to extremes that none before it ever dared." Netanyahu is "giv[ing] a free hand to the Jewish supremacists and nationalist zealots" in his cabinet — a "free hand to rule as he wishes."
And yet the ethnic supremacy, nationalist zealotry and imperious arrogance that "Bibi" is hustling are unmistakable parts of a menacing global pattern. For this, it seems, is the century of authoritarianism.
Within it, Israel's Netanyahu and his ruling ambitions are virtually indistinguishable from the usual suspects of Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping and their ambitions achieved. These are the world's leading hooligans of unlimited domestic power and international avarice — the formidable authoritarian villains of whom the free world is said to be increasingly distrustful. Customary is to lump them into "the East," a geopolitical duo of bad actors hostile to, and squaring off against, the West.
But look around, if you've the stomach. At the rate the free world is going, how much veritable "squaring off" will the East require?
In the last decade, the West has elevated to either high office or portentous national influence the ruffians, rowdies and boundless authoritarian scoundrels of Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen, Alexander Gauland, Alice Weidel, Viktor Orbán, Jarosław Kaczyński, López Obrador, Nicolás Moros and Recep Erdoğan. No doubt I have overlooked others.
They — these democratic corrupters of democracy and freebooters of freedom — seem to be everywhere these days, throughout the West as well as in the East. Ideologically, the world appears to be on a "unipolar" trajectory of authoritarianism, not a bipolar or multipolar farrago of competing powers.
The West's demagogues and mountebanks sing to the bodies politic their siren songs of "traditional values," much as Putin is doing via proper Eastern Orthodoxy and reveries of orderly Stalinism. In China, Xi is resurrecting politico-cultural Maoism. In the Western hemisphere and its periphery, traditionalism is thrown in with some manner of ethnic supremacy, nationalist zealotry and, not infrequently, imperious exceptionalism (in this, the U.S. is not alone). Anti-wokeism and anti-multiculturalism have additional appeal.
And yet none of that really means much to those hungering for high Western office or its continuation. What they most if not singularly desire is power of Putinesque or Xiite magnitude. From ethnic supremacy to anti-multiculturalism, these are but a sociopolitical means to a personal end. And the means possess a frightening degree of popular appeal, blind as vox populi can surely be.
Of Netanyahu, Friedman writes that he is "a leader who has come completely loose of any ethical moorings." His untethered, authoritarian character was always there, though, the dark void in him, just as it has always been in Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán, Vladimir Putin & Co.
What we are witnessing is, perhaps, less East vs. West than West meets East.