A pale shadow of Ben-Gurion

Netanyahu has a flawed assessment of reality and cautiously avoids momentous decisions at every turn

By ASHER SUSSER
Updated: JANUARY 21, 2016 14:19
The shelling of the Altalena (photo credit: Courtesy)
The shelling of the Altalena
(photo credit: Courtesy)
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU likes to compare himself to Winston Churchill and he aspires to outdo David Ben-Gurion as Israel’s longest serving prime minister.
Unfortunately, Netanyahu is neither a Churchill nor a Ben-Gurion. He is a good speaker, possibly as good in his way as Churchill was. Churchill’s true greatness, however, was not in speechmaking but in his acute perception of reality and his ability to make momentous decisions accordingly.
Ben-Gurion’s reputation as the leading figure among Israel’s founding fathers was similarly not earned by oratory, but by a series of courageous historic decisions that forged Israel’s creation and secured its early years: accepting partition, declaring independence, waging the war of 1948, ingathering the mass immigration, developing Israel’s security doctrine, founding Israel’s nuclear capacity, building the national water carrier – just to mention a few.
Netanyahu, on the other hand, has a flawed assessment of reality and cautiously avoids momentous decisions at every turn. In his nearly 10 years as prime minister, he has not made even one truly historic decision. He famously declared his support for a two-state solution in his 2009 Bar-Ilan speech, but he has since flip-flopped back and forth and has certainly made no decisions to bring a twostate solution any closer. Quite the contrary. He is allowing the country to free-fall into a one-state reality, which could spell disaster for Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people.
In late December, Netanyahu passed what might have been his first truly momentous decision when the government decided to launch a landmark multiyear 15 billion shekel plan to promote greater equality and economic development for Israel’s Arab minority. But the ink had hardly dried on this resolution when Netanyahu exploited a lone gunman attack in Tel Aviv by an Israeli Arab to embark on a delegitimizing tirade against the entire Arab community of Israel.
He then proceeded to place the whole project in doubt by appointing two of his most right-wing colleagues in the cabinet, Yariv Levin and Ze’ev Elkin, to oversee the plan’s implementation.
This was typical of Netanyahu, who tends to play to his right-wing base with populist rhetoric for short-term gain, whether or not it serves the long-term national interest.
Ben-Gurion, on the other hand, enshrined the principle of mamlakhtiyut, or state-like behavior, a key component of which was the state’s monopoly on the use of force and the sovereign control of the state’s territory from either domestic or external challenges, all in the preservation of the national interest. It was in the upholding of this principle of mamlakhtiyut that Ben-Gurion shelled the right-wing Irgun arms ship, the “Altalena” and disbanded the left-leaning Palmach strike force in the name of a single unified Israeli army shortly after the declaration of independence in 1948.
After the lone Tel Aviv attack, Netanyahu denounced the Arab minority’s lawlessness, while the real threat to Israeli state sovereignty is not there but under Netanyahu’s nose in the lawlessness of the settler extremists who regularly defy the state and its institutions, erode its monopoly on the use of force, resorting to violence against Arabs and other non-Jews with virtual impunity and attempt to dictate decision- making on the most crucial defense and foreign policy issues.
The settler minority seeks to impose its vision of the shape of Israel of the future, in terms of its geography and demography and in terms of its moral and ethical content, as some form of racist and oppressive Jewish quasi-dictatorship in all of Eretz Yisrael/Palestine, rather than the democratic nation state of the Jewish people in a two-state reality.
Ben-Gurion strictly observed three policy principles: keeping Israel a Jewish majority state (and he was therefore an instinctive and immediate opponent to the post-1967 occupation of the West Bank); preserving Israel’s international legitimacy; and maintaining its firm relationship with the US. Netanyahu has steadily undermined all three by preferring short-term tactical gain over more strategic longterm state interests.
Instead of leading his center-right base into the realm of historic decision making, he has become the feckless prisoner of the far right, trapped in the paralysis of waffling indecision. As opposed to Ben-Gurion the nation-builder, whose brilliance was in seizing the moment to make timely, historic and courageous decisions, Netanyahu, unless he changes course, will almost certainly go down in Israel’s history as the epitome of wavering vacillation, the man who systematically undermined Israel’s survivability as the nation state of the Jewish people.
Not only is Netanyahu a pale shadow of Ben-Gurion, he may very well be remembered for the gradual dismantling of Ben-Gurion’s legacy, by failing to make crucial decisions when they were most needed, lacking precisely that special trait that made Ben-Gurion the great statesman he was. ■ Professor Asher Susser is the Stanley and Ilene Gold senior research fellow at Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and the Stein professor of Modern Israel Studies at the University of Arizona


Related Tags
jewish leadership