What does Netanyahu want from the Wexner Foundation?
MIDDLE ISRAEL: Faced with a tanking economy, plunging popularity rates, gathering unrest in the streets and also multiple indictments, Netanyahu is eager to change the subject.
By AMOTZ ASA-ELOVER THE YEARS, the Wexner Foundation leadership programs have enriched some 500 Israeli civil servants who studied with America’s best professors and shared classes with officials from all over the world.(photo credit: HARVARD UNIVERSITY)
It’s getting out of hand. After having accused the prosecution, the media and Israel Police of having conspired to overthrow him, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu just added to this fantasy an American philanthropist.The Wexner Foundation, established by clothing magnate Leslie Wexner and his wife, Abigail, has launched varied leadership programs, including one that brings Israeli civil servants for a year of study at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.Anyone who has been part of Boston’s academic scene knows the value of such an education. It’s priceless. One can only wish that more of Israel’s governmental class could benefit from Harvard’s broadmindedness and from America’s managerial wisdom.Over the decades this program enriched some 500 Israeli civil servants who studied with America’s best professors and shared classes with officials from all over the world. One can hardly think of anything more generous, original, effective and innocent that any American Jew ever did for the Jewish state.Still, this week Netanyahu said the state’s association with the foundation should be probed, while Public Security Minister Amir Ohana cited its ties with Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died last year in an apparent suicide while awaiting trial.Was Epstein linked to the foundation? Yes. What was his role? A trustee who had nothing to do with the program’s daily management, and never met its fellows. When was this? Before 2008. How did he leave? He was fired. Did the foundation order from Ehud Barak an overpriced study that the public never saw? It did. Was this deal legal? It was. Was Barak at the time a private citizen, and later Netanyahu’s own defense minister? He was.These facts did not confuse Netanyahu’s son Yair, who tweeted that Wexner’s graduates are “a pedophiles’ sect that seized control of the state and are conducting a coup.”In other words, Wexner graduates like IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi, Strategic Affairs Minister Orit Farkash-Hacohen, Health Ministry director-general Hezi Levi and former Israel Navy commander Yedidya Yaari are pedophiles and conspirators.While Yair’s broadside aims under the belt, his father aims at the head, by implying that Wexner is out to brainwash Israel’s elite. What are we meant to think happens inside the handsome classrooms by the Charles? That Noam Chomsky emerges there, attaching wires to fellows’ temples, and then infusing them with anti-Zionist venom?For heaven’s sake, Wexner’s fellows arrive in Boston as mature adults approaching midlife, usually married with kids. Their political views are long shaped by then, and will not become public until they retire. This is besides the fact that the program is about administration, not ideology.And that is besides the fact that Leslie Wexner has been a major Republican funder. And that is besides the fact that the head of the foundation’s Israeli board of advisers is former IAF commander Ido Nehushtan, whose father, Yaakov, was an Irgun fighter and also an MK for Menachem Begin’s Gahal.In short, this “scandal” is obviously manufactured, and the question it raises is not about the Wexner Foundation, but about its libeler, Bibi Netanyahu: what’s his problem?ONE REASON Netanyahu targets Wexner might be Donald Trump.Leslie Wexner attacked Trump after he said the racist rioters at Charlottesville included “very fine people.” Netanyahu, however, remained welded to Trump. Maybe, then, he no longer realizes an American Jew can actually abhor Trump and at the same time love Israel.Then again, while that can explain the willingness to besmirch Wexner, it does not explain the attack’s motivation, volume and intensity. To understand these one must consider the circumstances of these testing days.Faced with a tanking economy, plunging popularity rates, gathering unrest in the streets and also multiple indictments, Netanyahu is eager to change the subject to anything that is not the pandemic, the economy or his legal entanglements.Seen this way, the 82-year-old Wexner is a tempting target: he is foreign, he is rich, and he is Trump’s enemy. The ignorant masses, Netanyahu apparently tells himself, will believe me if I tell them he is after me. Didn’t Soviet citizens believe Stalin when he accused the Joint Distribution Committee of conspiring against him?The Netanyahu problem, then, has morphed. What began with political arrogance and then became a moral embarrassment is steadily becoming a strategic threat.When he repeatedly shed able people, from Dan Meridor and Bennie Begin to Moshe Ya’alon and Naftali Bennett, Netanyahu’s fans said he wasn’t nice, but could still run the country. When he was indicted they said he could still run the country because as long as he was not convicted he did not harm the country.Now Netanyahu is harming his country.FEARING EVERYONE is after him, and convinced he is smarter than everyone about him, Netanyahu has undermined his own Health Minister Yuli Edelstein’s effort to appoint a corona czar, refusing to grant that person the powers such a task demands.Then Netanyahu shot from the hip a plan to hand out cash to every family, letting Bank of Israel Governor Amir Yaron learn about this from the press, much the way he, Netanyahu, had undercut Finance Minister Israel Katz by leaving him out of consultations with former Bank of Israel governor Stanley Fischer.Before that Netanyahu dragged his ministers to the courthouse podium from which he attacked the judiciary. Then he passed late-night emergency legislation that lets the government bypass the Knesset. And in the midst of all this he had the Likud appeal to the High Court with a demand to order an investigation of the Wexner Foundation.It takes no Kennedy School graduate to understand that this hammering at political pillars and assets is no way to govern, least of all a country beset by medical plague, economic angst and national despair.www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer’s best-selling Mitz’ad Ha’ivelet Hayehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sfarim, 2019) is a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s leadership from antiquity to modernity.
