Bernard Avishai Dot Com

This may seem a rather abstract question, given the headlines, but I suspect that the growing culture war will be front and center once the guns fall silent and for many years thereafter. Thanks to Bennett Windheim for an interesting conversation.

Link to the podcast here.

This was published in early October.  

Benjamin Netanyahu came to the United Nations General Assembly on September 27th to tell the delegates—or, at least, those who hadn’t walked out on him—that his cause is righteous.

Eleven days ago, the C.I.A. director, William Burns, arrived in Cairo to join the negotiations over Gaza, which have also been brokered by Qatar and Egypt. Since then, ordinary Israelis began checking their phones every couple of hours to find out the fate of the “iskah,” Israel’s never-quite-consummated ceasefire deal with Hamas.

On February 22nd, four months into Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, Benjamin Netanyahu presented his war cabinet with a short document sketching out what, in his view, “absolute victory” looks like. The timing was not surprising. The Israel Defense Forces are poised to attack the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where Israel believes that four of Hamas’s last six battalions are hiding in tunnels and holding what is estimated to be around a hundred still surviving hostages.

For the past two years, at Dartmouth College, I have been co-teaching a course called The Politics of Israel and Palestine with Ezzedine Fishere, a former Egyptian diplomat who served under the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process. Our work in the class—a civil, exploratory dialogue sustained over eighteen sessions—anchored a series of public forums at the college in the aftermath of the horrors of October 7th.

In August 1975, I stood outside the Knesset, in Jerusalem, witnessing a fevered demonstration against Henry Kissinger, then the American secretary of state. Thousands of young men in knitted kippahs chanted and danced in circles, their arms wrapped around one another, their voices echoing off the stone building. They were mainly West Bank settlers, I was informed, part of a fledgling movement called Gush Emunim—in effect, the Young Guard of the National Religious Party (NRP).

In Tel Aviv, on Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters what President Biden had said passionately earlier this week—that the Administration has “Israel’s back.” For Israelis, mourning more than thirteen hundred murdered in the Hamas and Islamic Jihad attack from Gaza, stunned by the defensive breach, fixed on the fate of an estimated hundred and fifty kidnapped, and mobilizing three hundred and sixty thousand reservists, the Administration’s statements of support were timely.

Since 1977, when Menachem Begin, a founder of the Likud party, became Prime Minister, Israeli leaders liberal enough to entertain a peace process with the Palestinians that could end the conflict have controlled the government for just eight years.

Israel turns seventy-five this week: the ritualized celebrations of patriotic solidarity are, this year, unusually self-conscious and forced. The country is in an escalating culture war, and the festivity seems only a ceasefire.

Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have been allies, but also, intriguingly, mirror one another. 

That’s not only because both see “strength” as their go-to asset, or at least the con that the political base seems most likely to buy. Each claims to be his nation’s singular guardian against catastrophe. Each turns shamelessness into charisma. Each grew up coddled but plays up resentments for elites.