Since Binyamin Netanyahu’s election as prime minister, Israel has become an unhealthy democracy
Israeli diplomat was visibly flustered, tie askew, forehead glistening. A senior American official had just chewed him out inside the State Department and he had no idea what to say about it to the reporters clamouring for comment outside. He blinked helplessly into their cameras, struggling for words.
One way to read that generosity is as an election fillip. Mr Netanyahu’s hawkish Likud party, which leads a religious and nationalist coalition, is in a tight race with Blue and White, a new party led by Benny Gantz, a former chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces. The campaign has, like its most recent predecessors, been about Mr Netanyahu himself. Also like its predecessors it is close , not least because of corruption allegations.
Then there are the submarines. Mr Netanyahu’s cousin, who has long been his lawyer, and his former chief of staff, among others, have been arrested in an investigation into contracts awarded to ThyssenKrupp, an engineering conglomerate which has supplied submarines both to Israel and, subsequently, Egypt. Mr Netanyahu pushed the armed forces to buy submarines they did not want and approved the sale to Egypt without consulting his defence minister or army chief.
On that occasion, whatever fears “they” may have had proved groundless. Mr Netanyahu lost by 12 percentage points and left the Knesset. He returned to government a few years later, soon becoming finance minister. The bloated public sector was acting like a fat man riding on the back of a thin man, the private sector, he said, and embarked on radical reforms. He froze public spending, cut red tape and slashed taxes. State assets, including the national airline, El Al, were privatised.
All of this has taken a toll on the state, Mr Netanyahu’s critics say. “There is no question that when you look at the strength and health of Israeli democracy, it looks a lot shakier now than it did five years ago,” says Michael Koplow of Israel Policy Forum, a think-tank in Washington.
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