Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a ceremony commemorating Israel’s Remembrance Day for fallen soldiers, or Yom HaZikaron, at the Military Cemetery on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem on April 21.ILIA YEFIMOVICH/Reuters
The most consequential election for the world this year is not the midterms in the United States on Nov. 3. It is the one that will have to take place in Israel by Oct. 27 – possibly sooner, if this week’s dissolution of the Knesset results in an early vote.
The decision made by Israel’s voters will be a referendum on Benjamin Netanyahu, their Prime Minister for all but one of the last 17 years and a central organizing figure in the anti-democratic drift toward authoritarian intolerance across the democratic world.
The global impact of this vote gets less attention than it deserves in part because it may not produce seismic change within Israel. There’s a roughly even chance Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition of extremist parties will survive in some form, and the rightward drift of the Israeli public means that even a victory by the opposition would only slow the expansion of illegal settlements in the West Bank, the dismantling of the constitution and the de-facto occupation of Gaza.
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But simply removing Mr. Netanyahu from public life, even if Israel itself remains in the hands of his Likud Party, would be a significant development for the region and for the world – even more important than Hungary’s recent defeat of fellow far-right strongman Viktor Orban, and as important as the eventual demise of Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
That was made painfully evident by this week’s revelation in the New York Times that Mr. Netanyahu’s plan for the attack on Iran launched on February 28 – which he persuaded President Donald Trump to execute, under the name Operation Epic Fury – was not to create conditions for Iranians to overthrow their brutal regime, or even to replace it with a pro-Israel autocrat such as Reza Pahlavi, but to install the regime’s former hardline president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
During his rule from 2005 to 2013, Mr. Ahmadinejad repeatedly issued statements and hosted events calling for the elimination of Israel and calling the Nazi Holocaust a “lie.” It appears that Mr. Ahmadinejad, whose hopes were dashed after he was accidentally injured in an early strike, had made a deal with the Israeli Prime Minister that may have served Mr. Netanyahu’s personal political interests, but certainly not those of Israelis.
Indeed, Israelis have been among the significant victims of the war, which has seen about 650 Iranian ballistic missile strikes that have killed dozens and injured thousands.
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That their Prime Minister had brought such extreme danger to his country and the region for no purpose other than his personal political interests is, you would think, enough alone to end his rule. Many see an echo of events in Gaza – one poll last year found that 87 per cent of Israelis believe the PM should accept responsibility for the atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023. Most want him to resign over them, after learning that Mr. Netanyahu had gone as far as facilitating cash payments to Hamas leaders to ensure the terrorist organization remained in power in order to prevent a Palestinian state.
Mr. Netanyahu’s signature move has been to align himself with leaders, parties and movements that are credibly described as fascist, racist and antisemitic, so long as they endorse his own far-right domestic agenda and give him political cover.
Mr. Netanyahu’s 2019 campaign featured building-sized posters of the Prime Minister shaking hands with Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Mr. Trump and other autocratic-leaning rulers. That vision was formalized last year when Mr. Netanyahu had his party become the first non-European member of the alliance Patriots for Europe. Basically a bloc of parties with neo-Nazi or racial-supremacist backgrounds, PfE has cemented the ties Mr. Netanyahu has personally made with the likes of Hungary’s Fidesz, France’s National Rally, Spain’s Vox and Austria’s Freedom Party. Leaders of these parties frequently promote anti-Jewish conspiracy theories such as the “Great Replacement,” which holds that Jews are conspiring to install darker-skinned newcomers.
Mr. Netanyahu backed Mr. Orban’s advertising campaign attacking the philanthropist George Soros using what Hungarian Jews described as hateful “demonic Jew” imagery, and has done nothing about the waves of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery coming from Mr. Trump’s movement, contributing to a big rise in anti-Jewish incidents in North America.
The political scientist Jelena Subotic has classified this trend as “pro-Israel antisemitism,” in which far-right parties get away with deepening their targeting of Jews and other religious minorities locally under the cover of their ostensible support of Israel.
But these parties aren’t supporting Israel, or Israelis. They are supporting only Benjamin Netanyahu, whose political survival has been sustained at the expense of safety, democracy and decency around the world. Those Israelis would do us all a favour by ending this shameful bargain.