The Cost of Despair in Israel

Binyamin Netanyahu has a habit of getting reelected. But make no mistake, the United States is the only place these days where Bibi still gets standing ovations. Inside Israel, the attitude towards Bibi is one of resignation, at best. Etgar Keret, the famed Israeli short story writer, put it best in a letter to fellow writer Sayed Kashua:
Later on in the conversation, [the taxi driver] said that in the last election all the candidates seemed like good-for-nothing swindlers, but, in the end, he voted Likud, and in the next elections he’s planning not to vote at all. Which probably means that he’ll vote Likud again.
The only Israelis I have met who can muster unqualified enthusiasm for Netanyahu are recent American expats. So how does Netanyahu get people to vote for his party?
This summer provided one likely modus operandi. After the kidnap and murder of three Israeli teens, hundreds of arrests of Palestinians in the West Bank, the burning and murder of a Palestinian teen, and rockets launched by Hamas, the climate in Israel became emotionally fraught. So when Netanyahu declared that ground forces would enter Gaza, his approval rating hit a soaring 82 percent. “We are all united in the aim of hitting the terrorist organizations and restoring the quiet,” he said in early July.
Netanyahu likes to capitalize off of fear and despair. After the Charlie Hebdo attack, the prime minister traveled to France to convince French Jews to immigrate to Israel. Before giving his speech in Congress this week, he stated, “I went to Paris…as a representative of the entire Jewish people…I will go anyplace I’m invited to convey the Israeli position against those who want to kill us.” Following this pattern of generalization, the speech itself portrayed Iran as an enemy equivalent to ISIS.
It is no mistake that Bibi’s most sweeping statements come now: creating fearful situations allows him to paint stark pictures of a monolithic Jewry facing a monolithic enemy, neither of which are truthful accounts.
The only difference between the nature of Bibi’s rhetoric nearing these elections and his rhetoric last summer is that this time, the Palestinian issue is not even on the table.
Yet Likud is far from the only party to focus on other issues. In one campaign video, the Shas party portrays the daily encounters of “invisible people”—impoverished Mizrahi Jews—with the typically Ashkenazi middle class. A narrator says, “Middle class living isn’t easy. But Shas doesn’t worry about them. We’re worried about the two million Israelis living under the poverty line…for us, you are not invisible.”
Shas is an ultra-Orthodox Mizrahi party that has declared its newfound support of Netanyahu. It supports religious law throughout Israel and opposes any settlement freeze in the West Bank. But you wouldn’t know that from the video.
Shas’s campaign is effective because it highlights very real and pressing issues inside Israel: rising costs of living, racial tension between Ashkenazim and Mizrahim, impoverishment, and healthcare. But that’s also the problem. Throughout the party’s campaign in the name of “invisible people,” Shas failed to mention the most invisible of all: non-Jewish citizens of Israel, including Palestinians.
It is especially easy to ignore the Palestinian issue given that the effects of occupation are more felt by Palestinians than by any Israeli. But the aversion fails to recognize that the socioeconomic issue and the Palestinian issue are intertwined. The Israeli government spends more money per capita on an Israeli settler in the Occupied Territories than it does on an Israeli citizen within the Green Line. Seventy five percent of the 200 million shekels donated from the World Zionist Organization are directed towards settlements in the West Bank, rather than communities within Israel proper.
Neither Likud’s nor Shas’s willful aversions would be helpful to Israel. Capitalizing on the despair of Israeli citizens, Bibi has convinced people that though he isn’t a great option, there are no good ones left. Despair inspires passivity. Appealing to this resignation, Shas’s campaign distracts Israelis from one pressing issue by emphasizing another. Of course, thinking about Israel’s economic troubles as anatomically separate from its policies towards Palestinians puts a bandage on a broken bone.
But Bibi’s friends would rather have you forget that.