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Photo: Ido Erez
Netanyahu. Wants to be prime minister for the rest of his life?
Photo: Ido Erez
Eitan Haber

What does Bibi really want?

Op-ed: The most important condition for Israel's prime minister today is that a move towards peace will not result in his political suicide.

From Timbuktu to Kamchatka, from India to Ethiopia, people are sitting today, as they sat yesterday and will sit tomorrow too, racking their brains: What does Israel's prime minister want and what is he trying to achieve?

 

 

In all government halls, everywhere, people realized long ago that in the democratic State of Israel, there is only one person who decides. But in the past few years something has gone wrong with him, and perhaps with us too. The Israeli system no longer obeys him without question and says "amen" to each of his deeds and failures.

 

So given this relatively new situation, what does Bibi want, and how is it that almost every person ends a conversation with him satisfied and convinced that the prime minister has agreed with him, until proven otherwise?

 

And the biggest question: After everything that has happened and is happening, including American pressure and talks with the Palestinians, has Bibi crossed the Rubicon? Is he willing to "give away parts of the homeland" and "make painful concessions," as he says - in other words, evacuate settlements?

 

People who claim to know him well say, yes, he has crossed the Rubicon. Bibi wants to be the leader of a Jewish state, and he doesn’t want to control millions of Palestinians. His dream at the moment is something more or less like the Allon Plan (a proposal drafted by Yigal Allon after the Six-Day War for a negotiated partition of territory between Israel and Jordan), with the proper adjustments to our time.

 

This is where the famous Netanyahu "nay" comes in: He will say "aye" only if he is facing big people with big decisions. Then, only then, Netanyahu will also make "big decisions."

 

In the meantime, he apparently thinks that he has no partners for such decisions. Who? Mahmoud Abbas? Barack Obama? David Cameron? Menachem Begin had Sadat in front of him. Yitzhak Rabin had Yasser Arafat. Who does Bibi have in front of him? "A shrewd old man for small deals," according to those surrounding the prime minister.

 

Victory shot needed

But the most important condition for Bibi today, after a considerable number of years in power, is that the move towards peace does not mean his political suicide. Bibi wants, craves, yearns to remain prime minister. Some say, he is still young, and if it is possible, then for the rest of his life. He looks around and says, a left-wing leader who makes the "painful concessions" will not lose everything. On the contrary, he would be praised. The same "painful concessions" by a right-wing leader would bring about his destruction. He would crash, and the left-wing would applaud.

 

"They're all heroes at my expense," people say they heard him say. We must remember that Netanyahu has already experienced one painful loss in an election. He has no intention of returning to the political wilderness. Not to mention the fact that from his lofty position, like all of us, he is watching a former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who has been stripped of all his defenses.

 

Netanyahu is already in his third term and has yet to score any significant achievement or event in history's records. Begin scored, Rabin scored, and even Barak and Olmert managed a victory or two. But Netanyahu, until now, has scored nothing. He looks back with a lot of envy at two leaders who were not generals but nonetheless go down in history for ordering the bombing of nuclear facilities in Iraq and Syria – Begin and Olmert. He wants to be the third leader on this list and save the state from a terrible danger.

 

Bibi, a man with historical awareness, needs a victory shot. He has stuck to the Iranian issue so much that experts on the prime minister say he would even dare to attack the Iranian nuclear facilities if he knew for certain that he would succeed. But no one is willing to give him an insurance policy on this issue, and he sees himself as a cautious leader.

 

So at this stage he is in the position of the kibitzer (in Yiddish, a spectator offering advice or commentary), diving under the water and singing to himself, to the Israelis and to the entire world the popular song, "A small nation, evading trouble." He is evading. The state is evading in his footsteps. And everyone, it seems, is waiting for the stealth aircraft to do the job for us. In the meantime, these aircraft are evading too.

 


פרסום ראשון: 03.26.14, 10:09
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