Monday open thread: First the US. Now Israel.
The great thing about democracies is that, as long as things haven't gone completely out of joint, they always have the the chance to rectify any travels down a dark road.. American history is replete with examples of this country finally getting things right, from the abolition of slavery to Black civil rights to a general culture where civil rights are fought for and maintained.
From 2017 to 2021, America was in its darkest turn for a generation. Darker than the days of the Iraq War. Darker than anything since Vietnam. It seemed that democracy itself was teetering on the brink of collapse.
But, as we have before, we were able to regenerate and start to banish the darkness. We defeated right-wing populism, and gave ourselves space to eradicate it through diligence and determination.
Our closest ally in the Middle East, Israel, has been in a similar situation, but for far longer. The twelve-year premiership of Binyamin Netanyahu has been one of erosion of democratic norms, increasing authoritarianism at home, and bellicosity in the region. His government gave up any pretense of a two-state solution with the Palestinians, which served the interests of his unspoken allies in Hamas just fine.
Netanyahu has been on the precipice of being ousted many times before, but could always rely on the opposition's fecklessness to save him time and again. And it seemed as if it was about to happen once more.
Before the rockets from Hamas started falling, before Israeli cities erupted in sectarian violence, opposition leaders Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett were on the verge of forming a government. Then Bennett scuttled all talks as Israel once again went to war with Hamas. It seemed that Netanyahu had snatched victory from defeat yet once more, and was at the least heading for an unprecedented fifth general election in two years.
The road to the Promised Land is neither straight nor quick. But once the fighting stopped and the cities stopped burning, those in opposition to Netanyahu came to the realization that this was to be Israel's fate if it didn't manage to extricate him from the Balfour Street residence. Israel would never be at peace in the region, nor at home. Something had to give.
Yesterday at 9pm Israel time, Naftali Bennett was sworn in as Israeli prime minster, ending Netanyahu's twelve-year reign of errors. He will lead a government of left, right, and center. He will lead a government in which an Islamist Arab party is integral to its survival. (Ra'am is the only Islamist party to be in power in a non-Muslim majority country.) To call what happened yesterday unprecedented would be to understate the point.
The "change coalition" has as its mission to wrench Israel back from the cliff of authoritarianism and kleptocracy, and back to a vision of what the nation thought it was. And this time to also make Israeli Arabs full members of the nation's commonwealth. Those are heady and difficult goals. But just a few short weeks ago, it seemed as if Netanyahu had again scraped by. Things are always the same until they aren't.
Just as we have much work to do in the US, so do Israelis. Israel is even more riven than we are, and its far right is stronger than ours. Its far right was the government until yesterday. I wish them all the best. That patch of real estate hugging the eastern Mediterranean is one of the major sources of world conflict, drawing in empires on one side or another. Undoing that Gordian knot would go a long way to cooling tensions in other regions. May they attend to the business at hand as quickly and energetically as possible. !לנצח! أجل الحياة