HOWARD EPSTEIN: THANK YOU, MR PRIME MINISTER – AND NOW GO HOME
My regular readers will know that I have not been Prime Minister Netanyahu’s greatest critic. Those who have been have lamented his inertia; but I lauded it, on the basis that, in this part of the world, reaction to events was safer than pro-activity. Further, I always had in my mind his innate competence and track record of success. What’s that, you say?
The doyen of economics correspondents, Pinchas Landau, wrote recently in the Jerusalem Post:-
- beginning in April 2003 and continuing uninterruptedly for the next 13 years, up to and including the present, the Israeli economy would grow and all the key economic metrics would display consistent, almost unbroken, improvement.
- Since 2003, [Israel] has run a surplus every year, and this keeps getting larger over time. Israel is a net lender to the world, and its IIP (international investment position) keeps improving, in both absolute and relative terms.
- Israel’s labor force has expanded steadily since 2003 – admittedly from an unacceptably low base, but nevertheless unemployment has fallen to record-low levels, employment has risen steadily, and the participation rate has reached respectable levels – crossing the declining US participation rate along the way, with plenty of potential left to rise further.
Before 2003, Israel’s economy ranged from basket case at worst to stuttering performance at best. What caused the aliyah of our economy from the doldrums to international fiscal stardom? Ask not what but who? Israel’s Finance Minister from 2003 to 2005 was Binyamin Netanyahu.
Yet every product has its sell-by date and it would seem that that of the Prime (and former Finance) Minister has come – and gone. As The Times of Israel reported this weekend:-
Hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suffered a second ministerial resignation in eight days, a TV report said senior members of Israel’s governing coalition believe the government may soon collapse, triggering elections within the next six months. The Channel 10 report Friday night quoted unnamed political “party leaders” as saying that Netanyahu’s bid to expand his multi-party coalition by bringing in the hawkish Avigdor Lieberman “is likely to turn into a move that will destroy the coalition.”
There can hardly be an Israeli politician more controversial than Lieberman. Calling for the death penalty and for giving disloyal Israeli Arabs the chop (yes really, he advocated their decapitation) was surely calculated to be controversial.
Now it may be that, apart from purely political considerations about maintaining a majority and his hold on power, Bibi thought that Lieberman, the Israeli boogeyman for our neighbors, and our “friends” – the French and the Americans who shower us with tough love “because [as they say] that’s what friends are for” – would have been a good, strong colleague to have involved in any “peace” talks that may be about to be foisted on us; but Bibi should have known that Lieberman had excluded himself from decent and diplomatic society by his completely undiplomatic words. No wonder then that large parts of the nation have been outraged at the prospect of Lieberman serving in the cabinet. And no wonder that the coalition appears about to fall.
The real criticism, however, is that Bibi apparently could not see all this coming.
Well, come it has, and there is every likelihood that few will lament the political demise of a prime minister whose antennae are plainly not properly attuned. That’s what happens after seven years in power. (Admittedly Margaret Thatcher lasted over ten years in her premiership, but her removal was ugly (reminiscent of Caesar’s departure on the Ides of March) and far uglier than will be Bibi’s if the coalition falls and he loses the consequent election, as now seem likely.)
Israeli Prime Minister
Given that the hugely successful presidency of Franklin D Roosevelt, which endured for twelve years until his death in 1945, led to the constitutional change that limited a US president to eight years in office, why would any leader of the western world think he should serve longer?
Israel’s Foreign Minister
Answer: politicians’ natural hubris. See if this is not hubristic: the Israeli government has two part-time ministers – both of them Bibi Netanyahu! Why he should think that half of him should be a better choice than anyone else in his government can only be answered with the H word.
Enough already! The prime minister, after seven years in the saddle – this time round, for he served as PM for three years until 1999 also – should, as the deliciously euphemistic Israeli expression has it, “go home.”
This is unlikely to be a hardship for him. The international speaking circuit beckons. Tony Blair, former UK Prime Minister, commands GB£250,000 per speech, ie some NIS 1.25M or, well, “a lorra lolly”. (Blair earned some £14 million in 2015). And just think, Mispachah Netanyahu, no-one will be counting the numbers of empty Fanta bottles returned or the cost of the cosmetics. There is a flip-side to every coin, even one that appears to be a bad penny.
In any event, with the inevitable corruption investigation that is now threatening (it’s almost de rigeur, a virility symbol for an MK), Bibi may have to spend a considerable amount of time with his lawyers.
That was the problem that allowed 9/11 to happen. Clinton was so preoccupied by the legal ramifications that flowed from his philandering that he did not see Al Qaeda coming, despite their four wake-up calls, one being an attempt to kill him in Manila. The list (extracted from my soon-to-be-published book on Modern America) is in the panel below.
| The Unheeded Al Qaeda “Wake-Up Calls”
Clinton’s Diversions and 9/11 |
|
1993 – February Truck bomb in basement of North Tower of the World Trade Center, New York City: 6 fatalities; 1,000 injured 1996 – November Philippines Attempt to kill President Clinton with a bomb[i] under a bridge in Manila 1998 – August East Africa US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania bombed: 200 plus fatalities; 5,000 injured 1998 – September The House of Representative votes to receive the Starr report November 1998 Clinton settles with Paula Jones 1999 – February Impeachment process ends 1999 – March Further rulings in Jones case 1999 – /April Clinton held to be in contempt of court in Jones case 2000 – October Aden, Yemen Bombing of USS Cole: 17 fatalities; 39 injured January 19, 2001 Clinton stripped of license to practise law in Arkansas for five years 2001 – September 11 The “9/11” airliner attacks on the World Trade Center, New York, and The Pentagon, Washington DC: 3,000 fatalities; 6,000 injured |
[i] Reported in the 9/11 Commission Report, published July 22, 2004, at page 147, thus: “…KSM and Yousef also developed plans to assassinate President Clinton during his November 1994 trip to Manila”
http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf
Clinton’s job was to knock together the heads of the Heads of the FBI, the CIA and the other competing US security agencies (about 14 in number at the relevant time) to make sure they were joining up all the dots. This would have been infinitely more productive than being obsessed by the need to defeat special prosecutor Kenneth Starr’s impeachment process arising from his dalliances with a girl half his age, in relation to whom he stood in a position not of merely superior but absolute power. Even after Monicagate, he still had to contend with the fall-out from the Paula Jones action for sexual harassment and the finding of contempt of court that followed.
Does anyone seriously believe that had the Transition, from Clinton to Bush, been properly handled, Condoleezza Rice, the incoming Secretary of State, and Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary for Defense, would have been so dilatory or negligent as to ignore proper warnings from the outgoing Clinton administration? No. It is much more likely that problem was that the quality of the intelligence passed down from the administration of the semi-detached Clinton was far below the standard required. That is what happens when you have a distracted president.
Well, Israel cannot afford to have a distracted, unfocused Prime Minister, so Bibi’s departure some time soon could be a blessing – unless, of course, his successor has been careless with his/her expenses sheets (as in: Now where did I put that taxi receipt and the one for dinner with that diplomat, what’s ’is name? So easily done and a flawless political career down the sherutim).
The next weeks will be illuminating. But the nation should remember Bibi as the 2003-5 Finance Minister who turned this country around – and, perhaps equally importantly now, recall, and put to good use, his ability sans pareil, with his superb communication skills, to promote Israel abroad. It is hard to think of a better choice for conducting the Hasbarah war that we need to start waging in Europe and America – and amongst the youth of America, whose increasing disaffection with Israel comes on the cusp of the period when they may need Israel more than ever before. Do they think that Henry Ford’s paying for the publication of 500,000 copies of The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion was the last anti-Semitic act in the USA? But that is for another day.
© Howard Epstein – May 216
[i] Reported in the 9/11 Commission Report, published July 22, 2004, at page 147, thus: “…KSM and Yousef also developed plans to assassinate President Clinton during his November 1994 trip to Manila”
http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/911/report/911Report.pdf
