John Waage of the Christian Broadcasting Network, observing the 2015 Knesset elections when Isaac Herzog of the Labor Party challenged Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu, broadcast his observation, saying: “‘Anyone but Bibi.’ Those three words encompass the predominant media theme here.”
A decade has passed. Much has happened. One thing, however, seems not to have altered, and that is the opposition rallying cry of “Anyone but Bibi.” That slogan is what has been driving Ehud Barak and the politicians trying to unseat Prime Minister Netanyahu.
Blogger Shira Tamir termed the mantra “Anyone but Bibi” as more of a “desperate battle cry.” Her harsh truth was that “this approach has failed repeatedly, and it’s time to call it out for what it is – a lazy, ineffective, self-defeating cop-out that has done nothing but ensure Netanyahu’s continued dominance.”
I would agree. More than anything else, it has corrupted our political discourse.
Stopping the Netanyahu government
At London’s Chatham House on March 27, 2023, Ehud Barak famously described his formula for stopping the Netanyahu government from achieving its political and economic platform on which it was elected. Calling the judicial reform a “regime change... they’re trying to make Israel, basically, a dictatorship,” Barak continued and declared: “We are not going to accept it... [we’ll use] the legal tools of democracy.... And we will win, I’m confident of it, because... we have even empirical evidence for this.”
What was his “evidence” for his expected success?
Barak, a former prime minister and IDF chief of staff, elucidated that he based himself on the research of two academics, Chenoweth and Stephan, made of hundreds of civil protests in the last 100 years and the common denominator they found. The protests that succeeded were when a level of 3.5% of the population, which ends up to be about 8% of the adult population, was reached.
If the protesters tenaciously and persistently kept up the protests, with civil disobedience and such, Barak informed his audience, “at the end the government either [would] fall or capitulate. This exactly – we already crossed this number within less than three months, so we are heading in the right direction.... So, basically, I’m confident that we’ll do it....”
Since then, over two-and-a-half years have passed. So, what has happened?
What has happened is that while the judicial reform program was stymied, Netanyahu and his Likud are in power. Despite the war, the most recent polls place the Likud as garnering the most seats in the Knesset, although his coalition is not fully assured.
More importantly, the opposition is even farther away from forming a government and, worse, is fractured. Except for Justice Minister Yariv Levin’s program to balance the power between the executive and the judicial branch – that is, the Supreme Court as well as the State Attorney’s Office – the major political issues have not provided the opposition any genuine headway.
Major political issues
The war has essentially ended, although Hamas can be depended on to keep stoking a low-level active confrontation. It ended on Netanyahu’s terms through increased military pressure, although not quite a “total victory” scenario, with all the living hostages returned. As for those deceased, US President Donald Trump has been threatening Hamas, a policy that former president Joe Biden and his secretary of state Antony Biden did not adopt. All this was foreseen as a calamity by the anti-Bibists.
A list of all the failed projections and assumptions the “anyone but Bibi” factions made, and too many of them by “commentators” broadcasting via the mainstream media and in the newspapers, is much too long for this column. Iran is subdued. Hezbollah is collapsed. Bashir Assad is in Moscow, and Syria is negotiating, although the Druze issue is still to be resolved. Qatar suffered an airstrike with no lasting damage to Israel. The economy is strong. David Zini is director of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency).
But anything is an incentive for their anger, as in the latest case of what the name of this war will be. I recall a half-dozen names suggested for the 1967 war. In 1982 Israel fought the “Peace for Galilee” war, before it became the First Lebanon War. Over a year ago Netanyahu announced the name change, long before the final resolution of the battles was known, and specified the name the War of Revival (Tekuma) in speeches earlier.
However, the opposition demands that whatever the government wants must be, well, opposed. Everything.
Concerns about the next elections
One would think after all that has happened and more, while not a perfect situation, elements of the “anyone but Bibi” conglomerate would reconsider its position. But no. What some have done is to go down the dark path of conspiracy theory.
Gadi Eisenkot, Naftali Bennett, and others who oppose the sitting prime minister have set adrift recently a suggestion that Netanyahu perhaps will not abide by the law to hold elections for the next Knesset. A campaign such as this is simply poisoning the atmosphere even more than what the Kaplan camp protest movement has been doing for years.
There is no epithet they have not employed, no comparison to historical figures they have not made, and no recommended remedies to end Netanyahu’s term of office they have not voiced, including gallows, guillotines, and firing squads.
Several prominent members of the Kaplan camp are either in jail or awaiting trial for use of armaments, storing arms, as well as being engaged in dangerous incendiary acts that have caused harm to the public. They have set upon the use of violence, in their language and in their actions. A small fraction of these occurrences, if done by right-wingers, would have set off paroxysms of hate and castigation from the Left.
A time for, if not healing, a coming together is required, but Yair Golan, Dan Halutz, Yair Lapid, Shikma Bressler, Ben Caspit, and others will not let go. It is as if their existence depends on “anyone but Bibi” momentum. It has become a modern rendition of Cato’s “Carthago delenda est.”
Has at any time everything been perfect here in Israel? Could we not do with a bit less of the anti?
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.