Netanyahu’s disastrous, populist regime is a dire warning for U.S. voters

Even before the blood had dried from one of the worst days in the country’s history, a professor at a top national university tried to make sense of what had gone wrong, less than a year after a right-wing populist backed by religious fundamentalists and facing criminal charges had been returned to power.

That man, the academic wrote, was “a public-relations genius but an incompetent [leader]. He has repeatedly preferred his personal interests over the national interest and has built his career on dividing the nation against itself. He has appointed people to key positions based on loyalty more than qualifications, took credit for every success while never taking responsibility for failures, and seemed to give little importance to either telling or hearing the truth.”

These are the kind of words that I dread will be written here in the United States at some point after January 2025 if Donald Trump, the 45th president and overwhelming frontrunner for the GOP’s 2024 nomination, returns to the White House. But in this case, the writer, Yuval Noah Harari, a professor of history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was describing the disastrous, populist regime of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that citizens like Harari say left their homeland unprepared for Hamas’ Oct. 7 terror attack.

The widespread dissatisfaction and even rage in Israel toward Netanyahu hasn’t received nearly enough attention in American media, which has been more focused on the shocking visuals and the horror stories of war and the role of President Joe Biden in marshaling support for Israel after the Hamas attack. In the moment — with the petty, truculent Trump lashing out at his former close ally Netanyahu over something as small as a congratulatory post-2020 election call to Biden — it’s easy to forget what amazingly similar stories these two men tell. And what a dire warning those tales are — not just for Israel, but for the United States and the entire world.

Netanyahu, the 1967 Cheltenham High School grad who became Israel’s longest-serving prime minister over three stints, has been under constant criminal investigation since 2016, and returned to power last year, even as he continues to face trial on three separate indictments that accuse him of bribery, fraud, and breach of trust. Just like Trump, now currently indicted on 91 felony counts in four separate state and federal cases, the Israeli leader’s legal strategy has been to delay, delay, delay. Just like Team Trump, Netanyahu and his allies claim the charges are merely their political enemies out to get them. As with Trump, there are serious concerns about Netanyahu using the levers of political power to ultimately quash the charges or blunt their impact.

No wonder both Trump and Netanyahu have placed such an emphasis on remaking the judiciary — for U.S. Republicans, that meant political power-plays to install new judges, including three on the U.S. Supreme Court, while for the Israeli prime minister, it has been legislation aimed at blocking the power of a more liberal highest court, which has brought tens of thousands of protesters out in the streets of Tel Aviv and elsewhere.

Seeking a return to office while under indictment has also meant, for both men, an embrace of the far-right that is heavily seasoned with religious fundamentalism — more so than earlier in their careers. After several years of partisan stalemate and divided government, Netanyahu’s successful push back to power meant an embrace of fringe figures like his national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, an extremist whom the Washington Post has described as “inextricably linked to the violent vigilante settler movement” and an anti-Arab provocateur.

A Trump restoration here in America would be little different. Indeed, his backers at the right-wing Heritage Foundation have been drafting a blueprint called Project 2025; its centerpiece is a plan to fire thousands of skilled civil servants from the federal government and replace them with fanatical followers of Trump’s MAGA movement. The pervasive cross-pollination of antidemocratic concepts between Team Trump and Team Netanyahu has grown stronger, an invasive weed of authoritarianism.

What could possibly go wrong?

A constant refrain over the last two weeks has been that the Oct. 7 assault was Israel’s 9/11, and the worrisome parallels are obvious, from calls for restrictions on free speech to the high-level rejections of advocating any moderation or de-escalating the tense situation. But in one critical way, the current crisis in Israel is nothing like what happened here in the United States in 2001. Everyday Israelis are not rallying behind their leader. They are furious — both over the botched, slow response to the attacks, but also Netanyahu’s policies that made war more likely than peace.

Last weekend, a rally in Tel Aviv expressing solidarity with more than 200 hostages believed to be held by Hamas turned into an anti-Netanyahu affair, with signs like “Bibi, you have blood on your hands,” and diatribes like that of 62-year-old Monica Levy, who lost a loved one in the assault and said, “I want Benjamin Netanyahu and all his people to go home because they’ve abandoned residents of the south and they’re not interested in the lives of residents there and instead they’re obsessed with small politics.”

This is hardly a minority viewpoint. One post-attack poll of Israeli citizens found that two-thirds would now prefer “anyone else” as prime minister instead of Netanyahu — reflecting the viewpoint that his government was too distracted and thus blindsided by the Hamas attack.

» READ MORE: War brings new threat to free speech | Will Bunch Newsletter

The headline on a scathing analysis published in Israel’s liberal-leaning newspaper Haaretz while the gunfire of Oct. 7 was still echoing read: “Another Concept Implodes: Israel Can’t Be Managed by a Criminal Defendant.” Author Gidi Weitz blamed Israel’s inadequate response on Netanyahu’s distractions, including his indictments, and on how his far-right agenda had triggered ice-cold relations with his own generals. (Again, does this not remind you of Trump’s feud with his Joint Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Mark Milley?) Weitz wrote that “Netanyahu prioritized ensuring his personal survival and to the integrity of his coalition at the price of capitulating to insane, messianic racists. To this end, he turned his domestic rivals into enemies and systematically destroyed the connective tissue that, with great difficulty, held Israel society together.”

Gee, why does that sound familiar?

Israel has a two-year start on the possible worst-case scenario for America: a Trump 47 presidency. That buys us a little time to consider the grim parallels. One of the most worrisome is that Netanyahu’s long-term strategy of propping up the violent Hamas bogeyman as an excuse for anti-Arabism and expanding settlements rather than seeking a peace deal with more moderate Palestinian factions is the demonize “The Other” strategy shared by all right-wing strongmen. Thus, it echoes in a likely Trump 47 crackdown on Central American migrants, tent cities for the unhoused, or sending troops to Democratic-led big cities. From the West Bank to West Texas, dictators thrive on division.

Meanwhile, the world has gradually become a much scarier place — in Ukraine, Gaza, perhaps down the road in Taiwan, and elsewhere. In a Trump restoration, the president would either once again be at war with his generals over his civil rights and constitutional abuses — yet again, shades of Netanyahu — or would use the vast pool of Pentagon vacancies created by his dimwitted ally Sen. Tommy Tuberville to fill the U.S. Defense Department with extremists and conspiracy theorists who know nothing of the nuances of geopolitics. Could a demoralized U.S. military get caught off guard, just like Israel’s on Oct. 7?

We need to start asking these questions because world history has already shown us once, in the years from 1933 to 1945, how the domestic grievances that give rise to autocratic strongmen lead inevitably to war. Monsters need to keep creating enemies, foreign or domestic, in order to survive.

It’s not unreasonable to wonder whether a President Trump 47’s efforts to stay out of jail could snowball toward World War III. What’s the worst that could happen in reelecting a criminally indicted leader and his extremist pals? Netanyahu and his posse of right-wingers just showed us from the other side of the world — if we’re able and willing to pay attention.

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