Living by the Sword

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Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands accused of waging war in his personal rather than Israel’s national interest.

Netanyahu’s critics argue that had the prime minister focused on Israel’s national interest rather than his personal concerns, Israel would have long sought to end hostilities in Gaza and Lebanon and, perhaps, lobbied US President Donald Trump less hard for military action against Iran.

Focusing on Israel’s national interests would also have spared Israel the reputational, diplomatic, and economic damage it has suffered, which will take years to repair and require significant political and policy changes.

Analysts define Netanyahu’s personal interests as: wanting to escape conviction in a corruption trial; betting on war to boost his lagging chances in elections scheduled for October; and ensuring that his legacy is one of military victory and enhanced Israeli security rather than responsibility for failures that led to Hamas’s devastating October 7, 2023, attack on Israel and presiding over the worst reputational crisis in Israel’s history.

Netanyahu Unbound

Polls suggest that most Israelis distrust Netanyahu, even if they are in alignment with his security and military policies.

To be fair, Netanyahu’s policies are as much informed by his political and ideological beliefs as they are by his personal interests.

Even so, Netanyahu’s ability to prioritize his personal ambitions raises multiple questions that are not simply answered by the fact that Trump, his predecessor, Joe Biden, and other Western leaders have given the prime minister a long leash.

Some of these questions go to the heart of problems with democracy that are accentuated by the rise of a critical mass of illiberal and autocratic world leaders, who have hollowed out democratic institutions or reinforced existing autocratic structures.

Others have more to do with Israel’s almost 60-year occupation of Palestinian and Arab lands; the country’s education system, including the prepping of youth for military service; refusal to acknowledge that other nations and people have equal rights; and the ability to flout international law and moral and ethical norms in the name of national security.

The occupation, coupled with Israel’s five-decade-long shift to the right and rabid ultra-nationalist and ultra-conservative rabbis prepping youth for compulsory military service in state-subsidized academies, has also removed the military as a potential check on what constitutes a national interest.

Gone are the days when the military questioned government policies — as it did, for example, during the First Intifada in the late 1980s and early 1990s amid calls for a brutal crackdown on the uprising against the occupation.

At the time, Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Daniel Shomron told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, “We can solve this but not at a price that either you or we are willing to accept. This is a political problem. You solve it.”

Similarly, over the last two decades, Netanyahu eliminated a key foreign policy guardrail that had ensured that Israel maintained the backing of Western nations, among them, first and foremost, the United States, Israel’s most critical ally, which supports it financially and militarily and protects it diplomatically.

Netanyahu did so by abandoning the principle of ensuring that Israeli policies enjoyed bipartisan US support. Instead, Netanyahu aligned Israel with the Republican Party and, increasingly, Trump.

Adhering to the principle did not prevent Israel from denying Palestinians their rights, settling the West Bank, and besieging Gaza for 17 years prior to the Hamas attack, while ensuring that more extremist policies did not become the norm.

However, abandoning the principle allowed Netanyahu to form Israel’s most ultra-nationalist government, adopt far-right racist policies, elevate war crimes and crimes against humanity to official policy, and encourage vigilante violence against Palestinians.

Netanyahu’s policies will likely come to haunt Israel.

They have turned the Jewish state into a pariah, with much of its international public support, including in the United States and Europe, eroded. In addition, Netanyahu’s policies have earned Israel International Court of Justice proceedings on charges of violating the Genocide Convention, and Netanyahu an International Criminal Court arrest warrant.

But Hardly Alone

Netanyahu’s pursuit of his personal interests at the expense of national interests is not unique, even if it may be one of the most extreme manifestations of a universal problem that is most acute in democracies — as opposed to autocracies, where there are fewer or no checks and balances.

The problem is straightforward: Those in power conflate their political and personal interests with those of the nation, with no effective mechanism to police the dividing line between national interests on the one hand and officeholders’ political and personal interests on the other.

The theoretical exceptions to the rule are parliamentary oversight and censure, including impeachment; court proceedings; elections; or resort to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, which are ineffective and kick in after the damage has been done.

The problem is exacerbated in a world in which universal norms have been abandoned in favor of the law of the jungle, the principle of might is right, and double standards.

Moreover, creating an effective mechanism is easier said than done and may not be feasible. Too often, what constitutes a national interest is neither self-evident nor free of fierce debate.

“The question is, what is your national interest? … And when you debate that, it is not debating one abstract principle, like sovereignty versus another abstract principle like the economy, and then how do I weigh them? Which one weighs a little bit more?” said former Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

You have “to be able to set your own path and decide whom you want to do business with and what you stand for in the world. What are your values? What are your ideals?” Lee added.

How it Played Out With Respect to Palestine

The question of the recognition of Palestinian rights and the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel is a case in point.

Palestine may also illustrate the fact that attempting to police the distinction between personal, political, and national interests in ways that protect national interests may be impossible or, at best, a theoretical exercise.

Nevertheless, the distinction’s relevance, as is evident in the case of Netanyahu, requires it to be a permanent fixture of any discussion about national interests.

The antecedents of Netanyahu’s warmongering and supremacist policies predate Israel’s creation and were already part of public discourse in the state’s early years.

Netanyahu’s ideological mentor, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and former Israeli Chief of Staff and Defense Minister and Labor Party member Moshe Dayan, among others, acknowledged even then that Israel would have to live by the sword if it failed to accommodate Palestinian rights.

For Jabotinsky and Dayan, it was a question of them or us.

To be sure, Israel’s Labor Party–led governments advocated varying degrees of territorial compromise and acknowledgment of Palestinian rights that, by and large, either fell short of full recognition or were structured to ensure failure.

Similarly, Israel did not always have a Palestinian counterpart capable of rising to the occasion.

Even so, living by the sword ad infinitum can hardly be a national interest, particularly if there are viable alternatives that promise better outcomes, even if they would require compromise.

As a result, living by the sword was always an Israeli choice that ultimately would have disastrous consequences. The question was never if but when.

In the 1920s, on assignment for the official organ of the Zionist Organization of America in Palestine, where he witnessed Jewish-Palestinian violence, including the 1929 Hebron Palestinian massacre of Jews, journalist Vincent Sheean concluded almost on arrival that colonization without accommodating the rights of the indigenous population was a recipe for disaster.

“From my second or third day in Jerusalem I began to wonder if all was as well between the Arabs and the Jews as I had been led to believe. I knew nothing; but anybody could see, in a half an hour, that here were the physical elements of a conflict. … And on the whole the Jewish disregard for the Arabs seemed to me (from their own point of view) perilous in the extreme,” Sheean wrote in his memoir.

James M. Dorsey, an associate editor of WhoWhatWhy, is an adjunct senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies and the author of the syndicated column and podcast The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.