Will Bibi Make the Left’s Nightmares Come True? It’s Never Happened Before

Translated from Hebrew

Since the electoral upheaval of 1977, in which the possibility of a change in government in Israel became real for the first time, every elected government has been received with utter shock by the defeated side, which conjured up scenarios of horror and failure to come in the immediate aftermath of electoral defeat. But only two governments since 1977 have justified the nightmare scenarios illustrated by the other side: the Begin government of 1981 and the Rabin government of 1992. The Netanyahu governments have never justified the threat the defeated side attributed to them, especially after the 1996 and 2015 elections.

Many believed that the rise to power of Menachem Begin and Likud would lead to a war against the Arab armies and a crisis with the superpowers. Given that there were only six years between the previous two wars, the assumption was entirely reasonable. But apart from the trauma of the loss itself after three decades of uninterrupted rule by Labor, there was nothing in Begin and Likud’s leadership from 1977 to 1981 to justify the concerns of the old Labor guard. Begin’s first coalition included elements that still came from the old Israeli establishment, such as the liberal Dash party of Yigael Yadin and the ultimate symbol of “Israeliness,” Moshe Dayan, who left Labor to serve as Begin’s first Foreign Minister. In any case, Begin did not annex territories. Furthermore, not only was there no war, his was the government of the peace agreement with Egypt, the bombing of the reactor in Iraq, and increased funds to underprivileged neighborhoods.

In 1981, after Dayan’s death and Ezer Weizman’s resignation, there were no more elements from the old establishment in the coalition or in Likud itself. The right won its majority in a difficult and violent election campaign without parallel in the history of Israeli democracy, and the government that was formed set out to abandon its commitments under the Camp David Accords to pursue negotiations that would lead to autonomy for the Palestinians.

It was Begin’s short second term from 1981 to 1983, quite unlike the first, that realized the darkest nightmares of the old guard’s voters. These were the years of the disastrous invasion of Lebanon, the end of the autonomy talks, the rampant inflation that led to the collapse of symbolic fortress of Labor Zionism — the kibbutzim. These were also the years of the loosening of all restraints on the construction of settlements, and the expansion of the minimal exemption that Ben-Gurion granted to ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students into a blanket exemption that turned yeshivas into refuges from military enlistment and the State of Israel to the most generous benefactor there ever was to the world of unemployed Torah study. In these years, Begin and Likud did indeed change the face of the country and lead it in a direction that was further and further away from the vision of its founders. If there were any years when the lament “they stole our country” was justified, those were the years of the second term of Begin and Likud.

In this sense, Labor’s 1992 electoral victory is the mirror image of Likud’s in 1981.

Likud under Yitzhak Shamir came to the 1992 elections with no fighting spirit. Six years of unity governments with Labor without notable achievements attributed to Likud ministers or its clearly uncharismatic leadership did not benefit Likud’s status. Two years of a narrow right-wing government after the no-confidence crisis of 1990 were characterized by repeated crises with the American government, principally on the issue of the settlements, and helplessness in the face of the rising violence of the First Intifada. On the one hand, the absorption of the large aliyah from the USSR had not yet been credited to Shamir, and on the other hand, the intifada and the changes in the world after the collapse of the USSR caused Shamir to be perceived as obsolete.

Yitzhak Rabin was elected in 1992 to change Israel’s priorities from investing in the territories to investing in Israel proper. But from the point of view of the right, Rabin’s government went much further than shifting priorities and brought the right’s worst nightmares to fruition.

It gave the PLO international legitimacy just as the organization was facing collapse and was subject to a global boycott after supporting Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. With the Oslo Accords, the government began an irreversible process of building an independent Arab political entity west of Jordan while committing to conduct future negotiations — including over Jerusalem — thereby closing the door on the dream of a “Greater Land of Israel” as it existed in the 1980s. Worse, despite all the talk of peace, the period was characterized by a number of murderous attacks against Israelis — although Baruch Goldstein was responsible for a heinous attack against Palestinians — that Israel had not known since the 1950s and perhaps even since the establishment of the state.

Along the way, there were many other governments that surprised, disappointed, and failed. But there were only two governments that actually justified the anxieties and concerns of the other side. What stands out is that Netanyahu’s governments, all of which, without exception, were greeted with tears by the defeated side, never implemented these nightmare scenarios, and sometimes even the opposite occurred.

The mourning after Netanyahu’s first victory in 1996 was especially heavy because it came against the background of Rabin’s assassination on the one hand, and the disappointment, or perhaps the denial of disappointment, from the Oslo process on the other. At the same time, in the 1996 government, Netanyahu was responsible for a significant decrease in terrorist attacks along with the continuation of the Oslo process, which he opposed. He also did what even Peres would not — and withdrew from Hebron. In the 2009 government, Netanyahu froze settlements, gave the Bar-Ilan speech, and removed most of the roadblocks in the territories erected during the Second Intifada, while reducing the number of attacks and victims. In the following government he conducted advanced negotiations with the Palestinians (where again the Palestinians were the ones who said no), and in the last government with Gantz, he agreed to an American proposal whose essence was the division of the country into two states (when again of course the Palestinians said no) and brought normalization agreements with four Arab states.

In all of his governments, including the one formed in 2015 that was considered extreme right-wing, Netanyahu, unlike any prime minister before him, except perhaps for Shamir, evinced a clear tendency to contain and de-escalate violence. His terms of office stand out as years of relative security in which the number of Jewish and Arab casualties from violent conflict was one of the lowest in the history of the conflict. In domestic matters, the years of Netanyahu’s rule were generally characterized by economic prosperity, the expansion of the circle of participants in the Israeli economy, and the expansion of the secular liberal space.

For decades, the left has had alternating demons: Begin, Sharon, Lieberman, Bennett, the political success of each of whom was seen at the time as the end of Zionism. Today every one of them stars in one way or another in the gallery of heroes of the left. But Netanyahu remains a demon whose political victory instills an atmosphere of raging pessimism on the defeated side.

It is impossible to rule out the possibility that this time, the Netanyahu 2022 government, due to its reliance on the Religious Zionism faction in the Knesset (and especially on Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party) — which unlike Netanyahu, is not inclined to contain violence — and due to the expressed willingness to take sweeping measures to overturn Netanyahu’s trial, will be similar to the 1981 Begin government and will realize the nightmares of the defeated side. Even in the parable of the boy who cried wolf, the wolf eventually comes. Yet, given that the nightmares of each defeated side came true only once, and not during a Netanyahu government, it raises the question of whether it is truly justified to sound the alarm this time, or whether to allow for the possibility that it is, in fact, not justified.

Shany Mor is an Adjunct Fellow with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Einat Wilf served as a member of the Knesset from 2010-2013.