Barbara Kay: Bibi’s electoral adversary may help dial down anti-Zionism in the West

Israel’s first post-October 7 election, scheduled for late October, will represent a settling of accounts like no other. Benjamin (“Bibi”) Netanyahu and his long-empowered party, Likud, are in the national dock on a long list of charges. His odds of re-election with a government-forming coalition are currently poor.

One issue uppermost in many Israelis’ minds is Likud resistance to launching a politically disinterested state commission of inquiry into alleged security failures on October 7.

Equally problematic for Bibi, at a time when IDF resources are severely strained on multiple war fronts, with reservists in their 30s and even 40s being called up repeatedly, is a near-unanimous national opposition to long-tolerated military exemptions for the Ultra-Orthodox Haredim, roughly 80,000 men of military age.

For Bibi, pandering to Likud’s Ultra-Orthodox wing is the necessary political price for political survival. But other party platforms are in synch with the 90-plus percentage of Israelis who support an end to the Haredi entitlement.

The list of Bibi-centric grievances goes on and on. One can never rule out Bibi’s remarkable survival skills, but a surging tide of opposition, coalescing in rising support for a relative political newcomer, Gadi Eisenkot, former IDF chief of staff, now leader of the new centrist political party Yashar, which translates to “straight,” ”direct,” and “honest,” speaks to a deep hunger for radical change at the top. Three weeks ago, the burly, plainspoken Eisenkot ran neck and neck with Bibi in a “suitability for Prime Minister” poll. As of July 14, he is ahead by nine points, 43 versus 34 per cent.

“Gadi projects everything Netanyahu is not,” Gayil Talshir, a political scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, told The Times of Israel.

Netanyahu is a scion of Israel’s Ashkenazi elite, the son of an academic superstar, who spent much of his privileged childhood and university years in America, acquiring both American-accented English and American cultural fluency. Eisenkot is a Mizrachi (Middle Eastern) Jew of Moroccan descent, raised with eight siblings in the humble towns of Tiberias and Eilat.

Bibi lost a brother who died in the 1976 Entebbe rescue of Jewish hostages in Uganda: politically, that’s no longer a value-add for his campaign. Eisenkot lost his youngest son, as well as two nephews, in this Gaza war; these losses resonate deeply with significant swathes of Israeli parents with sons and daughters of military age.

Netanyahu’s campaign team is pulling out all the stops to highlight Bibi’s perceived strengths against Eisenkot’s weaknesses. In June, Yonatan Urich, Bibi’s senior campaign strategist, ridiculed Eisenkot’s ponderous, heavily accented English in an attempt to portray English fluency as a sine qua non for an Israeli prime minister. When Eisenkot challenged Netanyahu to a debate, Urich sneered, “Are you prepared to do it in English?” (Netanyahu won’t debate him in Hebrew.)

Urich’s absurd challenge — why would any Israeli politician campaign domestically in English? — seems to be a sign of desperation, an admission that Eisenkot’s actual platform is popular, and his character unassailable. But worse, this line of attack signals an inability to read the post-October 7 tea leaves. A March Pew poll indicates that Americans’ growing hostility to Israel is inextricably bound up with their dislike of Netanyahu. In both political parties, majorities of adults under the age of 50 now rate Israel and Netanyahu negatively.

Foreign ministers will still need well-spoken English in their professional toolkit, but as the Netanyahu-allergic West in general continues to distance itself from Israel, forcing Israel to cultivate a multilingual circle of friendship, a prime minister’s ability to schmooze American presidents in vernacular English should not be considered a priority.

Far more important than his English is the fact that, if elected, Eisenkot would be Israel’s first Mizrachi prime minister, and high time. The positive optics this would generate cannot be overstated. In 1948, when Israel became a nation, the Jewish population was 600,000, mostly Ashkenazic, with only a small percentage of Mizrachi Jews whose residency stretched back to pre-exilic times. Then almost a million Mizrachi Jews driven out of their ancient homes in Muslim lands — Morocco, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq — flooded in.

Displaced by these Arab countries, the Mizrachi Jews were socially and educationally neglected by young Israel’s patronizing, but also overwhelmed Ashkenazi civil service. The newcomers remained a underclass for many years, with all the negative baggage the word implies, including disproportionate crime and incarceration.

It is to Israel’s credit that within a few decades the cultural divide was healed by accelerating rates of intermarriage (which likely accounts for Eisenkot’s Ashkenazic surname). The Mizrachi slums are long gone. And so too is the Ashkenazic domination of institutional power. Netanyahu’s hybrid Israeli-American brand seems retro beside Eisenkot’s “echt” (genuine) Middle Eastern cultural identity.

In an updated epilogue to his only recently translated 2019 book, “The Jewish March of Folly” — the “folly” being “my forebears’ anarchism, tribalism, factionalism and fatalism” — Israeli historian and journalist Amotz Asa-el recounts the stunning transformation of Israel’s Mizrachi demographic since 1959, from yesteryear’s “squalor, humiliation and wrath” to: solid representation in high military echelons, along with three defence ministers, four finance ministers and five foreign ministers, besides more than one-third of all lawmakers and mayors, not to mention a few Mizrachi billionaire tech pioneers and a Supreme Court justice. The closing of Israel’s social gaps isn’t complete, Asa-el says, “but the direction is clear.”

In the post October 7 era, if elected, Eisenkot’s imperfect English may help to dial down Zionophobia in the West. Flaunting his at-homeness in the anglosphere (he generally speaks in English at the UN), Bibi likely reinforces the erroneous assumption amongst progressives that Israel is a colonial outpost of the West rather than the legitimate birthplace and homeland of the Jewish people.

Eisenkot’s Moroccan provenance is manifestly non-colonial. Speaking Hebrew in all public forums (with, if need be, a translator at hand, like many other heads of state, including Putin and Xi Jinping) would be smart: it would cement his — and Israel’s — standing as Middle Eastern first and foremost. Nothing bespeaks “indigeneity” more than the proud, default usage of one’s indisputably indigenous language.

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