The Netanyahu Video Fallout

A recently broadcast video from 2001 reveals the deceptiveness of the Israeli prime minister.

An amazing video is circulating around the internet. It reveals Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with his guard down as he shares his thoughts with West Bank settlers in 2001. He seems to have believed that the cameras were off.

The video was recently shown on Israel’s Channel 10 but it deserves a wider audience, especially in North America.

The viewer sees Bibi bragging about how he handled the Americans during his first stint as Prime Minister between 1996 and 1999. He boasts that he was personally responsible for killing the Oslo Accords, loathed by the settlers as the first step towards a Palestinian state. “I actually stopped the Oslo Accords,” he says, sharing no credit with Yasser Arafat or the Palestinians, who in most right-wing Israeli accounts are held responsible. In his inimitable way he declares that the Palestinians must be hit harder until they feel the pain.

But, ask his hosts, won’t the world and the U.S. react against Israel? “No,” he replies. “The world won’t say a thing,” adding “America can easily be moved, moved to the right direction.” The Americans can be tricked, he says. “The trick” is to remain in the occupied territories (both the West Bank and Gaza at that time) “… to be there and pay a minimal price.” He quotes the wisdom of his grandfather: “It would be better to give two per cent than to give 100 per cent.” In other words, give a little to keep much is his preferred strategy.

Gideon Levy, one of the more radical columnists for Israel’s left-leaning Haaretz newspaper, declared his astonishment that the video has not created more of a stir. After all, in Levy’s words, the video reveals the prime minister as a “con artist,” a man “who doesn’t believe the Palestinians and doesn’t believe in the chance of an agreement with them, who thinks that Washington is in his pocket and that he can pull the wool over its eyes.” Levy seems to believe that if only Israelis and the Obama administration would watch this video, they would vigorously react against the prime minister. Sure, many Israelis might “want a right-wing, nationalist prime minister, but a prime minister who is a con artist?”

I would like to share Levy’s optimism, but I believe that people generally vote with their eyes fully open. Israelis who supported Netanyahu did not think they were voting for a saint. They wanted a hard-line anti-Palestinian, a deceptive politician, perhaps even “a con artist.” If they had wanted an honest, well-respected dove they could have voted for Chaim Oron, leader of the leftist Meretz party, which won only three seats in the last election.

This sort of behaviour is hardly limited to Israel. Think of the Italian electorate, which regularly assures pollsters that they will not vote again for the rather tarnished Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, but in the privacy of the voting booth cast their ballots for him all the same. Electorates more often than not get the crooks they deserve.

As for the Obama administration, they do not need this video to know the character of Netanyahu. They already know him well. But he is still the prime minister of Israel and that means that they have to deal with him, just as they deal with many less-than-reputable leaders around the world.

However, there may be many people outside of Israel who maintain illusions about Prime Minister Netanyahu and believe that he may yet emerge as a pragmatic peacemaker, following in the footsteps of Menachem Begin. I would certainly recommend this video to such inveterate optimists. Yes, people can change. But ideologues rarely do.