Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's Faustian pact with the far right may have clinched him a narrow victory in the latest election, but it has come at the expense of Israel's democracy as well as its security. Those who still yearn for peace have no choice but to keep hope alive and await a generation of more enlightened leadership.
MADRID – Having secured a fifth term (and his fourth in a row) as Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu is on his way to surpassing David Ben-Gurion, the state’s founding father, as his country’s longest-serving leader. Yet Netanyahu’s Israel would hardly be recognizable to Ben-Gurion, who strived to combine the country’s Jewish character with democracy. As L.P. Hartley wrote in the opening of The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
MADRID – Having secured a fifth term (and his fourth in a row) as Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu is on his way to surpassing David Ben-Gurion, the state’s founding father, as his country’s longest-serving leader. Yet Netanyahu’s Israel would hardly be recognizable to Ben-Gurion, who strived to combine the country’s Jewish character with democracy. As L.P. Hartley wrote in the opening of The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”