In Netanyahu’s Israel, the Divisiveness Is Now All About Him<br />15, 2018<br />JERUSALEM — In a trio of new polls, Israelis have declared what they think of the bribery case against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,<br />and the answer is roughly the same as what they think of Mr. Netanyahu himself: About half think he should step aside.<br />Yet Mr. Netanyahu’s Israel also lacks the sense of a unifying national mission<br />that characterized the country’s first 50 years, when it was building itself up from the sand, absorbing waves of diaspora immigrants and defending itself in a series of existential wars, days when its prime ministers wore frumpy clothes and lived modestly, as if they wouldn’t know a payoff if it landed in their palms.<br />For many Israelis, the ugliness hit a new low last year when, at an emotional Knesset committee hearing on the 2014 Gaza war, two members of Mr. Netanyahu’s<br />Likud Party got into a shouting match with two bereaved parents, calling one of them a "liar." Mr. Netanyahu, who attended the hearing, sat silently.<br />The bet paid off eventually but it also accelerated the trend of support for Israel breaking<br />down along American partisan lines — a dangerous shift for American Jews and Israel alike.<br />Shlomo Avineri said that Imagine if, in the next few weeks, there is a justified case for Israel to go to war,<br />Mr. Netanyahu’s Israel has seen less partisan moments, like the social protests of 2011<br />that cut across party lines and were a fleeting reminder of what it could mean for the country to come together in peacetime.<br />If we had to go to war, the decision would be contaminated for a lot of people." Mr. Netanyahu has dismissed the police recommendations to charge him as "slanted"<br />and "full of holes, like Swiss cheese." The attorney general, Avichai Mandelblit, praised the police on Thursday, in his first public remarks on the recommendations.
