Yardena Schwartz on Netanyahu, Trump, and the greatest threat facing Israel

On the NYR Daily this week On Tuesday we published Yardena Schwartz’s dispatch about Israel’s upcoming election, “[Why Bibi Fears Arab Voters](,” in which she tracks the growing political influence of Arab-Israelis, who comprise roughly a fifth of the population: if they turn out in high numbers in next week’s election and vote for center-left Jewish parties, as well as the Arab parties of the Joint List alliance in the Knesset, they could hold the key to ending Benjamin Netanyahu’s decade-long tenure as Israel’s prime minister. This is clearly a scenario Netanyahu himself fears. As we went to press, Yardena updated her piece to reflect his latest effort to push legislation that would see cameras installed in voting booths—a Trumpian gambit based on [unfounded claims]( of Arab voter fraud. Then Bibi tried to rally his base by promising to annex part of the occupied West Bank, and finally his party’s Facebook page (his preferred social media channel, to Trump’s Twitter) warned supporters of the “Arabs who want to destroy us all.” (Facebook subsequently ruled this a violation of its “hate speech policy” and suspended the chatbot that had posted it.) Photo by Yair Golov Though New Jersey-born and raised, Yardena has been based in Tel Aviv for the past six years. Before that, she worked in New York at NBC for five years as a TV news producer—not her first choice, as she’d always wanted to write for print, but when she graduated from Columbia Journalism School in 2011, newspaper hiring had not yet picked up the recession. She spoke Hebrew, so when she decided to pursue a career as a freelance foreign reporter, moving to Tel Aviv was a natural choice. Now that she’s truly embedded, I wanted to know what most foreign observers miss about Israel. “Many Americans and foreigners have little awareness of the makeup of Israeli society,” she told me via email. “There’s this misconception that Israelis are mostly white European Jews, perhaps because many American Jews have roots in Europe. Yet over half of Israel’s Jewish population is brown, having immigrated or descended from Arabic countries such as Iraq, Morocco, Yemen, Tunisia, and elsewhere in the Muslim world.” Since Yardena is an American émigré, I was interested in her perspective now from Israel on what we might call the Peter Beinart Thesis, after [his groundbreaking 2010 essay]( for the Review about the fracturing of support for Israel among American Jews. “I personally think the growing divide between Israel and young American Jews is the greatest threat Israel faces today—much more than any security threat from Iran, Hamas, or Hezbollah,” she said. “This dichotomy is most obvious when you look at the strong support among Israelis for President Trump, who is anathema to the vast majority of American Jews.” The weakening Jewish-American identification with Israel is something not well understood there, she said—“that’s why many Israelis fail to see the damage Trump has caused to Israel’s relationship with American Jews.” Given the close political alignment between Trump and Netanyahu, there is a cottage industry of commentary on who imitates whom. I asked Yardena what her take on that was. “For all the comparisons, Netanyahu has been at this game much longer,” she noted. “He was labeling journalists leftists and traitors long before Trump entered politics, and was inciting against Israel’s Arab citizens years before Trump began blaming America’s problems on immigrants. “What’s changed since Trump entered the picture is that Netanyahu has grown even more aggressive in his attacks on the Israeli media and Israel’s Arab population. And because Israelis see the supposed leader of the free world using these same tactics, it not only gives Netanyahu a pass for similar behavior but puts him in the league of an American leader. It’s no wonder Netanyahu’s campaign billboards all over Israel show him and Trump smiling over the words ‘Netanyahu: Another League.’” Given Netanyahu’s legal woes and his failure to form a government earlier this year, Yardena believes that “his opponents have a much better chance this time around.” But that’s as far as the optimism runs. I asked: “Two-state: dead or alive?” She replied: “It was dead long before Netanyahu made his last-minute campaign drive this week, vowing to annex a third of the West Bank if he wins reelection… In the absence of a two-state solution, I think what we will see, unfortunately, is one state where it will become increasingly more difficult for Israel to toe the fragile line of being both Jewish and democratic.” The paradox of life in Israel, however, is “the sense of safety” that she says many Israelis feel—herself included, in marked contrast to how she feels now, as a Jew, when she visits Trump’s America. “Yes, the conflict is always in the background, but unless Israel is in the throes of an actual war, the conflict largely stays in the background for most people who live here,” she said. “The notion that Israel is a war zone is easy to understand if you’ve never been to Israel and have only seen it on the news. People who visit for the first time are often shocked when they see how relatively ‘normal’ life is here.” For everything else we’ve been publishing, visit the [NYR Daily](. And let us know what you think: send your comments on articles or this newsletter to Lucy McKeon and me at daily@nybooks.com; we do write back. Matt Seaton Editor, NYR Daily You are receiving this message because you signed up for email newsletters from The New York Review. [Update preferences]( The New York Review of Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 [Unsubscribe](