Israel’s Prince of Paradoxes
Saul thought, “I’ll pin David to the wall,” and twice threw a spear, but David dodged it both times. So the prophet Samuel describes the tragic relationship between a weakened king and his former protégé, a drama that is now recurring in Israeli politics. Benjamin Netanyahu—master strategist, ruthless politician—is in fact no Saul, nor is Avigdor Lieberman a fair-haired harpist. Yet the purported decline in Netanyahu’s powers and the palpable rise of Lieberman’s have biblical overtones. Only, this time, it is David hurling the spears.
Almost daily, Lieberman, the former Israeli defense minister, impugns the prime minister’s fitness for office, assailing him as a liar and a closet leftist who gave a long list of concessions to the Palestinians—in the 1998 Wye Agreement with Yasser Arafat, the 2011 prisoner exchange with Hamas, and, most egregious, Israel’s agreement to transfer Qatari cash to Gaza’s terrorists. Lieberman, by contrast, resigned from four Israeli governments rather than back what he termed “disastrous” acts of weakness. He’s even challenged Netanyahu to a televised debate. “Let’s have a confrontation between the man from Caesarea and the man from Nokdim,” he declared—that is, between the upscale coastal neighborhood where Netanyahu owns a villa and the modest West Bank settlement where Lieberman lives.
Such sniping would be commonplace in Israeli politics, but for the fact that Lieberman was once Netanyahu’s closest ally and, prior to the elections in March, widely judged a has-been. Netanyahu led his Likud party to an impressive victory, winning 35 seats out of the Knesset’s 120, edging past the centrist Blue and White of former Israel Defense Forces chief Benny Gantz. But then Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party, with a mere four seats, blocked Netanyahu’s efforts to cobble together a right-of-center coalition. A fiery rightist, Lieberman would have been a natural partner in such a bloc, but he demanded a price for his support: a law requiring
