Netanyahu's Legacy: A Historic Victory Over Obama and the Palestinian National Movement

Netanyahu's strategy was to buy time between the fall of the liberal-democratic order and the rise of a new technological-economic order on the world stage. The abilities he developed in his relationship with Sara are the same abilities that allowed him to control the Israeli state of chaos and withstand the upheavals of history and the region

Zelda Fitzgerald and her husband, whose relationship Zipper compared to Sara and Bibi  (Source)

"He hangs the earth upon nothing" (Job 26:7)

Yuval Noah Harari and Benny Ziffer are two prophets of the Netanyahu era. These two sharp cultural commentators were better at identifying than any political analyst the underlying trends of the Prime Minister's strategy - which brought him an unprecedented victory over the local left, and in a sense, over the global left as well. This is not just a fleeting tactical victory but one with ideological-conceptual implications that has thrown his opponents into strategic confusion, reflected in the loss of direction of the Israeli left and to a large extent the global left in the face of the rise of the new right - which Netanyahu is perceived as a global figure who heralded it. Yuval Noah Harari, as a historian, was adept at identifying the historical change behind the policy of the historian's son, while Benny Ziffer, as a literary figure, was skilled at identifying the personal and marital drama that drives the Bibi-Sara couple.

The victory Netanyahu achieved over the Palestinians now seems irreversible with the death of the demographic problem and the triumph of technology over the womb of the Palestinian woman. Leading thinkers of the Israeli left, such as the late Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua (may he be blessed with long life), saw demography as the Achilles' heel of the right - irrefutable proof that "time is working against us" and that we are standing against an irreversible historical trend that would put an end to the Jewish state. But this is an anachronistic view of the 20th century, belonging to the humanistic past, where the number of people was the essential variable in the strength of armies, in the economic power of nations, and in moral and political power.

At the beginning of the rise of the post-humanistic era, Netanyahu and Yuval Noah Harari thought differently. They identified the decline in the value of demography itself in the balance of power, and with it the decline in the power of democracy - with the decline in human power in the face of technology. The 20th century was the era of demography, with the demographic explosion and the rise of mass communication, and its ideological equation was the will and welfare of the masses. In contrast, the 21st century has abandoned quantity in favor of quality, and the formula that drives it is the aspiration for accelerated technological and economic progress. The 1% defeats the 99%, Silicon Valley defeats the Rust Belt, and the Jews defeat the Arabs. This is the local version of the split of humanity into a technological super-class and a class of "useless people" - as Yuval Noah Harari predicts.

In the 21st century, in the era of smart machines, autonomous vehicles that will lead to autonomous weapons, surveillance capabilities brought by the information age, and automated production without workers in the fourth industrial revolution - the Arab majority between the Jordan and the sea will no longer change anything in the balance of power. Israeli technological quality will defeat any Arab demographic quantity. Arafat, who chose to rely on the weapon of the Palestinian womb, was wrong - and Netanyahu was right. Time works in favor of technology, and therefore time works in favor of Israel.

If the old romantic right clung to the issue of territories against the Arabs, in 19th-century thinking, and the old left responded that it's not the territories that matter but the people and demography, in 20th-century thinking, Bibi and the new right have a 21st-century answer - neither territories nor demography are important in Netanyahu's view, but technology and economy. From this historical perspective, Netanyahu stood for a great containment battle against the demographic settlement trend of the conflict and the separation of populations that remained from the end of the 20th century and against the worldview of the old left, which was embodied more than anything in Obama's figure. And the rest is known.

But the trend of containment and absorption at all costs and with impressive skill, with which Netanyahu is most identified, would not have come into the world without a personal foundation and marital dynamics that Benny Ziffer identified in his first encounter with the Netanyahu couple, in his brilliant article in Haaretz: "How tender was the night I spent with the Netanyahu couple in my home". Benny Ziffer, the literary fox with the sharpest irony in our parts, chose to hint with a thick hint like no other, but visible only to the literary milieu, to the existence of a mental illness suffered by the Prime Minister's wife in his article, which ended thus: "They appeared to me, he and his wife, on that night, as mysterious and hypnotic and lonely figures from a Scott Fitzgerald novel, and the night was indeed tender, tender to the extreme, like the title of that tormented Jazz Age author's last work."

Anyone who has read the novel Benny Ziffer is talking about, "Tender Is the Night," immediately identifies Netanyahu's personality with that of the rational, exceptionally intelligent and very American hero dealing with his wife's mental illness - the novel's female protagonist - and her outbursts. The novel is based on Scott Fitzgerald's own experiences in dealing with his own wife's mental illness. Such a personal struggle within a marital system develops in the caring spouse exceptional containment abilities and extraordinary blocking skills, which certainly served him, if Ziffer's hint is correct, also in dealing with the disturbed Israeli political system and achieving stability within chaos - at any cost.

Anyone who has experienced such a relationship, of living in close proximity to a mental problem that could erupt at any moment, knows that they adapt to a person a worldview focused on the tactics of containment over an abyss: to get through another day, to contain each current outburst, and never to stop fearing the next one. This is the end of Netanyahu's era as Prime Minister and he is buying time. He postpones. He contains. But this is not a new situation for him. This has been his existential state for years - Netanyahu is a man living on the brink.