KIBBUTZ MISHMAR HANEGEV, Israel — How do Israelis feel about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s much-scrutinized diplomatic trip to Washington, D.C.?
“Honestly, no one here cares,” one college student who recently returned from reserve duty in Gaza said. “We all have bigger problems.”
On this kibbutz just 20 miles from the Gaza border, none of the Israelis I spoke with are impressed with Netanyahu for making the trip, or excited about its potential results. Instead, they’ve reacted to Netanyahu’s venture to address Congress — at a moment when the U.S.-Israel relationship has developed serious new tensions over the war — with a combination of dark humor and skepticism that is, well, how Israelis react to most things these days.
“He should go and stay,” said an agricultural consultant. “Maybe he’ll replace Biden.”
At any other time, Netanyahu’s trip would be the biggest political story of the week. But, as last Friday’s front page of Yediot Aharanot noted, amid a contentious campaign, for the presidential candidates “Right Now, Netanyahu Is the Last Thing That Interests Them.”
And that was before President Joe Biden made the earth-shattering announcement Sunday that he would end his run for a second term. It’s like showing up late for a wedding and finding out the groom is no longer the groom. And he has COVID. And his potential replacement is, well, somewhat more skeptical of your presence.
So: Why go?
Is Netanyahu visiting on behalf of Israel — or himself?
“His wife wants to show off her new airplane,” said a former kibbutznik visiting from Beer Sheba, suggesting the trip has more to do with Netanyahu’s inflated sense of pomp and ego than anything else.
The airplane, named “Wings of Zion,” is a Boeing 767 that the government ordered at Netanyahu’s request. Originally budgeted at $41.2 million, it’s now expected to cost taxpayers $260 million — a shocking number, especially given the war’s deleterious effect on Israel’s economy — an increase some have blamed on the design whims of Sara Netanyahu, the prime minister’s wife.
“The plane is a dismal monument to everything Benjamin Netanyahu has wrought upon the state and inflicted on Zionism,” the journalist Uri Misgav wrote in Ha’aretz. “The corruption, enfeeblement, loss of capabilities, erosion of checks and balances, emasculation of the country’s watchdogs and subjugation of the defense establishment to the whims and caprices of one family.”
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Traveling with the Netanyahus on that plane will be the families of some current hostages, as well as former hostage Noa Argamani, who was freed in a daring IDF rescue in June. Their participation has proved controversial, too.
At a July 17 press conference organized by the Hostages and Missing Families Forum , Ayalet Levy Shahar, mother of hostage Naamah Levy, said she told Netanyahu — who faces accusations of dragging out ceasefire talks in order to prolong the war and maintain his grip on power — that she wouldn’t accompany him to Washington until negotiations for her daughter’s release are successfully completed.
“Meanwhile I’m staying here and asking you, Benjamin Netanyahu, to look her in the eyes,” Levy Shahar said . “That’s my little girl. Meet with us immediately so we can make her voice heard.”
Callers into Israel Army Radio echoed the sentiments of most of the hostage families.
“First make a deal,” said one man. “Then handle the missiles in the north. Then you can go.”
Netanyahu’s speech comes as Israel faces multiple crises: the draining and internationally unpopular war in Gaza; ever-growing internal dissatisfaction over the failure to retrieve the more than 100 hostages who remain in captivity; the fallout from a recent attack in Tel Aviv by the Houthis in Yemen; ongoing missile attacks from Hezbollah in Lebanon; factional turmoil over drafting Haredim ; accusations of genocide; and severely diminished standing abroad.
Given that turmoil, how will Netanyahu make the case that Israel is standing strong — and deserves strong American support?
“He will downplay accusations of civilian casualties, blame Hamas for those who have been killed, insist Israel’s cause is just, and accuse Israel’s international critics of double standards and hypocrisy for focusing on Israel and singling it out,” Ariel Reichard, a fellow at the Herzl Center for Israel Studies, wrote me in an email. “The question is whether these arguments still hold enough traction.”
Ehud Danoch, Israel’s former consul general in Los Angeles, thinks Netanyahu will certainly bring up Iran.
“We represent the free world in this war,” he wrote me in an email, anticipating Netanyahu’s approach. “The threat is to all of us. Today it’s us. Tomorrow it’s going to be you.”
‘The best politician’
On the kibbutz, people see Netanyahu’s visit as an instance of a leader whose star has been severely tarnished — if not burned out — trying to seize a last chance to shine.
“Bibi is finished,” said a young man who just returned from his second round of reserve duty on the Gaza border. He said he voted for the prime minister twice in the past five elections, but would never do so again.
It galls him, like many other Israelis, that Netanyahu doesn’t regularly meet with hostage families or the families of fallen soldiers, has not agreed to a government inquiry into Oct. 7, and has not made real efforts to visit kibbutzim that were attacked by Hamas. When members of Kibbutz Nir Oz brought that latter concern up recently, National Security Council Chief Tzachi Hanegbi defended Netanyahu , saying, “he isn’t someone with a lot of free time.”
But if Speaker of the House Mike Johnson aimed, in inviting Netanyahu to speak, to highlight Republican support for Israel amid Democratic criticism, then, at least in Israel, it seems to be working.
Small American and Israeli flags, fixed together, flutter along the roadsides here, reminders of the support Biden showed Israel following the Oct. 7 attack.
But the plastic flags themselves are faded and torn, a symbol of the fact that, among Israelis, there’s a sense that Biden’s support for their cause has slipped. Even left-leaning Israelis I spoke with took issue with the president’s decision to hold up one American weapons export to Israel over concerns about Palestinian civilian casualties.
“Those are what we use to destroy tunnels,” a kibbutz member told me of the bombs, some of which the administration has recently begun to ship.
Perhaps Netanyahu’s visit might rouse more support from the administration, or rally allies to face the multiple threats posed by Iran and its proxies in Yemen, Lebanon and Gaza.
But after Oct. 7, people here have little faith in Netanyahu’s competence beyond his ability to stay in power.
“He’s the best politician, the best,” a young woman who didn’t support him said. “That’s the problem.”
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