How Netanyahu exploited the politics of fear in a country that now fears for its survival
Rockets are fired from Gaza toward Israel Oct. 10, 2023. Photo by Getty Images
Robert Zaretsky October 11, 2023
The consequences of Hamas’ attack on Israel on Simchat Torah are catastrophic. Since Saturday morning, when Hamas launched its many-pronged invasion, more than 1,000 Israelis have died, thousands of others have been wounded, and more than 100 Israelis have been taken hostage. As we watch in horror the videos of the attacks, the word “catastrophic” utterly fails to take the full measure of this event.
That the attack occurred on Simchat Torah is also ironic. The holiday, celebrating the end of the yearly cycle of Torah readings, climaxes with the recitation of the opening passages of the Book of Genesis. These passages encompass, as Robert Alter writes in his stunning translation, “the tale of the heavens and the earth when they were created.”
The first man, Adam, is among the things created during these days of wonder. So far, so good. To keep it this way, if only for a short while, the reading ends before Adam and his companion Eve, persuaded by the serpent, eat from the forbidden tree of knowledge. The consequences are, once again, catastrophic: Upon hearing God trampling through the garden, they hide not just out of shame, but also fear.
Fear is the emotion, perhaps more than any other, that captures our collective response to events in Israel. Fear over what has already happened, fear over what has yet to happen; fear over what we know, and fear over what we do not yet know. Fear is the constant companion of danger, coursing through the body of a single person or an entire people upon suddenly confronting a grave or existential threat.
This is why Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous words, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” are misleading. According to Roosevelt, fear is a “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror.” In 1933, Americans had many nameable, reasonable, and justifiable causes for fear, ranging from a collapsed economy at home to a collapsed democracy in Germany. Ninety years later, nothing has changed. Israelis can also name and justify the many reasons to fear, ranging from the collapse of its defensive wall along the border with Gaza to the collapse of their faith in their intelligence and security agencies.
Fear thus has its reasons. Just as it spurs a person to meet a real threat, fear also unifies and galvanizes a people to counter such threats. This was the case for Israelis in 1948 and 1968, 1973 and 2023. (As of this writing, though, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has yet to agree to an emergency war cabinet proposed by opposing political leaders.) But as the reactions of Adam and Eve to God’s accusation remind us — the former blames the latter for their transgression, while the latter blames the serpent — fear also divides us.
Tragically, we do not have to go back as far as Genesis to recall this fact of human nature. Instead, we need go back no further than January 2023 and the genesis of the current coalition government. Determined to remain in power — and thus remain beyond the reach of the courts, where he was being tried on bribery charges — Netanyahu joined the Likud with far-right and ultranationalist settler movements. One of their leaders, Itamar Ben-Gvir, despite a police rap sheet longer than the Simchat Torah readings, was improbably gifted with the position of minister of national security, while a second, Bezalel Smotrich, was awarded the finance ministry.
Once formed, this government proceeded to enact judicial reforms — a euphemism for the dismantling of an independent judiciary — which further divided and frightened an already deeply divided and fearful nation. As the brilliant Franco-Israeli sociologist Eva Illouz underscores in her recent book, The Emotional Life of Populism, Netanyahu became Israel’s longest-serving prime minister through his mastery of the politics of fear.
This is hardly new. Historically, Likud’s leaders have won the support of Sephardic voters by exploiting their resentment over the discrimination they have experienced under the Labor Party. Likud’s increasingly populist rhetoric won over the Mizrahim — Jews of Afro-Asian descent — despite the fact that the party’s leadership is almost exclusively Ashkenazi and their neo-liberal policies penalize the very people who support them.
But Netanyahu, Illouz argues, “intuitively understood that the core of the Israeli soul was fear.” He owes his long tenure in power to manipulating this fear, by associating Arabs with the Shoah, “not for the collective interest, but for his own electoral interests.” By posing as “Mr. Security,” Netanyahu thus promised his base — as did his admirer, the former and perhaps future president Donald Trump — that he alone could fix what ailed the nation.
Instead, Netanyahu — once again like Trump — has nearly broken the country. The government’s determination to overhaul the judiciary deepened the nation’s division and demoralized its army, the Israel Defense Forces. While it is too early to ascertain the roles played by key individuals and institutions for the still-unfolding disaster in Israel — this will be the work of investigators and historians — it is too late to act on the obvious: that Hamas took horrific advantage of a distracted and divided enemy, one whose government, by exploiting the politics of fear to attain power, has made the nation rightly fear for its survival.
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