The relationship between allies Donald Trump and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, with family members too, including Jared Kushner & Netanyahu’s son Yair, is multi dimensional.
Both have some distasteful local and international allies including Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Saudi’s MBS, far right and religious fundamentalists, while attacking democracy to have institutions including the courts or legal system, media, military, older citizens etc., be subordinate and support them and their interests.
Further, the supposed global left or faux anti-imperialists who support Palestine versus Israel, but coy about Hamas and Gaza, while Netanyahu’s own extremists settlers create problems for any peace agreements and future of younger generations, are being used to belittle centrists including Biden – Democrats, Australia’s Labor government and UK’s Labour’s Keir Starmer, who is not even in government?
More transnational attacks on the centre by the right to prevail in elections, corruption, authoritarianism and power?
From Politico:
‘Opinion | The Trump-Netanyahu Strategy Is Revealed
Israel’s democratic crisis could become America’s.
Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu have been allies, but also, intriguingly, mirror one another.
That’s not only because both see “strength” as their go-to asset, or at least the con that the political base seems most likely to buy. Each claims to be his nation’s singular guardian against catastrophe. Each turns shamelessness into charisma. Each grew up coddled but plays up resentments for elites. Each cultivates, in effect, dictators like Vladimir Putin and Victor Orban and scoffs at Western Europe. Each will tolerate only loyalists, and has a string of former appointees, especially high-ranking security professionals, who look back on their service in disgust. Each brags promiscuously, condemns “fake news” and has a sycophantic, tweeting son.
Now, Trump, already running for president, is under indictment, a half-year after Netanyahu, already on trial, was reelected prime minister. Trump will deny learning from anyone; but if Israel, at times, seems like America in microcosm, then Netanyahu’s playbook might well provide some coaching. The crisis confronting Israel’s democracy, prompted by Netanyahu’s assault on the judiciary, is cautionary for the United States, moreover. One hopes that the mass response to that assault is instructive, too.
I hasten to add the obvious, that comparing Israel with the United States takes imagination. Israel is four-fifths the size of Massachusetts, with a population something less than Greater Chicago’s — and that’s before we get to history, religion, resources and culture.
But Israeli and American politicians often seem caught up in the same game. Israel, like America, suffers tensions between people on the peripheries of cities and those on the urban coast, between the less well-educated, who are often religiously dogmatic, and those more cosmopolitan and scientifically inclined; between those leaning to the right and those to the left. A broad middle also exists, with people who may be religiously sentimental, or reasonably tolerant, or just can’t be bothered; over 40 percent of Israelis are secular, about 30 percent of Americans. Israel’s inequalities are generated by a globalized, technological and entrepreneurial economy. When Israelis say “elites,” they mean pretty much what Americans do.
Israel, like America, moreover, is a nation of immigrants whose patchy ethnic origins torture collective identity; and though Israelis and Americans assume a powerful (arguably unrivaled) military, national unity is most effectively mobilized by, well, the threat of catastrophe. Finally, Israel, like America, has a checkered constitutional history, where high ideals espoused in a Declaration of Independence were not exactly enacted; it’s a reality largely owing to bigotries against a large minority who, for good reason, did not suppose themselves welcomed into their country’s founding — bigotries that can be invigorated by demagogues.
Which brings us back to Trump and Netanyahu.
For both, regaining or holding on to power means, among other things, subordinating judicial institutions that define and enforce the rule of law. That’s because both have hanging over them grave allegations of high crimes against the state. They cannot risk responsible legal professionals grinding away at their jobs. Netanyahu’s assault on Israel’s judiciary is his preemptive strike. Trump knows something about debasing constitutional norms, but his own assault on prosecutors and courts may just be gearing up.
Trump, famously, is under investigation for his role in fomenting the bloody Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which sought to thwart the transfer of power. Less well-known is Netanyahu’s jeopardy.
A year ago, before he returned to the premiership, Israel’s government — its “change coalition” — voted to empower an independent state commission to investigate Netanyahu’s role in the defense ministry’s 2016 procurement of submarines and other vessels from the German company, Thyssenkrupp — a deal in which he overrode the objections of his defense minister and the I.D.F.’s general staff. Close associates, and arguably, Netanyahu himself, profited; billions of defense ministry dollars were involved, not to mention millions in commissions and enhanced stock values. This was corruption with real national security implications. With Netanyahu back in power, that commission is, for the time being, dead.
But the parallel, alas, does not end there. For both Trump and Netanyahu are also charged with lesser corruptions that are comparatively difficult to prove, or at least easier for supporters to overlook: Trump’s alleged hush money to Stormy Daniels; Netanyahu’s payments — allegedly bribes — from foreign associates, and his alleged use of regulatory power to bend the news for his political benefit. In a way, moreover, both men have been lucky to be charged with these lesser crimes first. Netanyahu has already proven how an indictment of this kind can be useful in rallying the base, along with blocking potential challenges from feckless leaders of one’s own party.
His playbook is pretty much self-evident. You prompt condemnation of the less egregious charges as amounting to a witch hunt enabled by a “weaponized judiciary.” You discredit prosecutors and judges before they can convict you, and you justify your reelection, in part, by promising to tame them. The larger crime is thus submerged in “politics-as-usual” sparring — catnip for reporters and pundits who like the sport.
A “weaponized judiciary,” in other words, is your sly complaint when seeking power and your first priority when exercising power.
Netanyahu’s judicial “reform,” accordingly, is meant to make prosecutors and judges subservient to his cabinet. And, simultaneously, Netanyahu has made an alliance with ultra-Orthodox theocrats and pro-settlement zealots who feared that judicial enforcement of civil rights and the rule of law would undermine their privileges: a free hand in the West Bank, say, or control over marriage, or exemptions from the army for male yeshiva students. Netanyahu appointed the Kahanist bigot and provocateur Itamar Ben-Gvir to head the ministry overseeing the state police, which would be like Trump appointing Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the Oath Keepers, to run the FBI.
These moves may have no direct analogue in America. But Trump’s embrace of the anti-abortion movement is nothing if not submission to religious activists — including, ironically, reactionary Supreme Court justices, whom Netanyahu can only envy. And executive power carries other privileges. If Republicans win back the Senate next year, and Trump regains the White House, one can imagine whom he might install as attorney general. Jim Jordan is already chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Trump may be far from locking up the nomination, but he can take heart from Netanyahu’s brazenness. Trump’s enablers in the Republican Party (Fox News, and so forth) jumped to condemn his indictment as just another gambit by the liberal elite and “woke” Deep State. Trump is already promising presidential pardons for (and essentially singing along with) extremists who stormed the Capitol…..’
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Posted on March 4, 2024
Some years ago Putin and Russia attracted much attention and sympathy from Anglo and European ultra conservative Christians, radical right and free market libertarians for Russia’s corrupt nativist authoritarianism with antipathy towards liberal democracy, the EU and open society.
These phenomena can be observed through visitors and liaisons, but more so by shared talking points and values. These include family values, pro-life, Christianity, patriarchy, misogyny, white supremacy, traditionalism, dominionism, Evangelicals, anti-LGBT, anti-woke, anti-elite, anti-gay marriage, traditional wives etc. and corruption, promoted by right wing parties, media, ultra conservative influencers, think tanks and NGOs
Growth of Conservative Hard Right Wing or Nativist Authoritarian Regimes
Posted on December 18, 2022
Good article from Lucy Hamilton in Melbourne ‘The fight against paranoid nostalgia’ and one could suggest further common factors, actors and their reasons; underpinned by corruption and precluding few if any ‘off ramps’, these types are in so deep. In addition to Putin, Orban, Trump et al there is also Erdogan, Netanyahu, Vucic in Serbia, Dodik in Bosnia Serbia, Kaczynski in Poland et al. and of course the UK Tory governments….. whiff of influence and corruption.
Collective Narcissism, Ageing Electorates, Pensioner Populism, White Nativism and Autocracy
Posted on November 5, 2021
Plato noted more than 2000 years ago, one of the greatest dangers for democracy is that ordinary people are all too easily swayed by the emotional and deceptive rhetoric of ambitious politicians. We have observed the Anglosphere including the U.K., Australia and U.S., becoming more nativist, conservative, libertarian, extreme and conspiracy minded. This is not organic.
Fake Anti-Imperialists of the Anglo Left and Right on Ukraine and Russia
Posted on February 28, 2023
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine 2014 we have observed many Anglo left and centrists echoing Kremlin talking points that justify the invasion, shared with the far right, but not by the European left nor right?
However, if one observes many of the US along with some British, Australian etc. geopolitical analysts, media types and politicians promoted in Anglo right wing media, not only do they present sketchy analysis, but seem linked to US oligarchs, Putin allies and/or far right, or at best cold war agitprop?
Some posit that many on the left are not just playing out ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, but the Red-Green-Brown Alliance…