A First Draft of the Life of Benjamin Netanyahu

Between 2006 and 2012, 40,000 Eritrean and Sudanese migrants arrived in Israel by way of Egypt, many settling in the parks and abandoned buildings surrounding Tel Aviv’s seedy bus station.

Though the influx would cease with better policing and the construction of a border fence near the entry points, the remaining migrants’ status has become a flash point in Israeli politics. Residents of South Tel Aviv have protested increased criminality and social breakdown in the neighborhood. Left-wing activists and their international allies have insisted that, given Jewish history and Israel’s own beginnings, the state has a special responsibility toward migrants. The Supreme Court, in the habit of issuing dictates on human-rights grounds, forbade the government from jailing migrants. Meanwhile, most Israelis, who only reluctantly would set foot in that corner of Tel Aviv, look on in wonderment.

On April 2 of this year, a beaming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that he had reached a deal to defuse the crisis. Israel would permanently accept 14,000 migrants; the rest, according to a plan agreed upon with the United Nations’ refugee agency, would be settled in Western countries. But this compromise, moderate in its very essence, enraged virtually everyone. Activist groups on the left spoke darkly of upcoming deportations. Enraged right-wing members of Netanyahu’s coalition threatened to bring down the government over a perceived betrayal of their hard line on illegal migrants. After a few frantic hours in which his governing coalition seemed at risk, Netanyahu announced that the deal was off. The can was kicked down the road.