Economically, Strategically, and Diplomatically, the Netanyahu Era Has Been Good for Israel

Last week, the American Interest published its list of “the eight great powers of 2017,” one of which was the Jewish state. To much of the Israeli left, accustomed to lamenting their country’s allegedly sorry condition at the hands of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party, this judgment of Israel’s success might come as a surprise. To Amnon Lord, it is a vindication of Likud policies:

Benjamin Netanyahu achieved [a great deal] while in a state of constant conflict, primarily with Israel’s American ally. He got the keys [to the government] eight years ago, when the economy was in a tailspin in the wake of the most serious financial crisis since 1929. Growth was negative at the end of the Ehud Olmert administration. Netanyahu and Yuval Steinitz, his first finance minister, turned things around with budget cuts and the removal of [regulatory] barriers to the extent possible in the Israeli reality, and brought back investments and growth. The economy moved within months to a growth-rate of between 4 and 5 percent. Netanyahu saved Israel’s economy from the doldrums that characterized the economies of Europe, and especially the southern countries along the Mediterranean. Even the U.S. itself, under Barack Obama, failed to recover from the blow of September 2008. . . .

To the political, economic, and security accomplishments, we could add the way in which Israel has, on the one hand, preserved its ability to harm Hizballah’s arms buildup while, on the other hand, managing to stay out of involvement in the war in Syria and an unnecessary flare-up on that front. Netanyahu’s ability to keep Israel out of the area affected by the Middle Eastern earthquake, at least partially, is a great achievement, and those who see it simply as the result of passivity and luck are wrong. We can easily imagine other persons [in power] among those who envisaged all sorts of dark scenarios of what was about to happen and who would have gotten Israel into serious trouble. . . .

The political opposition in Israel is not enthusiastic about Israel becoming a rising power. . . . Israel has many ideologues who don’t think Theodor Herzl and David Ben-Gurion were aiming for a state with global or regional influence in the realms of security or economics. Many varied thinkers today prefer a smaller Israel, . . . an Israel in the pre-1967 borders that would be negotiating for its very existence [or] an Israel trying to survive thanks to security guarantees of the “powers” and UN peacekeeping forces. Ask the children of Aleppo—how did that work out?

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