Jews and Israelis: Labor Pains on the Way to Redemption

Israel 365 News ^ | 7/18/23 | Elie Mischel

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When Benjamin Netanyahu first became prime minister in 1996, he won with a simple slogan coined by some of his Chabad supporters: “Netanyahu: Good for the Jews” (נתניהו: טוב ליהודים). The morning after Netanyahu’s surprising victory, Shimon Peres, the outgoing prime minister, summarized his defeat with one terse statement: “The Jews defeated the Israelis.”

Peres understood that the Oslo Accords and the wave of Arab suicide bombings, the hot-button issues of the time, were disguising the true battle for power in Israeli society. As Yair Lapid would later write about the Gaza disengagement, “It was not despite the settlers but because of them. It was never about the Palestinians… There was a completely different motive: Over the past 20 years, the Religious Zionists made extensive use of the secular nation to fulfill a series of political and mostly religious aims… but Israelis don’t like being anyone’s mules, no matter who’s riding them.”

In 1977, when a reporter asked Menachem Begin what kind of prime minister he intended to be, he said, “The good Jewish kind.” It was an identity that Begin carried with him to the end of his life. Tellingly, he chose to be buried in a simple grave on the Mount of Olives, the traditional cemetery of the “Jews,” instead of Mount Herzl, together with modern Israel’s other great leaders (Amit Segal, “The Story of Israeli Politics”).