Today, March 17, 2015, is election day in Israel: a reminder of what little right anyone has to say that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu represents the Israeli people. Some take that claim even further and make the mistake of saying Netanyahu represents the Jewish people.
Later today, the Israeli Knesset’s 120 seats will be decided as a parliamentary election comes to a close. Foolish Americans these past weeks — usually neoconservatives — have sanctimoniously argued that Netanyahu’s opinions represent a monolithic Israeli people. As a result, Americans are somehow being conned into thinking that whatever Netanyahu says is the will of the Israeli people or even the will of all Judaism.
That’s all a big fugazi though. Neoconservatives are the opposite of conservatives. They seek a bigger government, even if that means a less effective, more costly government. Conservatives, on the other hand, seek a smaller, limited government that seeks to perform its few responsibilities — such as defense — more nimbly and effectively. Just like our American politicians, Netanyahu is just a voice out of an array of voices.
{mosads}The reality is that the Israeli political landscape is more diverse than America’s. This is understandably hard for many to grasp in the very black-and-white U.S. political environment. Where we have Democrats, Republicans and Bernie Sanders in Congress, the Israeli state has parties in its legislature like Yahad, Meretz, Yisrael Beiteinu, United Torah Judaism, Shas, Kulanu, Jewish Home, Yesh Atid, United List, Zionist Union and the Netanyahu-led Likud. Eleven parties in a legislative body makes it a lot harder for that legislative body to be a binary black and white. Likud, while the party of the current Israeli prime minister, only makes up a comparatively meager by U.S. standards 15 percent of the 120-seat Knesset.
Much has been said and written about Israel and the Middle East these past weeks since Netanyahu’s March 3, 2015 speech to the U.S. Congress in the run-up to the elections. Most of the nonsense I’ve heard could only have come from Americans who’ve never stepped foot in Israel and somehow believe that a country as populous as the metropolis of New York City, in as diverse a place as the Middle East, with an almost unimaginably diverse Jewish population, in addition to other minority groups, and millennia of religions that only branch out into greater diversity the more time passes, would somehow be home to people who think monolithically on an issue as fundamental to humans as safety.
Contrary to what stuffed suits, talking heads and collectivist thinkers would have us believe, nowhere in the world does the government actually represent the people. The government represents the state. The state does not equal the people.
Presidents George H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama represent my state’s government. They surely do not represent me and even if I were a bot in full agreement with all of their views, they would only reflect a fraction of my views when they speak, partly because political speeches are seldom a statement of actual belief by the speaker. The readers of these pages are astute enough to know that. Few people in the U.S. or abroad find themselves well-represented by politicians. The same is true for Netanyahu and the people of Israel.
Netanyahu does not represent the people of Israel, does not represent Jews, does not even fully represent the opinions of the supporters of his own party. By morning, as they cover the election horse race, Israeli media will tell stories of voters who strategically voted for Netanyahu despite severe reservations they had with him on some issues. The same stories will be told about other Israeli politicians as a dependably present staple of election coverage in Westernized countries around the world. To misconstrue a vote for a politician as ceding all opinion is to either misunderstand government’s role in our lives or to misrepresent that understandably limited role.
The world is a polyglot place and politicians thankfully make up only a sliver of that beautiful diversity of life and opinion. To pigeonhole an individual voter or all the individuals in an entire country because of the results of an election is a serious error. Political leaders are allowed a voice, but are simply not the great representatives of public opinion that some lazily assume.
This entire article should ideally all go without saying, since it is all basic high school civics class and elementary logic. It doesn’t, though; our political debate around Netanyahu has been barren of that fundamental understanding and calls into question whether self-proclaimed American experts on the region have the intellectual capacity or political sophistication to pen an op-ed about Israeli elections, let alone on the topic of region-wide international affairs.
Furthermore, if so many of us as individuals can’t get this obvious distinction right, how can we legitimately even as individuals call ourselves responsible parties in making foreign policy decisions during this heavily interventionist era in American foreign policy. This simple concept of ineffectiveness is one reason why conservatives throughout American history saw foreign meddling as the work of busybody progressives and socialists, a trend continued by the non-conservative neocons.
Netanyahu is an influential voice in a debate that has 8 million Israeli participants, and he is a politician slick enough to leverage his tiny 15 percent party into a coalition leader. While that somehow qualifies him as a neoconservative saint with the authority to dictate U.S. foreign policy, those of us with better footing in reality understand that the Israeli people are not a monolithic entity and that Netanyahu does not represent the voice of the Israeli people.
Allan Stevo is an American conservative writer. Follow him @AllanStevo.