For Israel’s underdogs, Netanyahu remains king
As Israel's Sept. 17 parliamentary election approaches, a settler, a former ambassador, journalists and a kibbutz member help explain how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been able to retain his support despite his legal and other problems.
ARIEL, West Bank — On a recent morning in the West Bank settlement of Ariel, Batel Benjamin, a 29-year-old law graduate with a disarming smile, explained her unstinting passion for the country’s longest reigning prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who is fighting to retain his post in the Sept. 17 parliamentary election.
“Ten years ago when we spoke about peace, it meant giving back big chunks of Israel,” she told Al-Monitor during an interview in the single-family home she shares with her husband, parents and four sons. “Under Bibi it is no longer so,” Benjamin said, using the universal nickname for Netanyahu. “For as long as he is the prime minister, I don’t fear that I will be expelled from our land.”
Benjamin, an Israeli of Iraqi and Yemeni descent, embodies Netanyahu’s core base, which has helped him enjoy uninterrupted rule since 2009. She’s Mizrahi — Jewish with Middle Eastern roots — upwardly mobile, muscularly religious and unabashedly opposed to a Palestinian state. Yet she claims to have Palestinian friends who “like living here in Israel.” Benjamin’s husband hails from India’s Bnei Menashe, thought to be among the Lost Tribes of Israel, and works at one of Israel’s thriving high-tech start ups. The couple is trying for a fifth child they hope will be a girl, amid nationwide worries that Israel’s Arabs, currently 20% of the population, will outnumber Jews someday.
Netanyahu’s left-wing critics might sneeringly cast the young woman as a hapless bumpkin duped by a ruthless and increasingly authoritarian Netanyahu clinging to power at any cost. But she is clever and articulate. Benjamin picked up her near-perfect English watching Netflix. She says her life has improved dramatically since the Likud leader, now 69, came to power for the second time after a prior stint as the country’s youngest ever prime minister in the late 1990s.
