Midway through the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Judges chronicles Israel’s struggle to attain God-worthy self-rule by outgrowing the perennial temptation of apostasy—an allegory that eerily resonates with the modern Jewish state. Judges begins with the Israelites restored by Joshua from Egyptian bondage to the Promised Land and is followed by the enthroning of the Davidic monarchy under King Samuel. In that halfway period, unfaithful to the covenant that Joshua proclaimed, the twelve tribes descend into a cycle of moral corruption and misrule that likens them to the idolatrous, Baal-worshipping Canaanites remaining in their midst. The cycle begins with the Israelites sinning against God, who allows them to be conquered, after which they see the error of their ways, repent, and entreat God for mercy. God then raises up a deliverer or a ‘judge’—more of an ad hoc military chieftain than a magistrate—who defeats the enemy and ushers in an era of peace before Israel falls again into sin. First committed to writing during the Babylonian exile ca. 550 BCE, the book’s lesson resonates through the long arc of Jewish history: though sin-prone themselves, in tumultuous times the judges are Israel’s best hope to secure its place among the nations.
It takes a sacrilegious chutzpah to liken a secular politician—Benjamin Netanyahu, nicknamed ‘ Bibi’ by friends and foes alike—to the ancient, God-sent shofets portrayed in Judges (Othniel, Ehud, Shmagar, Deborah, Gideon, Abimelech, Tola, Jair, Jephthah, Ibzan, Elon, Abdon, and Samson). After all, there’s an in-bred secularity to the Jewish state declared on May 14, 1948, that gradually secured its once precarious station through successive military victories, diplomatic assertiveness, and the growth unleashed by free-market reforms. That state was then—and remains now—independent of Judaism’s transcendent claims, despite the alarms sounded by progressives concerned that the recent entry of religious Zionist parties into government, under Bibi’s leadership, somehow portends a slide towards Iran-styled theocracy. David Ben-Gurion, to put it otherwise, didn’t summon the Jews of Palestine to assert their sovereignty because he thought the Land had been promised to them by God (although he likely thought so, as do many of Israel’s present-day politicians). Instead, his generation’s cadre of Zionist leaders simply longed for a national—not religious—homeland where the Jewish people could, yes, worship freely, but more importantly, be regenerated as a national entity, free of persecution.
Yet for all its outward secularism, Zionism’s achievements on this earth can’t be neatly disentangled from the Jewish people’s biblical covenant with God. At least not in the way that the temporal and spiritual realms can be dissociated in, say, a Christian context. Unlike Christianity and Islam—or at least to a higher degree than in these other two monotheisms—Jewish faith and practice are intimately interwoven with culture, identity, and therefore with the politics practiced in the only state fitted to that nationality. Not only do Israeli national insignia—the flag’s star of David and the eight-branch menorah in the country’s seal—carry an irreducibly religious significance, but the right to claim Israeli citizenship upon making aliyah—the determination on which the entire Zionist project hinges—is ultimately decided in rabbinical court. In addition, despite the best efforts of progressive politicians, religion always ends up spilling over into public life. When Naftali Bennett was challenged in February 2017 by Al Jazeera anchor Mehdi Hasan on the legality of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the then-Education Minister and later Bibi’s predecessor as PM responded point-blank: “ If you want to say that our land doesn’t belong to us, I suggest you change the Bible first.”
The parallels between biblical and modern Israel are further warranted by the fact that, despite the ongoing march to regional peace launched by the Abraham Accords, these remain perilous times for Israel’s future—not unlike in the Bible’s pre-monarchical kritocracy. Whilst Iran’s theocracy threatens to develop the weapons required to annihilate the Hebrew state, Israeli progressives long to erase the distinctive Jewishness of that state, melting it into the “magma of its citizens,” Arab minority included. Bibi is no conventional response to that backdrop. Thrice elected PM (in 1996, 2009 and in 2022), he has brought to that office (which, despite the diaspora’s progressive gripes, is a role akin to leader of the Jewish people) a degree of vision, political chops, and panache of biblical proportions. His memoir begins with the death of his elder brother Yoni in the 1976 Entebbe operation to rescue 248 Israelis from Palestinian hijackers in Uganda, a tragedy that scarred Bibi with purpose. The son of a historian distinguished yet conservative enough to be denied tenure in Israel, Bibi’s upbringing in America predisposed him to pursue hasbara—the battle for gentile opinion that Theodor Herzl summoned Zionists to wage—first as deputy ambassador in Washington and then as Likud’s leader.
Bibi’s souring on Israel’s cultural establishment goes back to his father’s academic exile, but it went on to inform his rejection, in the 1990s, of the Oslo accords, on the grounds that they failed to extract reciprocity from the Palestinians (he was even blamed for stoking the fervour that claimed then-PM Isaac Rabin’s life at the hands of a radical). Yet his stature as a modern shofet is reaffirmed later in his memoir. Around 2000—having lost the 1999 election and pondering a comeback—he happened upon his ‘vision,’ per a chapter title midway through the book. Not unlike the shofets’ divine mandate to straighten Israel’s ways amidst foreign aggression, this “vision consistently pursued in public life” has served as Bibi’s blueprint for leading the Jewish people through the terrains of progressive post-Zionism and Arab belligerence. Whereas Israel’s bien-pensant establishment “believed power would come from peace,” Bibi believed the inverse. First, free markets and high-tech—secured as Finance Minister in 2003-2005—would secure economic power. That wealth would then help build the military muscle to dissuade aggressors, which he did as PM in 2009-2021. That power was meant in turn to “attract Arab countries keen to forge ties with us,” as borne out in the 2020 Abraham Accords.
This three-step vision, the chapter continues, “combined with our ability to influence U.S. policy,” would help Israel “climb the ladder of nations” and “walk among giants.” It met its gravest test in 2009 at the UN General Assembly, a moment truly worthy of a shofet. At the time, Israel’s population neared 6 million—roughly the number of European Jews exterminated by the Nazis. True to shofet form, Bibi minced no words in warning of a similar danger that remains his dogged focus all these years later: pre-empting “a new Holocaust” by forestalling “Iran’s aim to exterminate the 6 million Jews of Israel.” Later in 2016, speaking to a joint session of Congress, he doubled down. “Seventy years after the Holocaust,” he recounts, “the Jewish state took a powerful stand among the nations for its future.” Bibi contraposes his vision of fearless, indomitable Jewish power to that of the cultural intelligentsia, who interpret Jewish values as requiring defencelessness and sought to be “perfect victims who harmed no one, perfectly moral.” Instead, enhancing the Jewish people’s “capacity to defend itself” was “the central mission” of his years in office. “The days when we stood defenceless against genocidal enemies are over,” he heralded in his 2015 speech to Congress, to a roaring Republican ovation.
Even Bibi’s defects are worthy of a shofet. After being ousted from office in 2021 by a marriage of convenience between his two arch-rivals—Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid—he resorted to replicating their tactics in 2022, cobbling together a no less unlikely coalition that gives ample governing power to parties at odds with Israel’s secular culture. These religious Zionist parties openly proclaim Israel’s exclusively Jewish nature (to the exclusion of its Arab minority), argue for halachic edits such as separating beaches by gender, and invoke the Jewish people’s right to settle in lands conquered in 1967. Yet Bibi reaches his shofet stature best in the judicial realm. The main obstacles to carrying out his “vision,” it turns out, are not his political rivals, let alone the Palestinians, but instead defects entirely his own. He is currently on trial for bribery, more of a nuisance of a charge than a real scandal given the minimal quantities involved in the case. His Minister of Health, Shas party leader Aryeh Deri, has been advised by the Supreme Court to step down due to lingering tax fraud charges. The entire government is, as of this writing, enmeshed in a standoff with the Court over judicial-executive skirmishes. True to Deuteronomistic theology, Bibi is—as were the pre-monarchical judges—a flawed agent on a mission.
