Bibi Agonistes

There are lots of different ways to spin this week’s events in Israel.

There’s the positive, non-cynical way. The leader, having plans for the future that he knows with some degree of certainty the Supreme Court will veto, seeks preemptively to neuter the Court by introducing legislation that will, among other things, make it possible for the Knesset to override such a decision by the Court with a simple majority. And since the Prime Minister’s coalition by definition has a majority in the Knesset, that basically means that the Knesset can act as it pleases without any need to placate even the nation’s highest court. But the nation will not have it. Demonstrations break out that disrupt everything. When the Defense Minister, Yoav Gallant, calls for a pause in the effort to pass the P.M.’s legislation so the nation can calm itself, Netanyahu fires him. And that leads to even more massive demonstrations. Tens of thousands of Israelis descend on the Knesset. Massive demonstrations in Tel Aviv close down the Ayalon Highway, a major artery. When the National Labor Union, the Histadrut, calls for a strike, the effect is even more amazing. Universities close because there are no teachers to teach. Israeli embassies all over the world, including in Washington, close because the staff is on strike. Hospitals across Israel cancel all elective procedures and treat only those whose lives are in actual danger. Outgoing flights from Ben Gurion are cancelled because the staff needed to guarantee their safety is not present. Suddenly, chinks in the formerly united coalition begin to develop as several important government ministers signal their eagerness to do what it takes to calm the situation before the pot boils over even more violently.

And then, because, in the end, Bibi is nothing if not a savvy politician, the announcement comes that the plans to reform the relationship between the Supreme Court and the Knesset will be put on hold so that thoughtful dialogue can ensue. Bibi, it turns out, is all for thoughtful dialogue! Who knew? But the more important point is that the people spoke clearly and loudly, and the nation’s leaders—after hoping the demonstrators would just all go home and leave the governing to the government—the leaders actually listened. So isn’t that the specific way democracy is supposed to work? The people elect individuals to govern but retain the right to exert the ultimate power on the governing party or individuals. In a nutshell, that’s what happened in Israel last week. So the system worked. The government backed down. Democracy proved its vibrancy by showing that the power, at least ultimately, always rests in the hands of the people. To put that in clearer terms, about half a million people were estimated to have taken part in anti-government demonstrations last week, which would constitute more than 5% of the entire population. (In American terms, that would be the equivalent of about 19 million Americans taking to the streets to protest something the government announced its intention to do. ) And those people were listened to.

So that’s the positive way to spin the events of last week. But there’s also a cynical way to view those same events. Bibi loves the power he wields as P.M., but he is not (politically) suicidal and is fully aware of the implications of the fact that his governing coalition has a majority of exactly four in the 120-seat Knesset. Therefore, if just four Members of the Knesset were to break ranks and vote against the proposal, it would fail. And that would be so intensely humiliating for the P.M. that heading off a mortifying failure of that magnitude was worth discovering the worth of dialogue. Plus, if the ruling coalition breaks apart, then the government will fall and there’s no way to predict who would win in a new election. According to this interpretation, the decision to put judicial reform on hold had nothing to do with the power of the people and everything to do with the ego of the P.M., who was prepared even to appear to bow to the will of the people if that what was necessary to keep from losing face and losing the battle upon which he has staked his reputation and possibly even his political future.

So those are the two avenues of interpretation that suggest themselves. But then there is a third approach, one that sees all that has happened to date (and all that yet may happen) as a kind of an extended Greek drama featuring Bibi not as a fiend or as a saint, but as a tragic hero.

In Greek drama, the tragic hero is an individual possessed of great talent who is brought down by a fatal character flaw, by something in a constellation of otherwise neutral affects that prevents the hero from acting in his (or her) own best interests. All this was discussed at length by Aristotle in his Poetics, where he also wrote that the key element in any drama featuring a tragic hero has to be the audience’s simultaneous admiration and repulsion for the hero, their sense that the hero is, at the end of the day, his or her own worst enemy…and, at that, a far greater threat to success than any real flesh-and-blood foe might be.

To interpret the events in Israel this last week as a prolonged Greek tragedy, we must begin with Bibi, the man: a very respected veteran of one of the IDF’s most respected elite reconnaissance units, a life-long public servant, the scion of an admired and famous family of scholars and heroes (his brother Yoni was the only Israeli rescuer to die in the famous Entebbe raid of 1976), and Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister. He therefore starts out as a very sympathetic character, as someone the audience wishes to see rewarded for his lifetime of service.

But then there is hamartia to consider. The Greek word means literally “to miss the mark” but was used by Aristotle to describe the flaw that brings the hero down, the indelible personality trait that a lifetime of effort simply cannot erase. With Bibi, it would have to be his sense of personal infallibility, what Aristotle called hubris : since he cannot be wrong, it follows almost logically that a allowing a balance of power to endure according to which the Supreme Court can thwart his will is intolerable. That, in the end, is the direct function of infallibility, after all: the assumption that any who disagree must, almost by definition, be wrong. So how it possibly be a good thing to allow the Court to override policies he personally wishes to set in place?

And now we come to peripeteira, Aristotle’s name for the reversal of fortune that serves every Greek tragedy as the lynchpin of its storyline: the hero, unable to overcome his less good self, finds himself facing a situation that he personally created yet cannot control. He is, therefore, a victim of himself—which is what makes his story tragic and not merely sad. And this too played out in Israel last week as Bibi found himself face-to-face not with opposition-party politicians, but with an entire nation camped out on the Ayalon and around the Knesset, tens of thousands of citizens protesting a plan that must have seemed—and must still seem—wholly reasonable to the P.M., one that would remove the sole possible impediment to his making real the plans for the nation he wishes to put in place. Or, if not to remove that impediment, then at least to defang it and make it ultimately impotent.

And then we come to anagnorisis, the moment the hero, after suffering humiliating defeat, is visited with a moment of self-awareness, of self-knowledge (which is what the Greek word means), of self-understanding. And that is where we have come to in our drama. The hero has been smacked down, publicly and in as insulting a way as possible: by being led forward by the very people the man was personally charged with leading forward. So what will happen now? That is the real question! And that is where we are in this unfinished drama still awaiting the curtain to come down not on the first or second act, but on the play itself.

If this were a Greek tragedy, the hero’s downfall would be irreversible. But this is not, of course, an actual tragedy by Euripides or Sophocles that we’re witnessing. Bibi can survive. He actually has survived. So the question is whether he will be chastened by the humiliation he endured this week—his first effort truly to alter the face of Israeli demo-cracy mercilessly slapped down by the demos itself—and grow from the experience. Or whether he will continue to be chained to his own sense of infallibility—the hubris that makes it unbearable for him to have to endure the existence of a Court that can thwart his will—and so end up like King Oedipus or King Lear, like Hamlet or Jay Gatsby or Willy Loman: tragic heroes no less doomed by their own flaws than they were potentially great because of the possibility of overcoming them.