The end effectively came last week, when Benny Gantz resigned and pulled his National Unity alliance out of the emergency government, exasperated by Netanyahu’s refusal to draw up a plan for the aftermath of the war. He was then joined by Gadi Eisenkot, the most moderate of the five members of the body. Netanyahu, presiding over a council that could no longer plausibly claim to represent a unified Knesset, was forced to pull the plug.

The problem here isn’t hard to glean. Gantz and Eisenkot were two of the more moderate voices in the coalition (and indeed contemporary Israeli politics). More than this, they are, unlike Netanyahu, both proper military men. Ganz is a former Chief of the General Staff; Eisenkot is a former Head of IDF Northern Command. Their resignation is a loss both to Israel’s military campaign and to its politics.

It was Gantz and Eisenkot who insisted a war cabinet be set up before they agreed to join Netanyahu’s emergency government in late 2023. Their rationale was twofold. First, the country needed to come together in a moment of national crisis; and second, they wanted to, as far as possible, sideline national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a couple of bloviating extremists with little military understanding or interest beyond constantly urging a more aggressive approach and rejecting any concessions for the release of the hostages. Over the past six months, these malignant cranks have spent much of their airtime arguing for the reestablishment of Israeli settlements in Gaza.

More from this author

Iran is winning the Gaza war

By David Patrikarakos

The breakdown of the cabinet is, in certain regards, a microcosm of the problems facing Israel. For a start, the state’s ludicrous parliamentary system of almost pure proportional representation means that every single Israeli government is a coalition. This, in turn, means they almost always contain minor parties populated with various loons who are elevated to the role of kingmakers. It also means that governments tend not to see out their full terms. This is a legacy of Israel’s socialist beginnings; and it was perhaps the most egregious error David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founder, ever made. The results are plain 80 years later. Netanyahu feverishly needs both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich to keep his coalition together — especially now. He has no choice but to take account of their various religious and political pathologies. Without them, he’s out.

Perhaps the second greatest mistake Ben Gurion ever made was to exempt the Orthodox Jewish Israelis from military service. He did this because, back then, there were relatively few of them (they made up around 5% of the population). They didn’t have to serve or pay tax, because they fulfilled their duty by “praying for the state”. Obviously, Ben Gurion knew this was nonsense, but it was the easiest way to keep them on side. The problem is: when you don’t have to pay taxes, and indeed get a host of benefits for doing essentially nothing, you tend to have a lot of children (as the Orthodox do anyway), especially when you get benefits for every child. There are now expected to be two million Haredis by 2033.

In early June, as the Supreme Court heard arguments that the exemptions are unlawful, dozens of Haredis blocked roads in protest. The tensions around this issue cannot be underestimated. At the turn of the century, I flew to Israel to take part in a debating competition when I was Chairman of Debating at the Inner Temple during an ill-advised (and ill-fated) foray into law. Inner Temple were the reigning champions and, with my debate partner Michael (a Northerner who had lived in Israel for 20 years), I had to bring the oversized trophy. For this, I purchased extra legroom seats on the El Al flight so we could rest the trophy securely in front of us. After dozing off for a while, I awoke to find the space occupied by two Haredis davening (praying). As they rocked back and forth, a look of disgust passed across Michael’s face. “Fuck off!” he roared. “Michael, you can’t speak to them like that,” I whispered, mortified. “Fuck ‘em — freeloaders,” he retorted. “And pay some fucking tax!” he bellowed at their retreating figures.

These issues have dominated Israeli politics for decades. Now, they threaten to unravel it. Netanyahu is a masterful politician, but, more than this, he is an old man desperate to stay in power. All his political skills are now devoted to this; winning the war is a secondary priority. He knows that when all this is finally done, the official enquiry will come and, as prime minister, he will not be able to escape blame.

With the more reasonable and more military experienced voices now gone, the prognosis for the sanity and pragmatism of Israeli government decision-making does not look good. Israel is engaged in a war in which its avowed and overarching objective — the total elimination of Hamas — has already failed. It had recent success in rescuing four hostages in operation “Seeds of Summer”, an extraordinary military operation involving its special forces. But the effect is ultimately limited. Especially given, as an IDF official admitted to me in Tel Aviv, there is a belief that many of the hostages are now dead. 

With no military solution likely, only a political one remains — to the degree that any “solution” to all this is possible, which I suspect it is not. The best that can be hoped for is a cease of hostilities and some kind of governmental transition to ensure that a terror group like Hamas cannot govern Gaza again. The problem is that there is now a nexus of interests at the centre of Israeli politics that is less interested in compromise. And pragmatism and compromise will always have to come from Israel because, even though Hamas started all this, Israel is a democratic state, and Hamas is a bolus of psychopathic thugs.

At several points since Hamas’s attack, I’ve returned to the words of a fellow Middle East analyst who, over a beer in a Jerusalem bar, summed up the Israel-Palestinian conflict to me in a single sentence. Looking more exhausted than anything else, he replied: “I think the technical term for all this is irretrievably fucked.”

Now the difference between us is, of course, that I work at a think tank mostly dealing with policy responses to offshore finance and he’s one of the most lauded young — I think he can still pull that one off, at 40 — Jewish writers in America. But that’s not what we are here to discuss. It’s his new book The Netanyahus: An Account Of A Minor And Ultimately Even Negligible Episode In The History Of A Very Famous Family.

Upstate New York: there’s snow, an unreformed, old fashioned university and virtually no Jews and here Ruben Blum is making his unhappy way as a Jewish historian — but not, as Cohen keeps on pointing out, nod-nod, wink-wink, as a historian of the Jews. It’s the Sixties. The kind of golf club anti-Semitism that saw a “Jew Quota” put on Harvard is still widespread. Through a series of not particularly funny pastiches of David Lodge, Kingsley Amis and Vladimir Nabokov’s wonderful Pnin, poor old Rube swills around pathetically.

The drama kicks in when he’s informed “one of his own” — a Jewish historian and a historian of the Jews — is on his way from Israel for an interview. Would he take care of him? This is where the novel gets interesting. A letter — so well written I thought about it for days — arrives from a certain Dr Prof Peretz Levavi at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem warning Blum that this man, Professor Ben-Zion Netanyahu, is a rancid, ideological, venomous ultranationalist. Reject him at all costs. And then crashing into his life come Mr and Mrs Netanyahu and their three sons — Yoni, Bibi, Iddo — for a train wreck interview that leaves Rube feeling like the smallest Jew in the world.

It won’t come as a great reveal to learn that something like this really happened. The Netanyahu, little Bibi, who went on to become Prime Minister, really had a father called Ben-Zion who was a brooding, intellectually menacing historian, obsessed with proving that the conversos — Jews who converted to Christianity in medieval Spain and were the victims of the Inquisition — were really sincere converts. And that by racialising them in order to persecute them — by his theory so as to weaken their patrons, the nobility, in the class politics of the day — the Spanish Crown created a world where you could never stop being Jewish. His whole work really a warning to the Diaspora there was no point even trying: you can become a Communist, you can become a Nazi, you can burn an Israeli flag in Time Square — the Inquisition will always come for you.

Ben-Zion’s theories have been called ideological projection. But his impact on the way the Jews would come to see the world was not academic. Small, malevolent, with strangely shaped ears; having felt his Right-wing politics pushed him into American exile when labour Zionists ran the show back in Israel; Ben-Zion really did loom over his son who has ruled Israel for a fifth of his existence, warning that — “Jewish history is the history of Holocausts.” And of course he really was handled by an American Jew, who happened to be Cohen’s friend Harold Bloom, the vaunted literary critic and self-vaunted defender of the Western Canon, when he came to Cornell for his interview.

These clashing ways of Jewishness meeting needed — no, required — a novel. But I feel very torn about the result. It manages to both be the Jewish American novel I’ve been waiting for and a huge disappointment. The most interesting and the most predictable piece of fiction I’ve picked up in a while. The book with the most mediocre windup and the most fantastic — really fantastic — ending I’ve read all year. The often annoying campus comedy is marbled with totally fascinating reflections on Jewish history that merited — I think I counted five — essays on their own. But Cohen the critic, the intellectual, is too distracted trying to be funny.

Suggested article

Jewish privilege is a myth

By Giles Fraser

This is why I admire Joshua Cohen. It’s been obvious ever since David Remnick (what greater arbiter of bien pensant taste has there ever been than his New Yorker?) left dinner with Ben-Zion Netanyahu in the Old City in 1998 gasping about his outrageously reactionary table talk that there was a brilliant novel here in the encounter — the confrontation — between this avatar of Zionist Israel and one of the Upper West Side. But until Cohen, no American Jew, realised or dared. Instead, the Jewish novels of the last 20 years — think Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated to Nicole Krauss’s Great House — has given us Holocaust pedagogy. Entertaining us, in the third generation, with the comforts of trauma and loss. It’s the opposite of challenging Jewish readers. In fact it’s more like a warm bath. But here’s the thing: I loved those novels as novels from page one. 

The Netanyahus, on the other hand, was one of those highly irritating novels: so interesting I couldn’t stop reading it, without ever being sure I was actually enjoying it. As a kosher smorgasbord of ideas it is wonderful: a car journey to the Catskills’ worth of fun arguments. As a piece of fiction — until the very last, brilliant chapter — it didn’t do it for me. The problem isn’t Ben-Zion: everything about him is fantastically conjured. The problem is Rube, his wife Edith and the whole family of caricatures set up in opposition. This makes the novel mostly a drag. You hardly care when the Netanyahus fuck up their life.

I think these thinly drawn characters — the unassuming, uninsightful Rube Blum, next to the incredible, unforgettable, Ben-Zion Netanyahu — takes us back to Cohen’s obsessions, and mine. We’re not really obsessed with Jews. We’re obsessed with dead Jews or we’re obsessed with Israelis. The way The Netanyahus seems to rush through its plot, ticking off what we are supposed to know about American Jews — father worked in the rag trade, tick, daughter wants a nose job, tick — to get to Ben-Zion reflects something much deeper. Wherever the energy is in American Jewish letters right now — from the anti-Zionist polemics in Jewish Currents to the anti-anti-Zionists polemics in Tablet — it is about Israel. Wherever the crazes are — Fauda, the secret missions of the IDF, Shtisel, the secret lives of ultra-orthodox Jerusalem — it is not about us as American, as Diaspora Jews, but them.

Suggested article

How influencers have legitimised anti-Semitism

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

I sometimes marvel, on nights out in Brooklyn, that friends on the new Jewish Left know more about whatever crimes the Israeli army are committing at whatever checkpoints than my cousins who actually refused to serve in the IDF. I meet colleagues in DC who are more militant and seemingly intransigently up-to-date on the security situation in Gaza than my relatives who actually occupied it. It’s almost like we’ve lost interest in ourselves, out here, in America, as a culture. That the Big Jewish Novelists, who decorate Cohen’s endorsement page, have taken to writing about Israel reflects something bigger. That after the big joke in Curb Your Enthusiasm got old — that being Jewish in America after assimilation meant nothing but cringe — there was nothing left to say.

Roth. Malamud. Bellow. They were fascinated by Jews as Americans — it was a constant exploration for them — in a way that Rube feels like homework both for Cohen and for the reader, until we get to Ben-Zion and the good stuff. Maybe those novels of the immigrant experience can’t be written by people like us anymore. Perhaps they can only be written by Mexican-American or Asian-American writers and we should stop trying. We’re just too much a part of the furniture. The elite, the professions, feel if anything WASP-Jewish here in the North East, which is actually a pretty good description of most of our parents or our own relationships after this many generations in the New World. Our Rubes are lifeless. Fake.

We are bored of ourselves. Ben Gurion and Gold Meir. Ben-Zion and Bibi. These are some of the greatest characters in the Jewish story for centuries — if we want political drama like this we might have to go back to the Book of Judges. Israel is a country whose fate is still so precarious, its life so fantastical, or if you look at it from the other side, so cruel. And here we are, in America, in our Think Tanks, Mid Level Media Jobs or MFA-track writing careers: leading some of the most undramatic and tedious Jewish lives of all time. How could we ever write about something else?