Jerusalem Post columnist Gil Troy speaks to media in Sydney
Historian and Jerusalem Post columnist Gil Troy addressed an Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC) media luncheon on March 31 about the protests in Israel resulting from the current Government’s attempts to pass extremely controversial judicial reforms and now the apparent firing of Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for expressing his concerns.
Dr Colin Rubenstein, Gil Troy and Jeremy Jones
Troy, a guest of JNF Australia, first thanked the Australian Jewish community for being proud and unapologetic Zionists and emphasised the need to celebrate the miracle of Israel as it approaches its 75th Independence Day on April 25, and to realise how lucky Jews are to live at a time when they have a democratic state.
He also stressed that as bad as things seem now, the current Government has only been in power for approximately three months, and Israel can’t be judged by such a snapshot or entirely by its leaders
Fundamentally, Troy argued, what is needed is to avoid the severe political polarisation so evident throughout the world. “What we need is that kind of centrism, we need that kind of vision that we’re hearing from our President, Yitzchak Herzog, about listening to one another, respecting one another, agreeing to agree, and agreeing to disagree, and understanding at the end of the day how lucky we are,” he asserted.
According to Troy, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is showing weakness against his own radical coalition partners, which is partially why Israel has reached this point. “From the moment he was elected, instead of telegraphing strength, he’s telegraphing weakness,” he said. “The master negotiator, the great chess player of Israeli politics,” was instead giving in to these partners. Because of this, and the longer it continues, his legacy and both his domestic and foreign policy successes as Israel’s longest-serving Prime Minister are fading away. Netanyahu, Troy said, has also rhetorically played on societal divisions in Israel instead of trying to unify the country, which ought to be the responsibility of a leader.
When it comes to the US-Israel relationship, Troy argues that President Joe Biden, in particular, has an obsession with the settlement issue and that the Democrats since Barack Obama have approached Israel with “tough love” and the Palestinians with “love love”, when what’s needed is exactly the reverse.
Furthermore, he argued, the Democrats need to condemn and disassociate from their anti-Israel and antisemitic members as conservative intellectual William F. Buckley Jr did with Republican candidate Pat Buchanan in the 1990s. A major worry, Troy explained, is that Israel becomes yet another entirely polarised domestic political issue between Democrats and Republicans. Troy also lamented the US “blind spot” towards Iran and the new antipathy towards Saudi Arabia.
Regarding the rest of the Middle East, Troy argued we need to alter the phrase “Arab-Israeli conflict” to “Arab-Israeli conflicts” to convey the complexity and historical evolution of the situation, particularly in light of the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and now the Abraham Accords.
The right in Israel, Troy says, succeeded in moving the conversation towards accepting the need for judicial reform across the political spectrum but then forgot that conservatism is based on conserving institutions and incremental changes, not revolutionary change without consensus as its pushing now. Conversely, the protesters have, to date, managed to stay united and focused on the judicial reform issue without bringing in extraneous issues such as the Palestinians and have ensured they can’t be painted as unpatriotic by all waving Israeli flags. Troy also underlined that a religious vs secular or right vs left divide was not currently a useful prism for analysing the protests and stressed the overall familial feelings Jews have for one another.
Most Israelis want to see compromise, despite the loud voices on the fringes, Troy stated. He further warned that “the longer this goes on, the more scars accumulate, the more pain grows, the more anger grows, and the more the mission and the expectations [of the protest] grow.”
AIJAC
