Netanyahu and Trump show that you can’t fight culture wars and win actual wars

The new conservatives betray the nations they claim to love

Benjamin Netanyahu promises to be a “prime minister who looks after our soldiers, our police” during the 2022 Israeli election campaign (CREDIT AFP/Getty Images)

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One of the most ominous changes in the 21^st century is that we can no longer count on conservatives to defend the West. In the past it was leftists who were the bleeding hearts and conscientious objectors, the fellow travellers and fifth columnists. Whatever you felt about the conservatives, you could assume that they would protect your country. And whatever your politics, there were moments of danger when you were glad to see old-fashioned patriots in charge.

Modern conservatives cannot offer the same reassurance. They are proving that you can’t wage culture wars and actual wars simultaneously. Culture warriors are so concerned with fighting the enemy within, they give a free pass to the enemy without.

I am not saying that all today’s right-wing movements are indistinguishable. To paraphrase Leo Tolstoy, “all happy countries are alike; each unhappy country is unhappy in its own way”.  But in Israel, the United States and to a lesser extent the United Kingdom the demands of modern conservative ideology have subverted national security.

To start in Israel and Palestine. If the crisis were not so horrendous, Benjamin Netanyahu’s government would be remembered as one of the most laughable administrations ever to blight a democracy.

The gap between the rhetoric of the hard men of the Israeli right and the reality of their betrayal of the national interest is dizzying. When he sought election last year, his supporters hailed Netanyahu as “Bibi, King of Israel,” no less. The king promised to be a “prime minister who looks after our soldiers, our police.” Other politicians would let Israelis down but he would be “very aggressive in protecting our security.”

As if.

Out thought and out manoeuvred by Hamas, Netanyahu presided over the greatest collapse in Israel’s national security since it was surprised by the attack of Arab states in 1973, and the greatest massacre of Jewish people since the Nazi holocaust.

For all the tough talk, the Netanyahu coalition’s main concern was not the security of Israelis. Like Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, and successive UK Conservative leaders, it wanted to target independent institutions. In Israel’s case that meant the judiciary, the one body with the power to stop the government operating like an elected dictatorship. The threat to the judges caused the largest demonstrations in Israel’s history.  If he had not been so stupidly over-confident, Netanyahu would have known that in a small country, surrounded by merciless enemies, culture war is a threat to national security.

It’s not as if no one warned him. Before the Hamas attacks, leaders of the protest movement said that growing numbers of military reservists were expressing their opposition to the government by refusing to serve. Israeli generals confirmed the story and told Netanyahu about the damage the protests were doing to the armed forces. Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s allies accused Israel’s security agencies of being infested with ‘leftist ideas’ and talked about a ‘deep state’, language which is familiar to those of us forced to listen to Donald Trump and Boris Johnson over the years

Netanyahu chose to polarise his country rather than maintain the unity which its citizen army required. He polarised it not only to limit the powers of the judges, the same judges, incidentally, who were due to hear allegations of corruption against him, but to allow his supporters to build yet more settlements on occupied land in the West Bank. As the inevitable clashes followed, troops had to be diverted from the border with Gaza to protect the settlers, who Netanyahu allowed to operate with impunity. The Israeli right worked on the assumption that Hamas was already contained, and the settlers and the politicians who supported them could do as they pleased.

I spoke earlier about Israel having a “citizen army”. But there is one group exempted from the demand to protect their country: ultra-orthodox jews. They maintain that their need for religious study requires their full attention. Israel’s proportional representation system gives ultra-orthodox political parties the power to demand an exemption from national service. Once this was an easy concession to make. At the foundation of Israel in 1948 only about 1% of the population was ultra-Orthodox. Today, conversions and a staggering birth rate ensures that ultra-Orthodox Jews make up about 13% of Israel’s 9 million citizens.

Far from trying to end the exemption in the name of national security, Netanyahu has relied on ultra-orthodox political support and defended and extended their privileges.  They have other demands too, such as  preventing public transportation and banning electricity production on Shabbat and implementing criminal penalties for women who read  the Torah . But it’s the refusal to risk their lives defending their country while others stand in for them that provokes outrage.

I could break into a great polemical outpouring at this point.  The Israeli citizens who now greet Netanyahu’s ministers with cries of “shame” whenever they dare to show their faces have every reason to despise their government. If I were an Israeli soldier about to go into battle, I am sure I would wonder why the government, that ordered me to risk my life, exempted ultra-orthodox Jews from the same demand.

But I prefer to make the indisputable point that the most right-wing government in Israeli history put its desire to reduce the independence of the judiciary, expand settlements and protect its client voters before defending the nation.

We will have to see what the inquiries into the reasons for the Netanyahu regime’s intelligence failure find. But diplomatic correspondents report that European and Israeli intelligence agencies are already saying that the government did not see the slaughter coming because its prime minister did not want to see it.

If he accepted the dangers his country faced, he would have had to abandon much of his programme.

You see the same betrayals on the US right, which panders to ultra-orthodox Christians rather than ultra-orthodox Jews.  The Republican senator Tommy Tuberville has used the needlessly complicated procedures of the US Senate to block the promotion of hundreds of officers in the armed forces. He will not relent until the Pentagon revokes its policy of covering travel costs for troops seeking an abortion across state lines.

There is no outcry among American conservatives about one of their own taking a hammer and anvil to the US military’s chain of command. Indeed, it is now commonplace to hear them denounce the military and the intelligence services as components of the “deep state” . You will recall Trump sneered at war heroes when he was president and called the fallen “losers” and “suckers” for giving their lives to their country.

Republicans might have decided to leave the military alone. They might have resolved instead to campaign to win control of the US Congress and presidency and outlaw abortion by normal legal means. But rather than follow democratic procedures American conservatives weaken their military for standing by its servicewomen even though Russia has invaded Ukraine, Hamas has massacred Israelis, and China is eyeing Taiwan. Once again there’s no need to go off into polemical fury. It is a simple matter of fact to state that the defence of the United States and the interests of the military are not the first concern of American conservatives.

I am not saying that British Conservatives are the same as their Israeli or American counterparts. Tolstoy’s rule applies, and my unhappy country is unhappy in its own way.  Yet no one in the ruling Conservative party will say that Brexit and the policies of Liz Truss weakened our ability to continue to maintain our armed forces. In Conservative politics and the wider world of Tory media you simply cannot argue that we need to revive growth by reversing Brexit and hope to survive.

Fantasies about national sovereignty beat the realities of our national security.  In the UK and across the West we are now in what our ancestors would have regarded as an unimaginable position. If we wish to protect our countries, we cannot vote for conservative politicians.

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