Netanyahu’s January 6 Moment
Netanyahu lost power six months later, when Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid succeeded in creating Israel’s short-lived “government of change.” Unlike Trump, he didn’t deny the results or incite his supporters to question the legitimacy of the election.
Key points
- midterm elections (apart from one social-media post, which I’ll touch on in a moment), while Netanyahu has refused to respect the results of Israel’s election last month and has tried to overturn them in ways that resemble the U.S.
- When Netanyahu lost reelection in 1999, after his first term as prime minister, he accepted defeat without challenging the foundations of Israeli democracy.
- No one can mistake me for a supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, or an apologist on his behalf.
Some fellow Netanyahu critics would point out, correctly, that when Netanyahu lost power in 2021, Biden was in the White House, and therefore any attempt to stage an illegal power grab would have run into strong headwinds from Washington.
Additional details
- The gap that once existed between Netanyahu and Trump was most obvious in 2021.
- Sadly, this distinction between Trump and Netanyahu no longer holds.
- president’s role in stoking the events of January 6, 2021.
- This crisis began in the days leading up to the October 27 election, when public-opinion polls predicted that Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up approximately 20 percent of the country’s population, would be voting in historically high numbers.
- Trump’s original response to the Republican Party’s collapse—he distanced himself from the results (“I wasn’t on the ballot”), blamed specific lawmakers for their losses, and said that the Iran war was worth the electoral shellacking—seems more authentic than his rant about how wrong the polls turned out to be.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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