Conrad Black: Don’t bet against capable Netanyahu - National Post

Copy URL Facebook Linked In X (Twitter) Loading account options Sign In Manage Account Close account menu Sign Out Israeli Prime Minister and Likud party leader Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to supporters at the Likud Party election-night event at the Teddy Hall, International Convention Center on October 28, 2026 in Jerusalem, Israel. (Alexi J. Rosenfeld / Getty Images) By Conrad Black October 31, 2026 at 6:21 a.m. Last Updated: October 31, 2026 at 4:38 p.m. Tuesday’s election in Israel will take months of intense bargaining between all of the more than ten parties now to be represented in the Knesset (Parliament), before the composition of the government and the prime minister are identified. The threshold in the popular vote required to elect a legislator is 3.25 per cent of the total vote. In the pre-electoral weeks there is constant negotiation between marginal parties about merging in order to be confident of representation, and there is intense activity within parties for priority on the lists that each party presents. It is not a constituency system. A party that receives 10 per cent of the votes gets 10 per cent of the legislators, 12 members of the Knesset, and their top twelve people on the party’s electoral list are elected. This system gives the Arabs some influence and debunks the nonsense about an Apartheid state. When they set up their state , the Jews wanted democracy and they have been over-achievers.

The largest single party is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud, remarkable since he has been prime minister over multiple separate terms for 19 years, almost a quarter of the country’s history. The Jews are the senior occupants of what is still widely known as the Holy Land, having been there for more than 5,000 years. The British in 1917 when the Turks still ruled most of the Middle East, effectively promised the old Roman province of Palestine to both the Jews and the Muslim and Christian Arabs; it was like selling the same real estate to two parties at the same time with predictable results.

If the surrounding Arab powers had accepted the original borders of Israel, as proposed by the UN, it would be barely half of its present size. But by unleashing an aggressive war to try to strangle the Jewish state in its cradle and being defeated in 1948 and again in 1967 and more narrowly in 1973, they facilitated the enlargement of Israel. On several occasions Israel has given back substantial territory that it has occupied in these wars including the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in what were referred to as transactions of land for peace. It was in fact returning land to Arab countries who had lost wars they had started in exchange for ceasefires that they almost immediately violated. Eventually, led by the distinguished President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and King Hussein of Jordan, the Arab powers made peace with Israel. And as the ancient enemies of the Arabs, the Turks and the Persians, have encroached upon them, Israel’s relations with the Arab powers have markedly improved.

The U.S. Carter administration’s failures were instrumental in the removal of the Shah of Iran in 1979, who enjoyed excellent relations with Israel and he was replaced by the militantly genocidal pseudo-theocracy of Muslim clergy dedicated to exterminating the Jewish people in the Middle East and expelling any Western influence from that area. Twenty-five years later, George W. Bush, convinced despite plenty of evidence to the contrary that any regime elected by a democratic process would itself be democratic, insisted on free elections in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, which elevated the Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist organizations who shared and pursued the Iranian goal of exterminating the Jews of the Middle East. President Obama topped this up by helping to promote the election of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. But it governed so incompetently that the Egyptian army overthrew it as they had overthrown the somewhat comical King Farouk 50 years before. The West was lucky to have dodged that bullet. The only American presidents who have seriously known what they were doing in the Middle East were Truman, Nixon, and Trump.

It seems to have been largely forgotten that the present Middle Eastern conflict was caused by the invasion by Hamas of Israel and the massacre of 1200 Jews in the most barbarous circumstances and the seizure of 250 hostages, an uncontestable act of war. Israel has an absolute right to exist as a Jewish state and there will be no peace until the genocidal terrorists who are suicidally determined to exterminate the Jews, are themselves exterminated. Only then will a two-state solution, which was always the only ultimate solution to the British promise of the same land to opposing parties, be possible. The United Nations has played a shameful anti-Israel role in the Middle East and the idea of peacekeepers in such a place is fatuous. If you have peace, you don’t need peacekeepers and if you have war, peacekeepers are useless. In practice, the UN peacekeepers are simply war-observers and have had no success at keeping peace. No one except Jews and militant Islamists will risk their lives fighting militant Islamists and Jews,

There is plenty to criticize in Netanyahu’s record, including his profound opposition to the concept of a two-state solution, his practice right up to the horrible Hamas invasion of October 7, 2023 of assisting Hamas financially in order to promote a division in the Palestinian camp, some excessive force in the West Bank, and his failure to conduct an independent inquiry into the events of October 7, 2023. The Israeli Defense Forces with reserves are a mighty force of 500,000, thoroughly trained and equipped and there were only 600 frontier guards along the Gaza border on that terrible say. The people of Israel are entitled to an explanation. Netanyahu has been a capable war leader and has had an excellent economic record, and it would be a mistake to bet against him now.

Despite the campaign of defamatory hysteria that has been conducted against Israel, its forces have caused an extraordinarily small number of civilian casualties by the standards of urban counterguerrilla warfare, especially so since the Hamas leadership makes no secret of their happiness to run up civilian casualties in order to damage Israel’ reputation, and they frequently conduct operations from mosques, schools, and even hospitals. There can be no peace until there are no significant forces in the area that will assault Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. The only road to peace is Israeli victory in this war and while Western opinion has been too obtuse and bigoted to recognize it, no nation could wish peace more than Israel does. But when the enemy is prepared to die to achieve a genocidal objective, he must die, at the hands of those who seek only the recognition of their solemnly affirmed right to exist in peace.

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