Haaretz: Netanyahu’s charisma is just hollow narcissism

Yoav Rinon wrote in Haaretz newspaper comparing between Israel and ancient Greece, considering that the example of Sparta, with its unbridled military tendency, doesn’t fully apply to Israel, but rather the closest example to its Athens with its imperial tendency that it declared explicitly.

Rinon wrote, that thousands of years after its collapse, the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta is back in the headlines, as a model to be compared to Israel 2024, both as an example to be emulated and feared, with its militarization and glorification of blood at any cost, and its definition of national cohesion and authority as anti-humanism that can only be achieved through endless war.

A notable feature of Athens during the war was the crisis of leadership, with the Athenian leader Pericles operating on the basis of a specific political vision, distinguishing between his personal interest and the interest of the state, until his position was usurped by demagogues who transformed their own vision of personal success into a public vision, although they didn’t declare “I am the state” because their state was based on democracy, but they acted in light of this guiding principle.

Alcibiades was a prominent demagogue, adds Rinon, who shared many traits with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but there is a big difference between the two men.

Alcibiades was one of the most talented leaders and military men of his time, which cannot be said of Netanyahu.

Although Netanyahu has charisma like Alcibiades, his appeal isn’t based on any substantive content, unlike the Athenian.

Rather, it’s a hollow, narcissistic charisma, behind which there is nothing but emptiness – as the writer says – no faith in peace, no security, no economy, nothing.

Rather, all that exists is Netanyahu himself, and he has been described as a magician, and he is indeed one, but he reminds us of the fake Wizard of Oz who successfully marketed himself as a magician, but this man is like the headlines of tabloids with nothing behind them.

It was Alcibiades who, in the midst of the war with Sparta, prompted Athens to open an additional front outside Greece in Sicily, the result being the formation of an unusual alliance between the city-states of Sicily and Sparta, and the campaign ending with Athens’ defeat in the war and the loss of the empire it had once possessed.

After Athens was considered the liberator of all Greece from the Persian threat, it came to be viewed, due to its internal wars, as an agent of tyranny aiming to subjugate all of Greece, and Sparta gradually began to assume the role of the representative of freedom, as the future liberator of Greece from the yoke of Athens.

Despite some similarities between this situation and Israel today, the author says, there is also a major difference: the fifth century BC was the century of the sophists, experts in the art of persuasion, whose basic principle was reasonableness.

To convince the general assembly responsible for making political decisions, one had to present one’s case with rational arguments based on a realistic assessment of the situation.

When Alcibiades convinced the Athenians to go to war with Sicily, he presented rational arguments and relied on facts and the actual course of events.

Today, Israel, under Netanyahu’s leadership, isn’t led by facts but by lies, and the central guiding principle is messianic, and therefore irrational, considerations.

Messianism has a rationality and a logic that is absolutely irrational, it’s a crazy logic.

If history repeats itself, as Thucydides predicted, the fate of Athens and Greece foretells what will happen to Israel and the entire region.

The end of the war that had passed centuries ago led to the end of democracy in Athens, and to the beginning of a tyranny that required the slaughter of many of Athens’ democratic citizens, and pushed a greater number of them to commit criminal acts.