How Israel’s Antimonopolists Helped Take Down Benjamin Netanyahu
If you pay any attention to the weird world of Israeli politics, you’ll notice that there was just a series of elections, and Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu, the right-wing prime minister of Israel who has dominated the country’s political landscape for a decade, and a close ally of Donald Trump did not do well. He didn’t quite get crushed, because there is now no majority to form a government, but his career is on the ropes.
While it wasn’t entirely framed this way in foreign coverage, corruption exposed by antimonopolists was a key driver of the political outcome. Netanyahu had a strategy to ward off charges of corruption: He sought to use a Trump endorsement and aggressive anti-Arab rhetoric to change the subject, in an attempt to fend off a centrist challenge.
Or that was the plan. So far, it hasn’t worked. And here’s why.
The Israel Antimonopoly Movement
In 2011, Israelis poured onto the streets in massive protests, partially inspired by the Occupy Wall Street-style movements sweeping over the rest of the world, like those in Tahrir Square in Egypt and the Indignados in Spain. (Occupy Wall Street came after the Israeli protests, but is the most well-branded of that global protest wave).
The last time I was in Israel was 25 years ago. I returned a few months ago; it is a very different country than the one I remember. Economically, the biggest difference is that the country is rich. There are skyscrapers in Tel Aviv, which there weren’t in the 1990s. Tech headquarters from multinationals like Microsoft dot the landscape. I ran into multiple businessmen from companies like Samsung and Intel, as well as venture capitalists bringing in Chinese tech investments.
The economy is divided into two segments. There is the tech sector, which created companies like Waze and is largely driven by engineers who come out of the military (half of Israelis serve in the military). Israeli tech companies compete globally, and the country’s tech sector ranks among the most highly sophisticated engineering and scientific communities in the world. Then there is the rest of the economy, which is that of a small nation-state strangled with monopoly distributors controlling everything from packaged goods to automobile imports. Israel’s prices are quite high, and a small number of politically-connected people are getting very rich off those high prices.
In 2011, Israelis en masse built the largest protest movement the country had ever seen, pouring into the streets for sustained protests over political corruption and the high cost of living in the country. It was the first time security was not the core political issue. In its first few weeks, the protests received a lot of positive coverage from the media, which led to rumors at the time that they were ginned up by the oligarchs, who owned most of the Israeli press, to go after Netanyahu.
As the protest continued, however, something strange happened. The tenor of the protesters changed. A business newspaper called The Marker, started by legendary Israeli financial journalist Guy Rolnik1), had been reporting on the reason for the high cost of living since 2008. The problem, he argued, was that the non-export economy was controlled by a small group of oligarchs, each of whom owned or allied with a bank or insurance company around which was a satellite of companies placed into holding companies. Rolnik’s campaign, launched three years before the protest, was inspired by Louis Brandeis’s 1913 book Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It, which described the same problem in the US a hundred years ago.