Bibi Netanyahu takes on the media

ISRAEL’S prime minister recently told an American audience that “there is no country in the world where the press is freer [than Israel]. There is no country in the world that attacks its leader more than the Israeli press attacks me. That’s fine. It’s their choice. They are free press and they can say anything they want.” Yet even as Binyamin Netanyahu extols the virtues of a free press and Israel’s democracy abroad he is risking the survival of his governing coalition by trying to take control of parts of the media at home.

The prime minister has embarked on a campaign against Israel’s new public broadcasting corporation, which is scheduled to begin operating on April 30th. Despite having voted three years ago in favour of a law disbanding the old, unwieldy Israel Broadcasting Authority (IBA), Mr Netanyahu is now convinced that its replacement threatens his government. He wants to institute controls over the new corporation, to be called Kan (“Here”), although he has still not spelled out precisely what these might entail.

The controversy pitted Mr Netanyahu against his finance minister, Moshe Kahlon, leader of the centrist Kulanu Party. Without his votes the broadcasting law cannot be changed. If Mr Kahlon were to quit the governing coalition, it would collapse. On March 30th Mr Netanyahu said that he had reached a compromise with Mr Kahlon whereby the corporation would begin broadcasting in May but without its news division, which will be formed as a separate entity. This allows Mr Kahlon to save face, while serving Mr Netanyahu’s purpose of squelching the independence of the corporation’s journalists.

Few members of the coalition, even those from Mr Netanyahu’s Likud Party, supported the prime minister’s brinkmanship. He had let it be known that he was prepared to dissolve the Knesset and hold a snap election, more than two years ahead of schedule, if he had not got his way. Such a course would have defied political logic. The six-party coalition holds a stable majority in the Knesset, with 66 of the 120 seats, and recently passed a two-year state budget which will allow it to continue functioning well into 2019.

One explanation for all this manoeuvring is Mr Netanyahu’s long-held (and not entirely unjustified) belief that the Israeli media are out to get him. Why allow yet another news organisation, and state-funded at that, to join the fray? Still, Mr Netanyahu has succeeded in winning four elections despite the hostility of much of the press. With almost 2m followers on Facebook, an astonishing number for a leader of a country of 8m citizens, Mr Netanyahu has bypassed the mainstream media. So why is he still obsessed by it?

Some argue it is because the prime minister likes to operate in constant election mode and feels a need to rally his base around the fear of a common enemy. The theme of the previous election in 2015, when he warned Likud supporters that “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves,” was fear of Israel’s Palestinian minority. Whether or not the broadcasting crisis is resolved, it seems that Mr Netanyahu’s platform for the next election, whenever it takes place, will feature a good deal of media-bashing.