Steve Sailer writes: I don’t follow Israeli politics all that much and don’t strong opinions about it, but I do think that Netanyahu is close to the being the most formidable politician of his era, and closest to the template of who you’d expect to be successful in politics. I mean, imagine yourself some old party hack in the late 1970s and you’re supposed to be out recruiting future candidates. Would the young Bibi be your number one draft choice? Impressive war record as a commando, hyper-articulate speech, masculine, handsome, strapping size. He’d grade out pretty well at the combine for future candidates. (One concern might be that his charisma strikes me as stemming more from intensity than from warmth.)
My guess would be that Israel gets more of its top men to go into politics than most other countries. And its universal draft and frequent combat gives other people the opportunity to assess potential political leaders in action.
COMMENTS:
* Israelis are not big people, and most Israeli commandos and military leaders are not of “strapping size,” compared to us Americans. I am only 6’2″, above average, but not exactly huge by American standards, but I felt like a veritable giant in Israel, surrounded by its military men.
Also, Israel does not have an obsessive culture of personal fitness as is the case among American elites, and instead has more of that Mediterranean “eat, drink, and be happy” culture, so even former army leaders-turned-politicians like Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon become obese as they age. Battle-tested men, to be sure, but they grow to be short, portly politicians. Hardly “strapping.”
Bibi, having grown up in the U.S., is something of an exception in that regard.
Ben-Gurion was 5′, Shamir was also 5′, and Sharon was 5’3″. Rabin and Perez was/is probably taller. Bibi is 6′.
“America certainly seem to be following the rule with all but one of the US presidents in our list coming in at six foot or over.”
* Israel operates more like an Anglo-Saxon kingdom during the heptarchy. Bloodlines count for a lot, but not everything. In heptarchy, the rulers had to prove themselves in battle to have much of a chance at ruling for very long. Even then, missteps meant assassination or exile. As a result there was a lot of churn.
The upside is bad rulers are removed quickly so the damage they cause is minimized. The downside is competent rulers are often removed by ambitious, but not always rational rivals. The genetic lottery throws up a savvy, skillful leader once in a while who led his people to dominate their era. In the heptarchy, there were examples of kings who had long runs and their lands enjoyed prosperity, but not a lot of them, relatively speaking.
It is not a perfect analogy, of course, but the Israeli system seems biased toward avoiding the ineffectual screw-up. The American system was designed to hamstring the once in a century leader with dreams of being Alexander. In that respect, the political cultures are mirrors of one another. I suspect that’s why conservatives are so smitten with Israeli politicians and liberals are so repulsed.
* Netanyahu’s hypocritical appeal to American Republicans that emphasizes Israel’s “ethnic cleansing for we but not for thee” will backfire on Jews as folks see through it and therefore become anti-Semitic. Jews can hardly be for open borders in the U.S. and yet support Bibi’s denial of Arab citizenship, adamant dismissal of Palestinian “right of return”, rejection of a two state solution, and expansion of the West bank settlements and rounding up of Bedouins in the Sinai and placing them in concentration camps. The contradictions are ridiculous.
The resultant anti-Semitism against American Jewry among people with any sense of fairness is justified.