In the words of Shakespeare: Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.  Such is Benjamin Netanyahu.

Presently, the world press is tearing this man down, but he is arguably the greatest world leader of the past fifty years.

Does he have his faults?  Yes!  Who doesn’t?

But Netanyahu has had to navigate his country’s security through the decades when even his “friends” (Clinton, Bushes 1 & 2, Obama) wanted to enforce policies on Israel that were self-destructive.  And his country had little margin of error if things went wrong.

Soon after he announced a new world order, George Bush, Sr. started pressuring Israel to accept the Oslo process at Madrid in 1991.  The Arabist James Zogby has praised Bush Sr. for doing so.

“Bush established consequences for bad behavior, and he got results,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute. “It can happen again.”

Bush Sr. was praised for being even-handed between the Arabs and the Israelis, but he was in bed with Arab oil money and interests.  Netanyahu’s so-called “corruption” pales by comparison.

Clinton thought he had brought peace in 1993 with the Oslo Accords.  That was a failure.

Bush Jr. was also part of this Bush-Saudi oil interest.  His administration would later encourage Israel to allow the 2006 elections in Gaza (with the approval of Jimmy Carter) that would get Hamas elected.

The Carter Centre and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) considered the 2006 elections to have “compared favorably to international standards ... with polling results reflect[ing] the will of the people.”

Of course, it is now obvious that the Palestinians were never interested in peace, but rather in conquest.  Netanyahu was warning everyone about that, even in the 1990s.

Has Netanyahu made mistakes.  Who hasn’t.

Yes, Netanyahu did subsidize Gaza to keep Hamas and the P.A. from uniting and working toward a two-state solution.  Netanyahu aimed for a divide-and-conquer strategy.  Had the Palestinian Authority (P.A.) and Hamas united, the P.A., with world approval and arm-twisting, would have forced Israel into a terrible predicament.

For years, the various governments led by Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.

The idea was to prevent Abbas — or anyone else in the Palestinian Authority’s West Bank government — from advancing toward the establishment of a Palestinian state.

Did this policy backfire?  Yes!

But how many times was Netanyahu stopped from bombing Gaza into submission in the past by a world that would not let Israel win a war?  In a way, the world left Netanyahu little choice.

Great men can make great mistakes.  Think of Gallipoli, Churchill’s horrific blunder.

Netanyahu is accused of being a liar.  Consider France’s President Sarkozy’s statement.

“I can’t look at him [Netanyahu] anymore, he’s a liar,” Sarkozy told Obama, the French media website Arret Sur Images reported.

“You’ve had enough of him, but I have to deal with him every day,” Obama is said to have responded.

What politician does not lie?

But the Western powers, which promised the Jewish people a return to their homeland, committed the greatest lie of all when, in 1939, they allowed the British to stop all Jewish immigration into the Mandate when the Jews needed it most of all, during the Holocaust.

Netanyahu had to guide Israel though the gauntlet of hostile Western diplomats determined to divide his country.

And what about the recent Israel protests, where half of Israel protested Netanyahu’s government?

Israel, like America, has a self-destructive left wing.  They are inventing charges, as they did against Trump.  Netanyahu may not be totally innocent, but the charges are blown out of all proportion.  At most, Netanyahu deserves administrative fines, not criminal charges.

I do not agree with Netanyahu’s partners.  Itamar Ben Gvir, for example, is considered, even by the Israelis, to be a violent extremist.

By his own count, the far-right provocateur and ultranationalist member of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, has been charged with crimes more than 50 times and convicted in eight cases, including once for providing support to a terrorist organization.

But politics forces one to make coalitions with unsavory characters.  FDR, the hero of the left, cut deals with truly scary Boll Weevil Southern Democrats.

What is clear is that Israel would not have survived so well without Netanyahu.  His vices are minor compared to his virtues.  The world, and the left-wing press in Israel, are eating him alive.

They are doing to Netanyahu what they did to Trump, and for the same reasons.

Image: Кабінет Міністрів України via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.