Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu railed Sunday against growing criticism from top ally the United States against his leadership amid the devastating war with Hamas, describing calls for a new election as “wholly inappropriate.”
In recent days, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest-ranking Jewish official in the country and a strong Israel supporter, called on Israel to hold a new election, saying Netanyahu had “lost his way.” President Joe Biden expressed support for Schumer’s “good speech,” and earlier accused Netanyahu of hurting Israel because of the huge civilian death toll in Gaza.
Netanyahu told Fox News that Israel never would have called for a new U.S. election after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, and denounced Schumer’s comments as inappropriate.
“We’re not a banana republic,” he said. “The people of Israel will choose when they will have elections, and who they’ll elect, and it’s not something that will be foisted on us.”
I’m sympathetic to this line of thinking but it ignores the expulsion of Jews from nearly all the other Arab countries after the foundation of Israel, and these are significant numbers, around 900,000 people until the 1960s. Around 700,000 Palestinians were likewise forcibly displaced in 1948. This is more or less like the population swap that took place in India after the British left, leading to the creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh.