Contrast two leaders: one wounded multiple times in combat defending his nation, who continued to interrupt his studies in architecture and business management to answer his nation’s call and worked in the private sector before entering politics. The other only ever worked briefly in the back office of a government-owned enterprise, before taking to a life of student politics and backpacking.
I’m comparing, of course, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu and Australia’s Anthony Albanese. Comparing their resumes, who would you choose to lead your country? Just compare their track records as leader.
Under Netanyahu’s leadership, Israel has achieved notable economic milestones: unemployment hit historic lows – though its crept up a little in the past two years – and the hi-tech sector has driven exceptional productivity growth, exports and tax revenue. Fiscal discipline reduced debt-to-GDP from more than 100 per cent to about 60 per cent, culminating in OECD membership.
Over the past 10 years, Israel’s per capita GDP has grown an astonishing 73 per cent and today its per capita GDP is similar to the UK, France and Germany. Netanyahu was in power for all but 18 months of those 10 years.
Under Albanese, Australia’s GDP per capita has fallen off a cliff. Before anyone objects ‘but Covid!’, GDP per capita strongly rallied until the Albanese government assumed power – since then, it’s precipitously dropped to its lowest in 20 years.
Who would you trust to lead your country through its greatest test: an existential war? Bibi has successfully fought a four-front war against foes who want to wipe his country and people from the map. Albanese didn’t even know that a Chinese warfleet was firing torpedos and missiles off our shores until a commercial airline pilot brought it to the government’s attention.
The truth is, Benjamin Netanyahu is a remarkable and unusual politician. Not only has he managed to stay in office to become Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, but he has grasped the country’s existential security challenges and gone a long way towards solving them.
No wonder Albanese hates him so much: like Donald Trump, he’s showing up our gormless, chinless quisling for the weak and woke traitor that he is.
After October 7, 2023, Netanyahu decided that Israel had to take on its enemies and defeat them. Obviously, Israel had been planning carefully to do this for a long time. To make the decisions that Netanyahu made, while at the same time managing a fragile coalition government in a fractious Israeli political system, required huge political courage. Netanyahu used October 7 as the time to retaliate and deal with Israel’s sworn enemies once and for all.
Not just Hamas and Hezbollah, but their puppet-master: Iran. A brutal Islamic theocracy that even the world’s hyperpower hadn’t had the guts to take on.
It took immense courage to launch military strikes against a huge country such as Iran, with around nine times the population of Israel and a substantial military. Not only did the Israelis destroy Iran’s air defences but, with the help of President Donald Trump, destroyed Iran’s nuclear facilities.
I know critics say they could rebuild them. But those critics are obviously not economists. It would cost billions for an impoverished country such as Iran, suffering as its economy has from sanctions over many years. I don’t think it will happen.
So to have destroyed the threat of Hezbollah to the north of Israel and neutralised Iran is an extraordinary achievement that two years ago few analysts would have thought possible.
And how does Albanese respond? By stridently demanding that Israel cease excising this global cancer.
Indeed, feckless governments only interested in opinion polling, such as our own, were demanding that Netanyahu stop his attacks on Hezbollah, and not attack Iran’s air defences and nuclear facilities. The Australian government wasn’t the only leftist Western government with a large Muslim population that did the same thing for the same reason: politics.
But Albanese is the least annoying cockroach under Bibi’s heel. Israel’s greatest enemy is the enemy of all the free West: the legacy media and Long March academia.
In Gaza, the Israelis have been comprehensively defeated in the propaganda war. It is just astonishing how the media barely report explanations from the Israeli government and Israeli military, and constantly give credence to claims of genocide and famine, claims that come from a terrorist organisation. But as Netanyahu said the other day when asked why Israel was not winning the propaganda war: “We Jews have been losing the propaganda war for 2500 years!”
Lesser leaders would crumple and fold at the least prompting from the legacy media and the unemployable rabble infesting our universities.
Then there’s the corrupt, complicit, deeply anti-Semitic UN.
I worked for the United Nations for six years and also visited the United Nations in Gaza while I was foreign minister. I was always astonished by how deeply hostile UN officials were to Israel. It didn’t come as a great surprise to me that some UN employees were involved in the Hamas attack on Jews.
Yet with Churchillian resolve, Netanyahu persists in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds. Because he knows that to lose is for his nation to be annihilated. Indeed, Netanyahu could well quote the words of the greatest statesman of the 20th century:
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory, however long and hard the road may be. For without victory, there is no survival.
In time, Netanyahu will rightly be judged as Churchill’s 21st century successor. Albanese and the rest of the ‘pro-Palestine’ rabble will be damned as the century’s quislings, Chamberlains and Daladiers.
