Contemptous, excessive spending by Netanyahu? Ho-hum

Isaac Herzog probably wouldn’t spend hundreds of thousands of shekels of public funds on takeaway food if he were prime minister of Israel. Yair Lapid almost certainly wouldn’t hire a party member as his emergency electrician at the state’s expense. The catering and cleaning bills would be unlikely to double year over year in the first term of a Moshe Kahlon administration.

Yet Tuesday’s cataloging by the State Comptroller of the Netanyahus’ appalling history of excessive spending is unlikely to deal a decisive blow to Benjamin Netanyahu’s prospects for reelection in precisely one month’s time — even in a country where a vast proportion of the populace simply cannot get through the month, cannot hope to buy a home.

Some of the specifics of this latest episode of The Lavish Taxpayer-Funded Lifestyle of Benjamin Netanyahu are new and tawdry. But the prime minister is a habitual offender, a cigar-smoking, ice-cream noshing serial indulgent.

Such excesses have not doomed him thus far; the Israeli public, though disgruntled and really quite offended, has shown itself ready to tolerate them.

Why? Because while Herzog, Lapid, Kahlon et al might well prove relative paragons of spending propriety were they to occupy the prime minister’s office, the electorate still remains unpersuaded they’d be better than Netanyahu at all the other stuff prime ministers do.

The surveys of recent weeks have seen Herzog and Tzipi Livni’s Zionist Union inching ahead, then reined back in by Netanyahu’s Likud, but in the personal popularity stakes there is no neck-and-neck tussle.

He’s Israel’s longest-serving prime minister after David Ben-Gurion, so voters ought to be heartily sick of him, by now. He’s not particularly well-liked. A chunk of the Hebrew media is basically engaged in a daily effort to prevent his reelection. There are plenty of people who think he’s bruising Israeli-American relations right now by insisting on speaking to Congress in an open challenge to the Obama Administration. But poll after poll after poll shows Netanyahu more than 10%, and sometimes 20%, ahead of Herzog as preferred choice for prime minister, with the other candidates trailing still further back.

Of course, Netanyahu has a mighty chunk of the Israeli media in his court — spearheaded by Sheldon Adelson’s free Yisrael Hayom, the country’s most-read daily. And US President Barack Obama — increasingly seen here as insistently blinded by ideology to the otherwise unavoidable facts of rising Islamist anti-Semitic violence and Iranian duplicity and nuclear ambition — is quite widely regarded as a presidential lost cause, to be outflanked if necessary for Israel’s well-being.

Maybe the Israeli public has become so familiar with Netanyahu it simply cannot bring itself to choose somebody else. Maybe there’s a sneaking admiration for the contemptuous behavior exposed in these spending excesses, a curious national political masochism. And maybe there’ll yet be a radical shift by March 17.

But as things stand, when Israelis go to the ballot boxes next month, they’ll be asking themselves whether Netanyahu is more capable than his rivals of responsibly stewarding future lurches into conflict, and many will answer yes. They’ll be asking whether Herzog is truly capable of avoiding those conflicts, and not so many will be sure.

They’ll be thinking about those monthly bills, too, and about all that irresponsible, insulting misuse of public funds at the Prime Minister’s Residence. But unless or until a smoking gun of Ehud Olmert-eseque corruption proportions emerges to recast Netanyahu as a true criminal, Tuesday’s State Comptroller’s report will likely come to be regarded as another minor story of relatively marginal abuse. Benjamin Netanyahu is certainly out of touch with the Israeli electorate when it comes to his personal lifestyle, but that Israeli electorate, as of this writing at least, evidently still regards him as the least lousy candidate to serve as its prime minister.