Strongmen Are No Problem for Netanyahu
The prime minister’s betting that Israelis won’t care who he meets with as long as he keeps the (relative) peace at home.
Welcome.
Photographer: Ronen Zvulun/AFP/Getty Images“It might be that we have to take a pill against nausea to receive him,” said Avi Dichter, chairman of the foreign affairs committee in Israel’s Knesset. That was the reaction of a senior member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own Likud party, to this week’s state visit of Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to Israel.
Duterte would seem to be the sort of foreign leader that Israelis would avoid at virtually all expense. He has boasted of his drug war killing thousands of alleged dealers or users when he was mayor. There are indications that he hasn’t stopped his campaign as president. On Wednesday, as he was completing his visit to Israel, a Philippine mayor alleged by Duterte to have been involved in the drug trade was assassinated in his office by four gunmen who barged into the town hall, shot the mayor repeatedly and fled. Equally odious have been Duterte’s many comments about rape, the most recent being his saying that “as long as there are many beautiful women, there will be many rape cases, too.”